The Real Car Wreck Is Gillard’s Bucks For Bombs

By Andrew Bolt

ALL you need know about Julia Gillard’s “cash for clunkers” promise is that it’s another green scheme.

Forget for a second the preposterous details of the Prime Minister’s plan to pay motorists $2000 for their junk-on-wheels if they promise to buy a new green car instead.

No real need to know more, since you’ve been bitten so often by such green pets that you must know you’re about to be chomped again.

After all, with every government it’s the same. If it’s sold as green, it will cost more than they say, deliver less than they promise, and will probably be riddled with rorts to boot.

Think of the Rudd Government’s insulation batts fiasco, sold as a green fix to global warming, only to become a honey pot for every con artist from Karachi to Bondi.

Think of the Green Loans scheme or the solar hot water rebates – both scrapped, too, after being rorted until we bled.

Same deal at a state level. Think of those monstrous wind farms, producing less green electricity than advertised, and so spasmodically that the nation’s entire wind-generated power supply at times falls to near zero.

Or think of Victoria’s desalination plant, sold as the green alternative to a dam, yet costing taxpayers not the first-advertised $3.1 billion but since-admitted $5.7 billion – four times the price of a dam for just a third of the water.

Or take the collapse of the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme, drained of millions by carpetbaggers who pushed boxes of free low-energy light bulbs and low-flow shower nozzles on to don’t-care customers to cash in on the fists full of over-priced abatement certificates they got in exchange.

Just why green schemes are so prone to flop or be fleeced is no coincidence. The word “green” – or “sustainable” – is like holy water. Sprinkle it on a sinner and even the greatest con man becomes redeemed.

It then becomes almost evil to question the sales pitch, or do the most basic value for money check.

And so we now see, with Gillard’s cash-for-clunkers, a promise so absurd that this one election promise should disqualify her from the management of our $1 trillion-a-year economy.

Let’s check it out, so you can gain an insight into the irrationality of the green faith, and the tragic idiocy of our times that such things become key election promises.

Gillard’s promise is to pay $2000 apiece to the first 200,000 voters to drag a pre-1995 car to the scrapyard, as long as they promise to replace it with a new green car, such as the Holden Cruze, Hyundai Getz or Toyota Camry Hybrid, now retailing for $39,000.

The aim of this $396 million plan, says Gillard, is to help save the planet from our wicked gases, which she claims are heating the world to hell.

“Australians own a lot of old motor cars, and those old cars guzzle a lot of petrol and they spew out a lot of pollution,” she preached.

“The amount of carbon we anticipate saving through this measure by getting the 200,000 old cars off the road is one million tonnes.”

And already we’re in la-la land. Even accepting the Government’s own rubbery figures (and its warming alarmism), this means Gillard will spend $400 on each tonne of C02 saved.

Does this make any sense at all, when we can remove that same tonne of CO2 by planting trees for a mere $10? Or remove countless tonnes of this gas for just $40 a pop by switching to nuclear?

Or put the maths this way. To pay for her plan, Gillard is taking cash from a fund meant to help develop alternative energy sources such as solar.

This means she is taking cash from things like solar panels, which can remove CO2 for about $250 a tonne, and splashing it instead to a used-car giveaway to do the same job for twice the price. Yes, it really is that mad.

Correction, that’s just a taste of how mad it is, because this scheme makes no sense on any serious level – financial, environmental or social.

Go through its list of inanities.

Does the cost of the damage done by CO2 come close to the $400 a tonne that Gillard is paying to avoid it? Not by any measure.

Will Gillard’s plan even save the emissions she claims? Probably not, given how much CO2 will actually be emitted to make all the new green cars needed to replace the bombs she’s buying.

Is the cost to taxpayers of this switch to green cars really “just” $396 million? No, since this Government gave another $200 million under its Green Car Innovation Fund to build exactly the local models of green car Gillard says are green enough to qualify for her trade-in. She’s subsidising not just the buyers but the manufacturers.

Is this at least a handout for battlers? No, since to get Gillard’s cash you first have to be rich enough to buy a new car for a price in most cases north of $35,000.

Is this scheme fair? Not on the poor, since used cars they might once have hoped to buy for less than $1000 are now worth $2000, thanks to Gillard, who’ll turn them into scrap.

Is this plan ripe for rorting? You bet, since cars that might have been scrapped anyway – or have been already – could now be driven to Gillard’s taxpayer-financed knackers’ yard instead for that $2000.

But won’t this as a bare minimum help manufacturers? Yes, if you’re talking about foreign car-makers, who cleaned up most under Barack Obama’s own “cash for clunkers” scheme last year. In fact, five of the seven models listed by Gillard as green enough to qualify for her $2000 trade-in deal are imports.

Will local manufacturers still win? Ah, now you may finally have touched on the real point of this charade.

Actually, Toyota’s locally made hybrid Camry needs all this help and more. Despite getting $70 million in handouts from the federal and Victorian governments, it’s been a market dud, selling fewer than 3000 so far.

Maybe that’s what this is really about – a Government spending millions to make the last millions it spent not look like waste.

But even then, as Germany found with its own “cash for clunkers” stimulus program last year, the extra demand for new cars stimulated by such handouts often just brings forward by a year or two the decisions of motorists to buy them.

Once the bribes end, so does the demand, leaving the manufacturers with a big hole where once there might still have been buyers.

This, then, is the $396 million scheme unveiled by Gillard at the weekend – yet another green-plated disaster that will cost more than you’re told, achieve less than you’re promised, and get rorted like most of the others.

So how can it be defended?

Why, it’s green, isn’t it? And aren’t greens more interested in that seeming than any achieving anyway?

True enough, because that’s just how Gillard’s plan is defended even now by Climateworks, the activist outfit that proposed it to Labor. Sure, conceded Climateworks executive director Anna Skarbek, this way of removing CO2 is about four times more expensive than most alternatives.

“You can cut carbon emissions by 25 per cent by doing things that cost not much more than $100 a tonne of carbon, but things like the cash-for-clunkers scheme can give you a role in signalling behaviour.”

This is just for “signalling behaviour” then? So it’s the gesture that counts, and never mind if what’s actually achieved is insanely expensive and utterly futile.

This is the Age of Seeming, after all, which is why the only things that get done by green schemes are the taxpayers. Over and over.

Andrew Bolt is a journalist and columnist writing for The Herald Sun in Melbourne Victoria Australia.
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Tagged: Andrew Bolt, Ed, Green Scheme, Julia Gillard

Posted in: Australia, Barry Soetoro (aka Barack Hussein Obama) Extreme Left, Climate Alarmists, Climate Change, Conniving-Lying-Sneaky Politicians, Demagogues, Enviromental Jihadists, Fear-mongering, Political Prostitutes, Socialists-Fascists-Marxists-Communists