Our Dear Leader of the Carbon Revolution must be enjoying a sense of self satisfaction these days, gratified by the knowledge that her place in history will soon be secured with the passage of her CPRS "Cap-and-Tax" legislation. Her place in the pantheon of Labour stars will be assured - as the person who single handedly destroyed more jobs than Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating combined.
While Gough certainly had more than able support from the elected dim-wits that surrounded him, and Paul had ample support from the dim-wits in the bureaucracy for 'the recession we had to have' - this latest effort will be all our Dear Leader's own work.
The other dimension to this, of course, is that the jobs destroyed by both Gough and Paul returned once the economy improved. The sad fact is that under the burden of a punitive ETS, the economy is unlikely to recover and the jobs will be gone forever.
On March 12, 2009, the Australian Food and Grocery Council issued a press release which warned that "manufacturing jobs are on the line as a result of the design of the proposed ETS". Australia’s largest manufacturing sector is food and grocery, which employs around 200,000 people. Our Dear Leader's ETS will gut local jobs because Australian-made food and groceries will become less competitive on supermarket shelves.
On May 8, 2009, the Australian Coal Association predicted that "by 2021 there will be at least another 10,000 fewer people employed directly and indirectly in the coal industry". They also predicted that "over the first ten years of the ETS scheme, the extra cost burden will ensure further job losses from mining companies cutting costs at mines that remain operating and jobs will also go as a result of both brownfield and greenfield investment moving to countries with lower costs than Australia".
To back this up, on May 22, 2009, MiningNews released a report which warned that "the CPRS will cost 23,510 mining jobs over the next decade".
Of course, these two reports can be dismissed as self-interested propaganda by well funded and vocal interest gorups.
Or can they?
On the same day, The Australian analysed the budget papers to determine what input Treasury had into the long term job predictions resulting from the ETS. This provides some sobering food for thought.
For a start, they make the staggering admission that "While the Government describes its Treasury modelling as the most comprehensive ever attempted, the analysis provides no forecasts on the sectoral or regional employment impacts over the first decade of the CPRS. None at all. The Treasury analysis provides intricate detail about the shift in employment shares between sectors in 2050, but nothing about what the scheme will mean for jobs in key Australian sectors between now and 2020".
It then goes on to say that "Senior Treasury officials admitted this week that a limitation of its modelling is that it "doesn't capture all the transitional elements". For those unfamiliar with bureaucratic eco-jargon, a "transitional element" means someone losing their job. In other words, the Government's premier economic agency officially has no clear sense about the near-term employment impact. This is economic policy-making with a blindfold on."
It then goes on to quote Brian Fisher, Australia's most experienced economic forecaster and a former executive director of the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE). He used the same Treasury assumptions and the same data sources used in the Treasury modelling and his results are even more breath-taking:
"The CPRS scheme will shed 23,510 jobs in the minerals sector by 2020 and more than 66,000 by 2030. These are direct jobs. All minerals sectors will be affected, whether in coal mining, gold and base metals, alumina refining, mining services, copper, zinc, lead and aluminium smelting and so on. No state, or the Northern Territory, will be spared, no mining region will be untouched. The impact on regional Australia will be severe, including thousands of jobs in the Illawarra and the Hunter in NSW, the Bowen Basin in Queensland, remote regions in Western Australia, including the Pilbara and Kalgoorlie, South Australia, Victoria's Latrobe Valley, Tasmania and the Northern Territory.
"You can add to these numbers the jobs of the council workers, the school teachers, the nurses, gardeners, and employees in the hundreds of small businesses in the towns and communities that service these mining regions."
Why doesn't it surprise me that this is a government initiative?
This last point is further backed up by a June 12, 2009 article in the Geelong Advertiser, which states that:
"A rerport prepared for the Victorian Government predicts the Federal Government's carbon trading scheme could rip 653 jobs out of the region. The report, prepared for the Council of Australian Federation, a group representing all states and territories, says 126,000 full-time jobs will be lost nationwide under the scheme."
Will there be any jobs left? More importantly, are any of our elected representatives concerned about this? Apparently not. Certainly this all seems to be in a day's work for our Dear Leader. While there is still a job or industry left that is not threatened by her new Cap-and-Tax, if there is someone out there that can still be made colder or poorer (or both), there is still much work to be done.
If the Prime Minister is serious in his claims that he does not want to live in a country that does not make anything, he should have a look over our Dear Leader's shoulder from time to time. Then if he wants to make something, the first thing he should make is a decision - that the first job to go should be that of our Dear Leader, and that this whole CPRS nonsense should be made history. While there is still time left.
