 | Richard Heinberg (via the ABC): "Nothing governments can do about rising oil prices" | TOD: Australia/New Zealand | Budget Update |  |
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I'll do an update on the budget now the real press reports are in.
I'd note I agree with the solar subsidy comments above - Rudd is proving worse than the Rodent so far.
I have a bad feeling about this...
That's no moon...
Note that in the speech given on Tuesday 'terrorism' or the 'war on terror' was not mentioned once.
That's it then. The war on terror is over... we are now fighting a new noun.
Did anyone notice?
We now have this whole 'inflation is the enemy' angle, and yet fail to see one prime root cause (ie oil). How many enquiries into, on one level disparate, but connected phenomena do we need?
I can not believe that the rebuilding Australia fund (or whatever its real name is) has sooooo many road building projects. This is insane.
Tonight on 7:30 report we had a union fella and an industry lady agreeing about the marvellousness of all this rebuilding... except the union fella seemed to be channelling Dick Cheney with his "our members will not accept a decrease in their standard of living" mantra when questioned about wages in connection to inflation.
The company Beyond Building Energy had developed a great supply chain and business model around the Government rebate. Their future must now be in doubt.
They approached reasonably wealthy suburbs and got 50 households in a small area to sign-up to solar panel installation, which enabled them to dramatically reduce the costs of delivering materials and installation.
I'm not going to lose any sleep over the Government cutting the tax exemption on condensate for the oil and gas companies, despite their justified annoyance at not being given any warning. But start-up businesses must have confidence that financial support is not going to be removed leaving them high and dry. We've shafted different segments of the renewable energy industry several times in this country already - there's no worse way to hinder developing industries than to keep changing the rules.
Let's have a proper bloody renewable feed-in tariff with some certainty that it's in for the long haul and then see what happens. Seems to be working pretty well in Germany.