Today we saw more Liberal Party corruption exposed by the NSW ICAC — meanwhile, the same party continues with its misguided plan to pay polluters. Bob Ellis says this is a wide gateway to corruption.
IT’S HARD TO THINK of a wider gateway to corruption than the paying-the-biggest-polluters legislation pitched to us by Greg Hunt.
A company has to cut back by, say, one per cent the carbon it puts in the air and someone has to measure this.
If he says: yes, too right, it’s down to 99 percent, that company gets fifty million dollars. If he says: no, bad luck, it’s as bad as it was, or worse, the company gets nothing, not even a fine.
It would be hard to find a job more suitable for Arthur Sinodinos, provider of clean sewage to Nick Di Girolamo in times past, or John Elliott, say, or Jodee Rich.
Who gets this job? And what is he paid? How do we know he’s not paid extra, a half million, say, as ‘commission’ for drop-kicking fifty million a big polluter’s way?
What is truly amazing is the penalty for a big polluter that pollutes even more — which is no penalty at all.
Killing the planet, it seems, is not even a misdemeanour now. If you do it, you pay less than a parking fine — you pay nothing at all.
And next year, when the age of entitlement is over and corporate welfare is ended once and for all, a big polluting corporation gets $50 million for farting at the atmosphere one per cent less often and pays not a cent to the virtuous judge who signs the money over.
Not since Enron has there been a sillier set of numbers.
Everything that happens – new fighter bombers, offshore processing, sewage pipes to new suburbs, the brave new world of ‘infrastructure’, Australia being ‘open for business’ – is seen as a new open door to corruption by this, the Looters’ Party.
They have no purpose other on earth than these dirty backroom dealings, the $20 million for Sinodinos, these $1/2 billion to Wilson Security for beating children on Manus.
It’s what the Liberals do.
And now they’re giving the big polluters billions for killing the planet one per cent slower.
And it takes your breath away — literally. They are truly, truly awful people.
And so it goes.
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