Right Pulse

Compare and contrast, GST vs ETS:

As the treasurer who introduced a GST, Peter Costello rehearsed offsets and compensation for almost three years. He declared later it “scarred my life”.

But that drab work equipped Costello to answer the thousands of questions he received about the price of Coca-Cola and even the Hockey Bear pyjamas from Korea that Labor’s Simon Crean produced in parliament one day, without falter. This week in parliament, Rudd was unable to answer questions about what compensation a single person earning $45,000 a year would get or what a double-income couple on $65,000 each — a NSW policeman and teacher — would get.

Small Business Minister Craig Emerson blustered about the “most stupid question” he had heard when a dairy farmer’s concerns were raised about electricity price rises from the introduction of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme being added to price rises everyone was already feeling now.

Of course Emerson has spent his entire career  in cushioned government employment. It was the ETS’s ’let them east cake’ moment.