The Stupid ‘Carbon’ Tax is Gone

Finally

The Greens, of course, are aghast,
the ABC is downcast;
reality-deniers
must give ‘deniers’ a blast.

The act was by no means fast
but the legislation’s passed:
Gillard’s stupid ‘carbon’ tax
has been abolished at last.

The “Putting a Price on X” Game

In “Clear link between climate change and bushfires: UN adviser warns Tony Abbott”, by the credulous Judith Ireland, we learn that the useless-when-it’s-not actually-destructive UN is still hoping to persuade people that slightly warmer weather is catastrophically dangerous, and that we must therefore lavish even more money on the already bloated bureaucrats who have lied to us for so long about the alleged dangers of very slight global warming.

A senior United Nations climate change official says there is “absolutely” a link between climate change and bushfires and has warned that the Coalition government will pay a high political and financial price for its decision to scrap carbon pricing.

There is, of course, no link at all between supposed anthropogenic global warming—which is what these venal buffoons mean when they refer to “climate change”—and bushfires.  That is a self-serving lie—or, to be charitable, perhaps yet another wondrous case of the modern flexibility of language whereby “absolutely” means “not at all”.

In an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Monday, the head of the UN’s climate change negotiations, Christiana Figueres, said there was a clear link between climate change and bushfires such as those raging in New South Wales.

She noted that the World Meteorological Organisation had not yet established a direct link between the NSW fires and climate change.

“But what is absolutely clear is the science is telling us that there are increasing heat waves in Asia, Europe, and Australia; that these will continue; that they will continue in their intensity and in their frequency,” Ms Figueres said.

Uh huh; there’s no direct link, and no proof, but we should base all our spending on the notion that there is a proven link, anyway.  This loony is allowed outside to walk among us.

Ms Figueres described the NSW fires as an “example of what we may be looking at unless we take actually vigorous action”.
The UN adviser said the Abbott government would not only pay a high political price but a “very high financial price” for stepping away from a price on carbon.

A price on carbon, by the way, is code for a neo-Luddite tax (on industrial emissions of beneficent carbon dioxide, for the most part) which can do nothing to stop any global warming, or cooling, but further enriches banks, middlemen, and the misanthracist, malfeasant UN, predicated on the ludicrous, pseudo-scientific conjecture that man’s puny contributions to the atmosphere are warming the world dangerously.

“What we need to do is put a price on carbon so that we don’t have to continue to pay the price of carbon,'' she said.

Christiana Figueres, clearly, is seriously deluded, but her “What we need to do is put a price on x so that we don’t have to continue to pay the price of x” game seems like fun.  I’ll have a go:

What we need to do is put a price on the silly but expensively corrupt UN so that we don’t have to continue to pay the price of the silly but expensively corrupt UN!

Furthermore:

What we need to do is put a price on those deluded, misanthropist, enviro-mentalist lunatics who won’t allow burnoffs but then have the gall to blame preventable or deliberately lit bushfires on non-existent AGW so that we don’t have to continue to pay the price of those deluded, misanthropist, enviro-mentalist lunatics who won’t allow burnoffs but then have the gall to blame preventable or deliberately lit bushfires on non-existent AGW!

Or, logically enough:

What we need to do is put a price on putting a price on things so that we don’t have to continue to pay the price of putting a price on things.

See also Tim Blair’s “Tell It to Ixchel”. 

UPDATE I:  see “UN climate chief breaks down in tears over global warming”.  See also “Why the Global Warming Agenda Is Wrong”.

UPDATE II:  see “What Is Christiana Figueres Thinking?” by Donna Laframboise:

Christiana is a supremely well-connected child of wealth, power, and privilege.  At this moment, she’s the Executive Secretary of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).  […] Ban Ki-moon, the head of the UN, reached out his hand and appointed her to that prominent position on the world’s stage.
Let us be clear about what this means:  She is a bureaucrat, a hand-picked UN employee.  She speaks for no one other than her UN bosses.
As the person tasked with trying to secure a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, Figueres is supposed to be a diplomat.  Her job is to coax nearly 200 countries to come to a common agreement.
So what in the world is she doing criticizing Australia’s shiny new, democratically elected government?  According to an article in today’s Australian newspaper,

UN climate chief Christiana Figueres has told CNN the Abbott government will pay a heavy political and economic price for walking away from Labor’s commitments on climate change.

But Figueres has things backward.  Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s freshly-minted government is doing exactly what he promised on the election trail.  It is reflecting the will of the people by scrapping that country’s hated, economically destructive carbon tax.

UPDATE III:  Prime Minister Tony Abbott today dismissed the irrational comments of Christiana Figueres, rightly asserting that bushfires, sadly, have always been “part of the Australian experience”; he explained to Fairfax Radio that the deluded woman was “talking through her hat”.

UPDATE IV (25 October):  US Congressman (and candidate for the US Senate) Paul Broun writes:

[S]ixty-eight years ago a clandestine organization was born.
It was the birthdate of the United Nations.
And now, sixty-eight years later, our nation is in danger because of this very institution.  The United Nations is threatening our everyday way of life, the freedoms and liberties we enjoy and the privacy our families deserve. 
I want to get the US out of the UN and the UN out of the US.  That’s why one of the first bills I introduced this year in Congress was HR 75 to end all US participation in the United Nations.
If you agree that our nation is better off alone then cohorting with this organization that allows dictators into this country, then add your name to my petition today.
As the United Nations grows in power and authority, the United States sovereignty dwindles with it.  Our country, under the dismal direction of the Democrats, is spending millions of dollars supporting a organization that undoubtedly endangers our children and grandchildren’s future.

UPDATE V (25 October):   see “Al Gore Throws Another Climate Lie on the Barbie” from Investor's Business Daily: 

Al Gore, patron saint of climate fraud, argues with Australia’s prime minister that its brushfires [brushfires!] are not caused by warming and that the record shows the koala bear, like the polar bear, is quite safe.
They were the largest Australian bushfires in a populous region in recorded history, consuming half the state of Victoria, claiming 12 lives and destroying an estimated 1 million sheep and thousands of cattle.  And they occurred in February 1851 during one of the coldest years on record.
Bushfires have been part of Australian life for centuries, long before the Industrial Revolution and the sale of the first SUV.
Since the 1851 fires, there've been the 1898 fires in Victoria, which consumed 2,000 buildings, fires in Victoria in 1938 that killed 71 and destroyed 3,700 buildings, and the Ash Wednesday fires in the early 1980s that left 71 dead in the state of South Australia.
Australia has been battling another round of massive bushfires west of Sydney for more than a week now, fires not unlike those that have occurred throughout its history.  The difference is that this time we have Al Gore and his climate co-conspirators at the U.N., the corrupt and fraudulent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to blame the fires on climate change.
Gore is upset with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s insistence that the recent New South Wales wildfires are not linked to climate change and his statement on Australian radio that “these fires are certainly not a function of climate change, they are just a function of life in Australia.”  […]
“It reminds me of politicians here who got a lot of support from the tobacco companies and who argued to the public that there was absolutely no connection between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer,” Gore said on ABC’s Los Angeles affiliate Wednesday night.
This echoes the mantra of the climate scammers that climate change “deniers” have long had their science-based skepticism subsidized by energy companies.
Yet it is Al Gore and others like him who have gotten rich peddling their climate fiction, while leading governments to stunt economic growth and divert scarce billions to chase a mirage.
The inconvenient truth for Gore et al is that wildfires have been decreasing as have been instances of drought that cause them.
“Historical analysis of wildfires around the world shows that since 1950 their numbers have decreased globally by 15%,’ wrote Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and the Copenhagen Business School in the Wall Street Journal.  […]
Domestically, the number of wildfires across the U.S. this year is on pace to be the fewest in the past 10 years and the acreage involved is at the second lowest level in that same period, according to an analysis by the National Interagency Fire Center.

See “Al Gore: Tobacco Hypocrite”
See also “‘Lack of political will’ the trigger” by John Ferguson and Stephen Fitzpatrick:

The Blue Mountains bushfire crisis was the result of a lack of political leadership over bush management issues and had nothing to do with climate change, says one of Australia's foremost disaster management experts.
It also demonstrated a failure to learn lessons from the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria that killed 173 people and left thousands homeless, said David Packham, a former deputy director of the Australian Counter Disaster College.
Mr Packham said while issues such as power assets were crucial when it came to bushfires—and moving them underground would be an important step—ignition would remain a given, whether man-made or by lightning.
A spokesman for Endeavour Energy, which covers the Blue Mountains region, said more than 100 damaged poles had been replaced since the blazes began last Thursday.  However, he questioned a finding by the NSW Rural Fire Service that one of the biggest fires, in Springwood, was started “as a result of powerlines during strong winds”.
“These were extreme conditions and any time there [are] winds over 90km/h predicted that’s bad news for electricity providers,” he said.  […]
Mr Packham said “a little” had been learned from the Black Saturday fires—five of which, out of 11, were caused by electrical assets—but said the Blue Mountains had been allowed to accumulate fuel, with the predictable outcome being large-scale, uncontrollable burning.  “What is happening in NSW is exactly what happens every 10 or 20 years, right back to 1915,” he told The Australian.  “If you have lots of … fire fuel you will have lots of unpleasant fire.”
Mr Packham also said linking the NSW fire disaster with global warming was “nonsense” because climate change was incremental and could not be blamed for dire fire events such as this.

The PM’s Airy Revision

A Change Is in the Air

We ever heard a litany
of silly claims: “morality”*
insisted fools impose a fee
upon our very air!

No skill in arcane augury
was then required to foresee
how ruinous that it would be
for us to tax our air.

The new PM has, finally,
observed what some could always see:
how screwed is our economy
from Labor’s tax on air.

Reacting to declivity
in polls with sly duplicity,
the PM hastens to agree:
“It hurts to tax the air.”

The tax had worked so thoroughly,
retarding all our industry,
that pollies noticed—even he!—
the harm from taxing air.

The PM ever shouts, “Trust me!”
but will his blether mean that we
will have less tax? Too easily
would Labor tax our air.

Electors, grant no clemency,
and don’t reward chicanery!
Give Rudd this message, and for free:
“You must not tax our air!”

*  Hon. Kevin Rudd opined, before he became PM in 2007 that addressing the supposed problems of “climate change”—meaning anthropogenic global warming—was “the greatest moral, economic and environmental challenge of our generation” but, after the election, when he was PM (for the first time), he claimed that “climate change” was a “fundamental challenge”; now, reinstalled as PM, he has claimed that he will scrap the unpopular “carbon” tax which his government increased only a fortnight ago.  However, he will replace the tax with an Emissions Trading Scheme which is predicated on the same, silly, pseudo-scientific conjecture that carbon dioxide, though essential for life on Earth, is somehow a pollutant.

See “A Land of Severer Severities”.

UPDATE I:  see “Prime Minister Kevin Rudd continues push to dump carbon tax at cost of $6 billion”, by Simon Benson:

Kevin Rudd has punched a $6 billion hole in the budget by confirming he will fast track the introduction of an emissions trading scheme to replace the carbon tax and save families up to $400 next year.

Oddly enough, when the new PM and the new treasurer stated that terminating the “carbon” tax will lower electricity prices, our lordotic media lickspittles nodded their heads sagely and murmured their agreement; yet, not so long ago, the same media were openly deriding the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, when he suggested that abolishing the “carbon” tax would lower electricity prices.  Like an amusing anecdote, it’s how they say it, evidently.

UPDATE II (15 July):  “apparently,” OMGTheMess suggests, “winning the next election is the greatest moral, economic and environmental challenge of our generation”.

UPDATE III (15 July):  

The Media’s Darling
 
The PM, with his golden touch,
announces to an awestruck press:
the “carbon” tax raised costs too much
so he’ll impose an ETS.
Lordotic journos arch their backs
or genuflect on calloused knees;
abolishing that stupid tax
has shewn his love for families! 
Our proctoleichous press must praise
the umblest leader of our days. 

The umblest PM going.

An Historical Leader 

Each word or act of Kevin’s meet
to be recorded in a Tweet;
posterity, no doubt, will prize
the deeds and sayings of the wise,
and history will surely call
our leader umblest of them all.

UPDATE IV (15 July):  our benevolent Government has released the details of its largesse:  though the PM finally realised that the “carbon” tax increased costs for families and businesses, the tax will be reconstituted as an allegedly less costly ETS in July, 2014:

“No-one,” says Rudd, cares more than I!
We’ll fix the problem—next July!”


 Yet Another Future Promise

The NDIS and other schemes,
we know, are merely based on dreams,
yet voters seem prepared to trust
assurances of pixie dust;
our Government makes many vows—
as many as the press allows—
but always over future times
in hope that we’ll forget their crimes.


 Labor’s Latest Campaign Slogan

“Elect great Kevin, and we may
see Kevin’s stuff-ups solved—someday.

UPDATE V (16 July):  the Liberals call it misrepresentation; others might call it a lie:

This morning Mr Rudd and his Treasurer, Mr Bowen, contradicted each other at the same press conference.

Mr Rudd said that families would save $380 “per year” and repeated this misrepresentation five times.  Mr Bowen corrected him and said it was just a saving of $380 in the 2014-15 financial year, but Mr Rudd continued to repeat his $380 “per year” claim.

UPDATE VI (16 July):  see “The Stupid ‘Carbon’ Tax” at The Friends of Carbon Dioxide.

UPDATE VII (17 July):

Certainty Up in the Air

An ETS means

business will have certainty

of how things will be!

The Minister for

Childcare has heard sound advice

that the “carbon” price

must soar. Firms know that

using electricity

may spell bankruptcy.

Kate Ellis has learned

that when you’re dumber than mice,

fair looks will suffice.

Ellis pleased that she can read books without pictures.

UPDATE VIII (22 July):  see “Kevin Rudd unmasked in Devil’s Island plan” by Paul Sheehan of The Age:

The mask has dropped.  We now see the real character of the man who leads Australia, a man so overbearing, so dysfunctional, so self-obsessed that his own government sacked him in his first term, unprecedented in Australian politics, and a third of the cabinet departed rather than serve with him when he returned.

There is no new Rudd.  There is only the Dear Leader who, on Monday, expects the federal Labor caucus to approve measures he has proposed that would make it almost impossible to remove him from the leadership if he wins the election.

On Friday, Rudd revealed that he will do anything, say anything, trash any principle, if he thinks it will keep him in power.

His Devil’s Island tactic, putting asylum seekers in tents on a malarial island off the coast of an impoverished, violence-ridden state, is malevolent politics.  He has made a massive bet that he can get away with this ploy before it can be tested by the courts, where it would almost certainly be rejected.

This does not concern Rudd.  Legal challenges take months. He is thinking in weeks.  He just wants to get across the line, win the election, and clean up the mess afterwards.  The mess he made.

UPDATE IX (12 August):  first posted as a comment at Catallaxy, following the PM’s use of forbidden notes during the first election debate between him and the Opposition Leader:

Rules Are for Other People

Rudd’s an even worse
liar than Gillard; he’s an
unprincipled cheat

and, on election
night, we’ll find he’s worse at

accepting defeat.

Anticipating
his concession speech (with notes,
of course) will be sweet

because, I warrant,
it will take just slight needling
to prick his conceit.

UPDATE X (18 August):  let’s see whether the ALP’s grand idea of identifying itself solely as the party of Kevin Rudd survive past 7 September:

UPDATE XI (20 August):

A Pentelope*

He so clearly thinks he is ‘rad’
as he shrieks until he goes red.
In a few weeks we’ll be well rid
of the man who’s been such a rod
to our backs. Goodbye, Kevin Rudd!

* a verse form invented by the classicist and cryptographer (and breaker of Enigma), Dillwyn Knox.

UPDATE XII (20 August):  like Macbeth, it seems our dear PM may be a somnicide, as his knitted kangaroo unravels all over himself:

Kevin:

Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more!

K. Rudd doth murder sleep”, the innocent sleep,

sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,

the death of each day’s life, sore Labor’s bath,

born of dud minds, great nature’s woollen course,

chief nourisher in life’s fleece—

Thérèse:

              What the flock?

You murdered sheep?  What did they ever do—

Kevin:

Still it cried “Sleep no more!” to all the House:

“Thou too hast knitted kangaroos, and thou

shalt forthwith leap them over sharks somehow!”

Thérèse:

Do give it a rest, egocentric fool,

you do unbend your feeble strength, to think

so brainsickly of things.  I trow it’s clear

that you need professional help.  Go find,

some aid to wash such nonsense from your mind.

Another Stunt

The sequence of events is this:  Hon. Edham Nurredin Husic, of Bosniak Muslim heritage, though not a practising Muslim, is sworn in as a Minister of the Crown using a copy of The Qur’an belonging to his father (the same one he used when he was sworn in as a Member of the House of Representatives without much subsequent commentary); the Governor-General, famous for loving the pomp and trappings of her office without bothering to ensure that Australians have a good, competent federal government, expresses her delight in Mr. Husic’s stunt as “a great day for multiculturalism”; people—including Labor’s paid trolls, assuredly—write comments on Mr. Husic’s Facebook page which are defined as abusive and demeaning by our predominantly compliant media; those media fools, ever willing to be Labor stooges, ask various ministers to express their outrage at such a woeful display of bigotry; Mr. Husic says fine, calming words and is praised throughout the media for his gracious forbearance; consequently, the media ignore the increase of the stupid “carbon” tax and other egregious examples of our government’s lamentable incompetence.

Much of the “abuse of Husic” and the subsequent controversy, I warrant, originated from the same tricksters who confected menugate.

UPDATE I:  hoping to demonstrate his fitness for office, our new Prime Minister attempts yet one more stunt:

UPDATE II:  on a not wholly irrelevant note, see “Twitter Censors Exposed!” by Will Dallas Brooks:

Death-threats, censorship, filtering, honey traps and account tampering:  Twitter is in the thick of an alleged scam to end political debate in Australia.  Now, in a stunning admittance, key players forcing Twitter to censor political debate in Australia, have exposed themselves in an audacious display on, of all things, Twitter.
After weeks of canvassing Ministers, Government and Opposition MPs and a main-stream media that is less than interested, our on-line campaign to end Twitter censorship lead to one Independent MP to address the matter with the Government—and then being told by a Government Twitter agent how and what to ask to avoid getting the answer!

UPDATE III:  one story buried by the mainstream media’s concern over impolite posters on social media was the handing down of a report of the final report of the Queensland Child Protection Commission of Inquiry by Justice Carmody; see “Heiner Affair: Carmody Says Labor Covered Up Child Sex, PM to Be Charged”, by the righteously persistent Will Dallas Brooks:

The Heiner Affair has been etched into the Australian psyche:  it involves allegations of criminal conduct at the highest levels of Australian government, even Constitutional stewardship.  Caught in the nebulous orbit of the nefarious matter sits successive Queensland Premiers, Chief Justices, a serving Prime Minister and a serving Governor-General.  The latter two being the highest positions in Australian government.
On Monday, Tim Carmody handed down his report:  it has received almost no media coverage, has appeared on only one radio program, but it is, without doubt, the most contentious report ever handed down on Government since Federation in 1901.
Carmody makes clear that those stewards, those at the very apex of Australian Government, be prosecuted for the willful destruction of documents with the express purpose of covering-up the pack rape of a fourteen year old girl, a ward of the state, in the 1980s.  […]
Labor must be held account; it is the only political party in Australian history to have so many convicted paedophiles in its ranks—and [it has led] the only Governments to have so outrageously and blatantly [conspired to] cover up these heinous crimes against children.  It is a political party that has found itself at the centre of the biggest corruption scandal in western democratic history, anywhere, ever.

Nearing the Downfall

The Incompetent PM and Her Odd Lack of Support

Within her bunker,
the PM, who promised
“no ‘carbon’ tax”, broods,

and wonders why she’s
hated, and why her party’s
so riven by feuds,

when she’s so superb.
(She and her lackeys want to

proscribe attitudes

insufficiently

servile; and then they’ll try to

ban sweet, tasty foods.

Led by a moll famed
for having had multiple

flings with married dudes,

our inept, rotten
government consists of
censorious prudes.)

Mystified by her
unpopularity, our
Dear Leader concludes

she’ll change naught.  Inside
her bunker, reality
at no time intrudes.

UPDATE (18 June):

Stultifera Navis

As Gillard flounders deep in pools
of tears, complaining that her mules
in caucus are bereft of tools
whilst shrieking that she’ll fund State schools,
K. Rudd won’t chose between two stools
but, undecided, sits and drools.
And all this while the planet cools.
Come, all aboard the ship of fools!

UPDATE II (20 June):

Scylla aut Charybdis

Labor has a simple choice:
the cloying or the strident voice;
the barking Tearer of the shore,
the certain Sucker of before;
but, he or she, each option must
produce for voters more disgust.
Charybdis, Scylla, either one
ensures for years the party’s done.

See “It’s Mr Arsenic or Ms Old Lace”, by Nikki Savva, for an assessment of the two likely leaders of the Parliamentary Labor Party:

Rudd is an evil control freak who betrayed his own side during the 2010 election, was a bad-tempered prime minister who treated underlings, ministers and senior public servants with contempt, and couldn’t deliver anyway.
Gillard is stubborn, refuses to heed advice or accept responsibility for mistakes, uses her gender as a crutch, then when she has to make a call it’s invariably the wrong one.  Other than that, she’s a nice person.

UPDATE III (20 June):  a slightly rewritten response (to a criticism of my describing the Labor caucus as “bereft of tools”) by Huckleberry Chunkwot at Catallaxy Files:

You must avoid the big red box!

The caucus is a paradox:
so soft of purpose, hard as rocks,
it gives but cannot take hard knocks;
though not right-thinking, orthodox,
it forces gloom on callow flocks
of how the “carbon” bomb tick-tocks;
prescribing keys but banning locks;
it’s full of—but bereft of—cocks.

UPDATE IV (16 July):  her caucus colleagues finally approved of having their rotten PM removed.

Taking Strawmen to Extremes

“Let’s talk about John!”

Looking very wan,
the inept PM intones
“Let’s talk about John”

(a bogus man on
whom she could project wonted
lies—a noumenon

which she’ll use anon).
The poor cove has lost all hope;
his prospects are gone;

and, living upon
credit, damns Gillard’s stupid
global warming con.

The Treasurer, Swan,
is livid since his fictions
have now been outshone.

Gillard’s benison
to those folk whose lives she’s wrecked?
“Let’s talk about John!”

UPDATE I:

“Simpletons and Sloganeers”

“Inevitably, confronted with a fact,
economic simpletons and sloganeers
will squirm and throw in arguments to distract.”*

The PM, of course, would never bend our ears
with less than truthful words! She would not enact
a “carbon” tax once she’d given an exact
undertaking not to do so, or stoke fears
or ever break an oath, would she?  She’s attacked
only because she’s a woman, it appears.
Nonetheless, the PM who claims to oppose
“economic simpletons and sloganeers”
cannot seem to discern that she is one of those.

*  That passage in her speech I slightly redact.

UPDATE II:  the PM’s scriptwriter seems to have a commendable familiarity with Genesis 41:

“The Pharaoh might have kept one fifth part of the grain from the field”;
but the treasurer and I, for now, must take a smaller yield. 
Irksome checks on our authority, of course, should be repealed,
and we’ll find a way to screw all—not just the rather well-heeled.

Perhaps the PM and her ministers indulge in other Biblical allusions:

Julia Gillard:  Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares?
Wayne Swan:  Abbott hath done this!

UPDATE III:  see “‘Imagine a wage earner’”, by Prof. Sinclair Davidson, wherein he writes:

It seems to be me that the only limit on how much they think they can spend is their imagination.

Somewhat luckily for us, our Government is extremely unimaginative. 

As a John or in the John

Gillard and her crew know naught of science
but well they know how to diddle clients;
it should not shock us when these paragons
denominate unwilling victims “johns”. 

Sometimes that word refers to “toilet”, too,
such as wherein the PM’s sleazy crew
would dump us; still, it isn’t fixed in bronze
quite yet that all must be reduced to johns.

UPDATE IV (30 April):  see The Prime Minister’s Exegesis”.

UPDATE V (30 April):  if you listen to the PM dogmatize, recall that she lies and lies and lies and lies.

UPDATE VI (30 April):  the PM’s office helpfully provides a transcript of the Question and Answer Session of the Reform Agenda Public Forum; after answering various fawning questions, the PM concluded with this eloquent response:

[Australians] should absorb that news, but they should also absorb the full suite of economic data available to people:  jobs continuing to be created, economic growth continuing to be there, us [!] making the wise investments to set us up for a stronger and a smarter and a fairer future, us [!] making responsible savings and asking people to share in the task of putting those savings together.

UPDATE VII (1 May):  see “No dragons live in PM’s perilous fiscal fantasy”, by Miranda Devine:

“John” appears to be the human embodiment of [Gillard’s] government, two weeks before Wayne Swan hands down his fifth Budget, complete with its fifth deficit.
In the real world, a man who found his income reduced would tighten his belt.  His family would look at the household budget and figure out what luxuries to give up.
Lamb might be off the menu, for instance, as would the Foxtel subscription, and the HCF membership.  The holiday overseas might become a trip to the Forster caravan park.  Private schools would have to wait until Year 11.
This is the sort of thrift Australian families have practised as a prudent response to global economic uncertainty, job insecurity, and a mercurial government, with household savings tripling in two years.
But the Prime Minister scoffs at such parsimony.
In “John’s world”—that arcadia of protected jobs, plenty of cash and government benefits that flow like water—, when John’s income is cut, he doesn’t curb spending.
Eat two-minute noodles for dinner?  Take his kids out of private school?  Perish the thought, says the PM.
He borrows money to keep his “family and lifestyle intact” because tomorrow is always another day of free money.
You can understand John’s behaviour only if, like everyone in government, the public service, academia and a good deal of the media, he has a protected job sheltered from the disciplines of the market.

UPDATE VIII (7 May):  our floundering PM said today that she’s “passionate about delivering better opportunities”:

The PM’s Passion

Her “being passionate” means nought
if those passions have no backing
from prudence, skill and learnèd thought.
In all three, she’s sadly lacking. 

UPDATE IX (7 May):  according to Hon. Wayne Swan, the Treasurer, “nobody has lost any money” after the Government announced that the promised increase to family benefits would never be delivered.  He should have a chat with the PM; when her imaginary friend, “John”, was told that “he [wouldn’t] get those promised increases”, she referred to his “loss of income”.