Carbon Tax protest.

I recently reported on the anti carbon tax rally in Canberra which was attended by an estimated four thousand people. This was greeted by the Gillard government with a hysterical reaction in which they claimed that people criticising the tax were extremists.

On Saturday it was Sydney’s turn with a rally in Hyde Park with a disputed turnout which seems to have been somewhere in the area of six-ten thousand people. This time the government have gone quiet on the subject. There are probably two reasons for this. The first is that seeing video of her performance probably embarrassed the PM, and the second is that they are too busy trying to distance themselves from their coalition partner, the Greens.

Here is the protest:

At this point the government is desperately trying to appear to not be beholden to the Greens while at the same time insisting that the Greens should have given them preferences in the NSW election.

There was only one article in today’s papers in favour of a carbon market but that was predictably from Deutsche Bank. Oddly they seem to feel that a compulsory scheme legislated by the state is a market-based solution, which is probably one of the reasons these institutions have to be propped up by governments. They have little understanding of the free enterprise system.