Cash For Clunkers

Sometimes when trying to formulate a comprehendible opinion on an issue I appreciate a journalist that articulates my view so accurately that I am compelled to agree wholeheartedly, but in words that I could never claim as my own. It happened this week in an editorial by Andrew Bolt, titled “Green is the mantra of Gillard the gullible”.

His comments were directed at the PM’s plan to get old cars off the road only if buyers agreed to have their car scrapped and choose from a limited list of ‘green’ cars.

Regarding the PM’s intentions, Bolt writes:

Gillard's promise is to pay $2000 a piece to the first 200,000 voters to drag a pre-1995 car to the scrapyard, as long as they promise to replace it with a new green car, such as the Holden Cruze, Hyundai Getz or Toyota Camry Hybrid, now retailing for $39,000.

The aim of this $396 million plan, says Gillard, is to help save the planet from our wicked gases, which she claims are heating the world to hell.

"Australians own a lot of old motor cars, and those old cars guzzle a lot of petrol and they spew out a lot of pollution," she preached. "The amount of carbon we anticipate saving through this measure by getting the 200,000 old cars off the road is one million tonnes."

Regarding rorting that has become so rife in preceding plans by the labor govt:

Is this plan ripe for rorting? You bet, since cars that might have been scrapped anyway - or have been already - could now be driven to Gillard's taxpayer-funded knackers' yard instead for that $2000.

Regarding the car industry:

But won't this help manufacturers? Yes, if you're talking about foreign carmakers, who cleaned up most under Barack Obama's own "cash for clunkers" scheme last year. In fact, five of the seven models listed by Gillard as green enough to qualify for her $2000 trade-in deals are imports.

Will local manufacturers still win? Ah, now you may finally have touched on the real point of this charade.

Actually, Toyota's locally made hybrid Camry needs all this help and more.

Despite getting $70 million in handouts from the Federal and Victorian governments, it's been a market dud, selling fewer than 3000 so far.

Maybe that's what this is really about - a government spending millions to make the last millions it spent not look like waste.

Regarding the defence of the scheme:

So how can it be defended?

Why, it's green, isn't it? And aren't greens more interested in that seeming than any achieving anyway?

True enough, because that's just how Gillard's plan is defended even now by Climateworks, the activist outfit that proposed it to Labor.

Sure, conceded Climateworks executive director Anna Skarbek, this way of removing CO2 is about four times more expensive than most of the alternatives.

"You can cut carbon emissions by 25 per cent by doing things that cost not much more than $100 a tonne of carbon, but things like the cash-for-clunkers scheme can give you a role in signalling behaviour," she said.

This is just for "signalling behaviour", then?

So it's the gesture that counts - and never mind if what's actually achieved is insanely expensive and utterly futile.

Thank you Andrew Bolt, keep it up. Join his blog here or read the story in full here.