Terry McCrann is usually a pretty smart business commentator (formerly Age/SMH/Fairfax newspapers, now News Limited) - below is his succinct view on the carbon tax:
HOW do you sensibly analyse an utter policy mishmash conceived in some phantasmagorical Julia-in-Wonderland Canberra world?
That is a mind-boggling combination of insanity and stupidity.
This is a policy that proudly boasts the average household will get $10.10 in compensation each week to cover the $9.90 in extra costs that households purportedly will face.
You can all save the Barrier Reef if not indeed the entire planet and be a thumping 20c a week better off. Every five months or so the average household will be able to shout itself a single cafe latte in collective celebration.
That a treasury could prepare figures of such exactitude, that a government and a prime minister could announce them, without the slightest sense of their fundamental and total absurdity, shows a major disconnect from reality.
That's reality in the broad: you reckon you can calculate the consequences of such mammoth and wide-sweeping change to our economy and our lives down to an exact 20c?
But also a disconnect in the privileged palaces and ivory towers of Canberra from the reality of people's everyday lives dealing with power price rises and those of food and all the rest in supermarkets.
We now have as official Gillard Government policy that the emissions from petrol used in cars and small trucks are OK; but the emissions from diesel used in semis are evil.
That a tonne of coal going into a power station is so bad that we must spend billions buying back and closing a big chunk of our coal-fired electricity sector.
But a tonne of our coal going into a Chinese power station is wonderful.
So it's bad for Australians to have cheap power from our coal, but it's just great for the Chinese to have cheap power from our coal. Can you get more Julia-in-Wonderland than that?