Gay Marriage
I used to be against this with a pretty low overall care factor. You know I was happy with equal tax status and de facto unions and what not, but I thought "marriage is for a boy and a girl - no buts!" Recently my care factor has reduced to zero thanks to things I've seen in the paper. Things like Kim Kardashian's pay-per-view marriage that only lasted for 7 episodes and mail-order 17 year old brides coming into Australia has just broken my resistance. If there are so many complete rubbish marriages between boys and girls, then why stop gay people getting hitched. In my experience they seem to be better at choosing "life-partners" anyway. So this conservative has given in. You want it - you can have it.
Carbon Dioxide Tax
This bit of bastardry is now law. Upsetting but its done, much like speed limits, I'll just have to wear more clamps on my personal liberties. Forget what Tony Abbott says about repealing it. No government will ever give up that much revenue. Nor will taxpayers give up the income tax cuts that came with it. The biggest shame is that it is really a social welfare policy and a means of imposing central control on the economy rather than an environmental policy. If it were an environmental policy they probably would've just need to tweak existing environmental protection laws rather than pass 19 bills that created three massive bureaucracies and radically changed the tax and welfare system. They'll be fiddling with this, just like the superannuation laws - endlessly.
Speed Limits
I'm over speed limits. Fifty here, forty at some times of the day, sixty at others, now eighty. It is crap! I don't give a fuck about the road toll in Victoria. If some drunk teenager wants to get in a car with a dozen of his mates and wrap the car around a pole - they deserve to die. That level of collective stupidity gives us problems like Tasmania (the state is broke and about half of them are government employees) or people who waste all their money at the pokies. I would like to be able to drive around and look at the road and other cars rather than my ugly speedometer. All those places that are marked as 40kmh piss me off. During the day you can't go much over 40kmh anyway as the road is so congested, so the limit is just to catch you and take your money should the road clear up for a minute. It's not safer, it's not environmentally friendly to drive around in second gear and it makes having a car way less economical. Let's go back to the good ol' days where the speed limit was sixty everywhere except on big roads with six lanes that were 80. Let's simplify and get back to watching the road. I'm sick of trading off my liberties to maybe help save the life of some mouth breathing ape who does stupid things with their car.
Bushy, which environmental laws would you "tweak" to address climate change? The carbon price is a massive game-changer from a regulatory point of view, essentially creating a whole new property right.
ReplyDeleteI agree that 19 separate pieces of legislation seems like overkill, but the whole problem is that this was needed to address a major market failure, and nothing that already existed could come close to creating the "incentives" required. (I don't think this legislation will create the necessary incentives, but its a small step in the right direction.)
For completeness, I'm with you on gay marriage - its not like heterosexuals are really doing a fine job of respecting the institution. And as for speeding, I think the concern is not that a car full of drunk 19 year olds will wrap themselves around a pole (natural selection, anyone?), but rather that a car full of drunk 19 year olds will plough into innocent bystanders. If only the damage were limited to the culpable...