Prime Minister Julia Gillard was and is a socialist.

She was big in the Australian Union of Students and the Socialist Forum as a 1980s university student.

Socialists believe in redistribution of wealth by government intervention.

Redistribution from people who work to those who govern.

That is what the Carbon Tax is about.

* * *

While JG and Mr Swan want the credit for Australia surviving the 2008 global financial troubles, everybody knows that what saved us was our coal and iron mining companies.

It would not be smart for the Gillard to try to destroy their profitability.

But she has to – Greens Party leader, Dr Bob Brown, insists on it.

She is in a dilemma.

She doesn’t need the miners to like her.

But she does need their taxes.

* * *

The present government’s desire for taxes knows no bounds.

People whose health is such that they would have received pensions in the past are now to be turned into taxpayers.

Likewise mothers staying at home to care for children are intolerable to the PM.

She refers to children — in particular a third child in the family — as “career-killers”.

Bringing up your own child with one-to-one 24/7 personal availability is apparently to be despised as a non-career.

The lady has a twisted world view.

* * *

Actually socialism could work, at least in theory . . . .

But human beings would have to be very different . . . .

Motivated exclusively by love for God and for his creatures . . . .

I read recently that in the USA, 70 percent of older people say they want to die at home, surrounded by loved ones etc.

But only 30 percent do so – most die in hospitals or nursing homes.

Why?

Sometimes a medical reason, unmanageable at home, arises — then there is no choice.

Often, however, there simply isn’t anybody with time available to spend on the old person as he/she becomes increasingly dependent.

Unfortunately.

* * *

A fortnight ago, Prime Minister Gillard said a speech, “I believe in the benefits and dignity of work. I believe in creating jobs and increasing workforce participation . . . .”

The punch-line soon arrived.

Yes, thanks to the nice Carbon Tax, she’ll be raising the tax-free threshold from $6,000 to $18,000.

Hooking married women into away-from-home jobs — using a tax-free $18000 bait.

What with the Carbon-Tax-induced sky-rocketing prices of electricity etc., most women are going to feel they have no choice.

We know how bad this is for their little children — dumped into institutional childcare from infancy, spending their waking hours wondering where Mum is.

We know about that . . . .

Less often discussed is the where-will-granny-pass-away connection.

* * *

If husbands received a wage on which a family could live and Mums stayed home, not only could children be parented by their parents . . . .

Granny could also die at peace.

(P.S. Such Mums could also live simpler, enviro-friendly, carbon-footprint-minimal lifestyles – growing their own vegetables, breast-feeding their own babies, walking more, driving less, doing  volunteer activities when time permits . . . .)

The Gillard government is using our money to inflict on TV-watchers and commercial radio-listeners endless advertisements promoting a Carbon Tax to stop climate change.

You cannot stop climate change.

The climate has always changed – and climate is very complicated.

We are told that “the science is in” – meaning it is now proved that global warming is caused by carbon dioxide emissions resulting from human lifestyles.

But the science is not in.

Lewis Carroll’s character, the Bellman, said that “What I say three times is true.”

We are all at risk of hearing how a Carbon Tax will improve the climate.

More than three times.

But it still won’t be true . . . .

* * *

Climate is complicated.

Won’t what we do on the land, about one quarter of the earth’s surface, affect the weather less than changes in the OCEAN which covers three quarters?

We know there are various cycles in the temperatures of different parts of the ocean.

Apart from thinking up fancy names for them: “el Niño”, “Pacific Decadal Oscillation”, “North Atlantic Oscillation” etc., we have minimal idea what makes them happen, or when they will happen next.

More like 100 percent of the energy affecting the atmosphere comes from the SUN. It varies with the comings and goings of sunspots and all kinds of other factors about which we don’t know much.

When we do find out more about the sun’s effects on climate, the next step will be to learn how to turn the sun on and off. Or at least up and down.

It may take more than a Carbon Tax to achieve that.

Fortunately, the earth’s gradual temperature rise over the last 30-odd years seems to have stopped and started declining – WITHOUT WAITING FOR OUR HELP.

For which we should thank God . . . .

* * *

So many facts and theories to try to get one’s head around.

One simple fact we can probably rely on, however.

The Gillard and her government tell lies.

That seems unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

(But is the other party any better?)

Pray for them.

All of them . . . .

Top AFL ruckman, Carlton’s Matthew Kreuzer, has apparently refused an offer of a massive pay check to join the GWS club.

His motive being that Carlton has been good to him and he wants to be loyal to them in return.

If so, it’s a good news story – in stark contrast to most current news.

In politics and much of everyday life, the motive too often is, “What’s in it for me?”

* * *

What about Prime Minister Gillard?

Before the election saying that no government led by her would impose a Carbon Tax.

Why did she say that?

So that she could become Prime Minister — knowing that most Australians realise such a tax will help neither the economy or the environment.

Now she says we must have a Carbon Tax.

Why? So that she can remain Prime Minister. The Greens Party won’t let her survive if she doesn’t pretend to believe in the Tax.

At least she’s sort of consistent: self-interest first, second and always.

* * *

Three days ago, the Herald Sun readers’ poll found 80 percent against the Carbon Tax and 20 percent for.

Yesterday’s Courier Mail poll found 90 percent against, 10 percent for.

Gillard and party are reaping the harvest they have sown . . . .

 . . . a reputation for being liars and total disbelief from the electors.

* * *

In a way it doesn’t matter.

What matters is how ordinary people live their private lives.

If you love God and your family . . . .

If your every act is motivated by the desire to please God and show him your goodwill . . . .

If you live like that . . . you will live simply and generously.

You won’t desire the excesses of personal consumption that lead to environmental damage.

A lot of people do understand that.

There is a lot of real goodwill out there.

When you see it, encourage it.

When you see a champion sportsman/athlete doing something for non-greedy reasons, it cheers you up a bit.

Would it be fair to say that the carbon tax, with which we now seem to be stuck, is nothing to do with “climate change”?

The money will supposedly be taken from the “big polluters” — then much of it given back to them in the form of “compensation”. Not to all of them, only those whom the Greens Party and hangers-on (i.e. the “government” of Australia) consider to be deserving.

So is the motivation behind the tax, in fact, to redistribute wealth and commercial viability on the basis of somebody’s ideologically-based choice?

* * *

That sounds rather bizarre.

The whole concept of calling carbon dioxide “carbon” — and of believing that shutting down certain out-of-favour industries will alter the weather — isn’t it all a bit bizarre?

Mr Swan says the coal industry will be compensated. Mr Swan says he is a “very strong supporter” of the coal industry.

Senator Brown says the coal industry will be phased out of existence by 2020.

From now on, coal miners can expect to lose their jobs. Any time.

A few might get positions looking after wind generators or solar farms or something.

Most won’t.

The price of electricity will go up.

Everything that needs electricity to make it happen will go up.

* * *

Yes, miners, farmers and all who work in primary or manufacturing industry – in fact everybody who hasn’t cornered a job counselling depressed primary and secondary industry workers – can consider their livelihood at risk.

What to do?

Complain loud and long.

Also, grow everything you need to feed yourself in your backyard. Keep chickens. Barter fruit with neighbours who have different kinds of trees.

Best home-school your children – otherwise they’ll soon be believers in anthropogenic (if that is how you spell it) climate change, as well as in same-sex marriage and long day-care for neonates and that one religion is as good as another and that no religion at all is even better . . . .

Thursday night: climate-change skeptic, Lord Christopher Monckton, addresses a meeting at Notre Dame University, Western Australia.

Prior to the event, a group of over 50 Australian academics signed a letter asking the University to cancel the speech.

They said that Monckton “stands for the kind of ignorance that universities have a duty to counter”.

Lord Monckton commented that he was pleased there were only 50-odd of them — he had encountered bigger numbers trying to suppress his freedom of speech in other countries.

* * *

“Academics” usually pose as free thinkers – challengers of conventional orthodoxies. To be consistent, they should welcome Monckton as a soul-brother.

As for calling his ideas “ignorance” . . . although claiming no personal qualifications in climate science, Monckton can quote numerous qualified experts who agree with what he says.

He is not saying there is no greenhouse effect, he says it is unproven that the effects will be as great as the other side — and their political and media mouthpieces — claim.

Al Gore — who toured the world sensationalising a doomsday view of global warming — had no formal climate science qualifications either.

But, being on the side favoured by the media, Gore managed to score — not contempt and attempted muzzling – but a Nobel Prize.

* * *

The media will never forgive Monckton for some of his previous stands.

He takes the Catholic position on homosexuality – condemning unfair discrimination against such persons, while considering homosexual acts to be intrinsically disordered.

In the 1980’s, when AIDS was first investigated, Christopher Monckton made suggestions which, if they had been followed, might have saved perhaps 30 million lives worldwide.

Monckton is also opposed to Britain being part of the European Union.