TOP SLAMS ALL WATER TAXES. IT’S ABOUT SETTING A PRICE
The Opportunities Party has joined farmers across the country in rejecting Labour and other parties plans to tax water.
Deputy Leader Geoff Simmons has written a hard-hitting blog rejecting water taxes set by politicians and bureaucrats in favour of a market price for water.
This would allow farmers and other business folk to make rational decisions about their water consumption.
The amount of water available for such commercial use will of course not exceed sustainable levels in terms of preserving and enhancing our waterways.
I guess the corporations will keep taking the water which we will pay them to do and then pay them again to get it back.
Not called the Commonwealth for nothing. I’ll type that again, not called the Commoners’ wealth for nothing.
http://investmentwatchblog.com/nestle-bottles-millions-of-litres-of-canadian-water-and-pays-nothing-billion-dollar-company-extracting-b-c-s-drinking-water-for-free-then-selling-it-back-to-canadians/
Right wing used the same tactic used against carbon tax as far back as the 1990s.
So we acquiesced and went down the cap and trade route.
Which has got us absolutely nowhere.
TOP shows its (camouflaged) neoliberal colours with this nonsense.
Donna Miles hit it on the head when she referred in a post above that the Private Sector tend to be wedded to “Silver Bullet” solutions.
It is lazy, tempting and wrong to look for simplistic solutions, and disingenuous to act as if the market does anything but allow the strong to prosper and divorce the decision-makers even more from real world variations.
When water prices rise, businesses become unsustainable, the polluting dairy farmer, along with the organic market garden. But perhaps the dairy farmer has the ability to tap into a bank better, or has more savings than the organic farmer. So he survives the drought, while the other goes to the wall.
There is nothing rational about this. It is the simple result of unemotional free market forces.
So choices must be made. Value choices, prescient choices, equity choices. It’s going to take a pretty smart “Market Solution” equation to add ethics and imagination to the “Blind Justice” of TOP’s wunderkind-solutions.