Carbon tax blame game has moved beyond reality

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Has the Opposition reached the end of its list of things for which the carbon tax can be blamed?

I know - I know. It's a surprising suggestion, seeing as the list of potential blameables is so temptingly long. But I ask only because in Question Time yesterday, the Opposition's carbon tax questions concerned mainly things for which the carbon tax cannot be blamed.

Possibly the most memorable entry in this ledger was a question from Michael McCormack, the Nationals Member for Riverina, who rose late in the piece to acquaint the chamber with the news that in Sunday night's finale of The Block, Waz and Polly emerged victorious only by virtue of the fact that none of their competitors' properties even made reserve. The real estate market is in a nosedive, Mr McCormack advised the Prime Minister. Did she still think it wise, under these circumstances, to persist with a carbon tax?

The Prime Minister was slightly nonplussed.

Perhaps she prefers Ten's The Renovators, a show with whose present levels of public support she has much more in common with than she does with the stratospheric figures of Nine's blockbuster.

Or perhaps she senses her Government's deep vulnerability on the vital policy area of reality TV-show outcomes, and was mentally totting-up the electoral damage that might conceivably ensue should a dropped pav destroy the dreams of some Junior MasterChef contestant, or some future Farmer fail to get a Wife, despite wanting one quite desperately.

That the accumulated disappointments of un-Pimped Rides, non-Survivors and Australians who don't have Talent could similarly be attributed to the spreading ravages of the nation's as-yet unlegislated carbon tax must indeed furrow the prime ministerial brow.

For the rules of attack seemed to have changed.

No longer, in seeking to make a point about the carbon tax, does the Opposition feel in any way obliged to demonstrate that the complained-of phenomenon have anything at all to do with a $23 price per tonne on the emission of the gas carbon dioxide. It's enough, now, simply to name something that's recently gone wrong and add: "Why are you making a bad situation worse?"

Yesterday's earlier Opposition sallies were about BlueScope's job cuts and the dramatic slump in Australian manufacturing. These are kind of understandable, even though BlueScope specifically pointed out, in its press release, that the job losses were not because of the carbon tax.

Steel jobs, being jobs in a high-carbon sector involving people wearing the kind of headwear that we traditionally associate with those protesting against the carbon tax, have an element of "taxiness" that lulls the human brain into casual acceptance of the idea that the loss of them must have something to do with the carbon tax.

Actually, what is killing steel jobs is the incredible success of the mining industry, which is pushing up the dollar while merrily importing cheap steel from China. Given that the Opposition's policy is to hand back to the mining industry all of the Rudd/Gillard governments' proposed mining taxes, this might be a good time to ask what making mining even more dominant would achieve.

But any problem, now, can effectively be converted into an anti-carbon-tax argument.

For instance: "Given that Australia has lost the Ashes, is this a good time to be introducing a job-killing, economy-destroying new tax?"

Or: "Brisbane traffic is terrible. Why, with your toxic tax, are you making a bad situation worse?"

Yesterday's Convoy of No Confidence was an exercise in taxiness. Take a bunch of grievances, all of which can be connected via a despised prime minister to her most identifiable public breach of faith - the carbon tax - add prime movers, and stir.

The Labor Party would be entitled to a certain degree of outrage, if they hadn't done exactly the same thing 13 years ago with the GST.

Annabel Crabb is the ABC's chief online political writer.

Topics: emissions-trading, pollution, climate-change, federal-government, tax