The government needs to start rolling out Public Transport right now, so that we are ready, not just buying a few more years here and there. Climate change is happening now. The more we delay, the harder it gets to solve.(due to large costs I believe that this is NOT just a local government issue)

Corporations sometimes adjust their behaviour in anticipation of changes; individuals rarely do. Corporations usually adjust their behaviour in response to current changes; individuals usually do, too.

To test this, we can look at the introduction of other taxes. Did consumer spending decrease in anticipation of the GST? Nope – it increased, with people getting in big purchases like tvs and fridges before the cost was going to jump – and then decreased for several months after the introduction of the GST.

People won’t change their cars because the price of fuel is going up in two or five years, they change their cars because it’s going up now. A society in which people have billions in credit card debt, in which people see the interest rate low and rush into mortgages expecting the rate to be low for the whole 20 years, in which people have used the rising value of their homes to get more from their mortgage – using their mortgage as a credit card – this is a society in which people are not thinking long-term. They’re reacting to conditions as they are today assuming that those conditions will last forever.

It’s entirely political. People are already bitching and moaning about petrol prices, the federal government is thus too cowardly to make the petrol prices rise yet more. I dunno why, it’d all be forgotten by election time.

They could of course point out that the price of crude oil has gone up by ten times since 1998, but the taxless price of petrol only three times, so that the people are complaining about nothing. But governments aren’t that brave.