One small suppression of free speech in Australia, one giant leap towards the coming dark age.
Gillard's tame ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) is threatening businesses with million dollar fines if they have pre-carbon tax sales, or blame price increases on the carbon tax.
A few things: First, to non-Australians, the ACCC used to be a service to the country, but I have seen nothing useful done by them since their former chairman Professor Allan Fels retired. Time and again they seem to be refusing to act for the consumer and making lame excuses for not doing so. They aren't anybody's servant, just another tame bureaucracy doing the biddings of their political masters.
Next, this might seem petty. It is far from petty. When this story was reported on Wattsupwiththat.com, a commenter got the entire thing backwards:
The Chairman was quite clear about the organisations’s position in his presentation, which is no different than it has been in the past about any other misleading advertising ... “Business costs increase all the time, and businesses are free to set their own prices. However, if a business chooses to raise their prices they should not misrepresent this as a result of the carbon price when it is not the case.”
Baloney. The cause of a price increase is not a misrepresentation of the same kind as pretending prices have gone down when they went up, for example (which has been happening in Australia with the ACCC as usual doing nothing). And everyone, yes everyone, should have special leeway in commenting on government policy simply because governments are so much more powerful than individuals, or even businesses. If you can't risk being wrong when talking about a government, then you can't risk saying anything. As the writer of the story, Willis Eschenbach, explained to the above commenter:
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