The strange logic residing between Tony Abbott's ears

Consumer Price Index figure for the March 2011 quarter have been released this week and they show a rise of 3.3% through the year to the March quarter 2011, compared with a rise of 2.7% through the year to the December quarter 2010. A change of 0.6% compared to last year.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics; The most significant price rises this quarter were for automotive fuel (+8.8%), vegetables (+16.0%), deposit and loan facilities (+4.6%), fruit (+14.5%) and pharmaceuticals (+12.5%).

This is Tony Abbott on Wednesday 27 April 2011 courtesy of his own website:

The latest CPI figures show that families are under considerable pressure. I think that it just makes it all the more urgent that the Government reign back its own spending because families under pressure obviously don’t need the kind of interest rate pressure which the Government’s spending spree is contributing to. The other point that ought to be made is that, why make a bad situation worse with a carbon tax and a mining tax? This is a government which is adding to the cost of living pressure on families, particularly with its carbon tax…….
I think that if you look behind the headline statistic you see that one of the big impacts has been fuel, one of the other big impacts has been power. Now, fuel and power haven’t been impacted by the floods and the cyclones. Fuel and power prices will be impacted by the Government’s carbon tax and that’s why I think it’s so important that the people understand that this carbon tax is toxic, this carbon tax will make cost of living pressures worse and what we want from government is sensible decisions, not decisions that make a bad situation worse

Er, run that by me again? Forget that floods and cyclones have resulted in expensive fruit and vegetables across the board or that pharmaceuticals have risen yet again. It is rising interest rates, fuel and power costs that have really pushed up the latest CPI figures according to Tony’s calculations. And those last two categories? Well, domestic economic reality that has seen electricity costs rise inexorably for years or those international market forces driving the price of a barrel of oil are not part of the Abbott equation - these current rises have no structural cause he can see and any future rise will be all the fault of a carbon price mechanism that hasn’t even been introduced to the Australian Parliament as a bill yet.

One of the most offensive aspects of the Leader of the Opposition’s political character is the fact that he obviously thinks the average voter is so stupid that any old lie told often enough will get him into The Lodge by 2013.