Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Water Resources) Share this | Hansard source

Well may they laugh. They can laugh away. I hope the constituents of the member for Hunter see him laughing, because the laugh will be on him when the constituents of the member for Hunter realise what the member for Kingsford Smith has in mind for them.

The Greens policy is to cease coal exports within three years—effectively shut down the coal mining industry, devastate the economy and sacrifice thousands of miners’ jobs, their families and their communities. And for what? For nothing. China would simply buy its coal from somewhere else or use its own coal, of which it has vastly more in reserve than we do—and that coal is more inefficient in terms of carbon emissions than our own. What is Labor’s policy? It supports clean coal, it says, but it sets an arbitrary target of 60 per cent reduction in emissions by 2050. It refuses to say what this will cost in dollars or jobs. I would ask Mr Rudd to reveal the analysis underpinning Labor’s 60 per cent target. What will the impact be on our economy or on Australian jobs?

When the member for Kingsford Smith was asked what Labor’s climate change policy would cost, he said, ‘We don’t know what paying more means.’ When asked about the cost of Labor’s policy on coal jobs, the member for Kingsford Smith said that it was a hypothetical question. The member for Hunter might tell him that it is not hypothetical for his constituents. Then in the Newcastle Herald he said:

The automatic expansion of the coal industry as we have seen in the Hunter region ... over the last decade is a thing of the past.

That is not a hypothetical answer, and the workers’ jobs it threatens are real. The member for Kingsford Smith’s remarks mean one of two things. Either there will be no new coalmines—that has a familiar Labor ring about it—which means that the coal industry is doomed to die because, as every mine is exhausted and closed, no new mine will take its place, or he is simply saying that we should not mine any more coal than we are doing now, that we should put a cap on our coal production and on our exports. To what end? All that will happen is our competitors will rub their hands with glee.

The government is committed to meeting the greenhouse challenge, to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and to helping the world reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, but doing so in a way which preserves the jobs and the economy that the Australian community depends upon.

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