Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

You should have heckled! Government members know I am speaking the truth. The government’s emissions trading scheme has been through the Garnaut review, the green paper and the white paper. We are due to get the legislation at the end of February and we are told it must be passed in the budget sittings, yet today the Treasurer has asked the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics to inquire into whether an emissions trading scheme is an appropriate response to climate change at all and to report in the second half of the year. What is going to happen if the House economics committee concludes that the emissions trading scheme is not an appropriate response and it has already been legislated for? What an extraordinary decision! You can see the government is getting ready to abandon the emissions trading scheme, its single most important and central response to climate change—‘the greatest economic challenge of our time’, as the Prime Minister said.

The government is in the hole it is in tonight because it dug it for itself. It has done the damage to itself. Its economic strategy is in complete and utter disarray—a fiscal stimulus plan which has been rejected by the Senate, which the opposition voted against and which the government demanded the opposition vote for but on which it then took no steps at all to consult, to discuss or to accommodate any of the views of the opposition. It treated the opposition with contempt. Let me say to the Prime Minister: you do not win people over by insulting them and treating them with contempt. That is what he has done. Then, to add to that, we have the great emissions trading scheme now being thrown overboard, cast into all of the uncertainty of an economics committee hearing.

We stand ready to sit down with the Prime Minister to discuss the composition and design of an appropriate fiscal stimulus package. We are committed to doing that. We are determined to do it. All he has to do is open the door. We can meet, and I am sure that with goodwill we can resolve measures that will then have the support of both sides of politics in this House.

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