Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

Australians have now for a decade felt secure in their jobs. They have been able to plan for the future with confidence. They have had the assurance of a strong economy to underpin their workplace. Yet, one year and a little more into Labor, all that has changed. The economy has moved quickly into retreat. Thousands of Australians have already lost their jobs and many look at the prospects for their career with nothing but doom and gloom. Yet Labor plan to introduce a range of new policy measures which they know will have a massive impact on jobs in this country. They plan to implement an emissions trading scheme—the harshest emissions trading scheme on jobs in the world; the harshest scheme that any government anywhere has attempted to impose upon its industrial sector, its productive sector. That is what Labor have in store for Australia, and on top of all that is industrial relations reform that they know will cost jobs across the nation.

Labor have never authorised any study into their new industrial relations scheme and the impact it will have on jobs. They have never authorised a study of the proposed emissions trading scheme and the effect it might have on jobs. The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics tried to have one, but the government stopped them from completing it. They do not want the public to know about the job impacts of the schemes that they are proposing because, whatever they may say in their relentless spin about jobs being the priority of the government, the people know that the government do not care about jobs; they do not care about the people whose jobs are being lost as a result of the government’s deliberate actions—their deliberate policy.

Yesterday in question time we asked the Prime Minister repeatedly what he had to say to the families who will be made redundant. All he could respond with was to say, ‘Well, we’ll make sure they get their redundancy payment.’ These people do not want a redundancy payment; they want their jobs. They do not want to trade in their jobs—their longstanding careers—for a redundancy payment. All the government can offer them is a redundancy payment. That is not a satisfactory answer to the people who are being thrown out of work as a result of the deliberate policies of this government. Today, when we again pressed the question, the answer had changed a bit. It was: ‘You need to have consistency.’ I do not think those people whose jobs are being sacrificed on the altar of consistency are going to feel very comfortable about the Prime Minister’s response that so long as you are consistent, and you keep consistently throwing people out of jobs, somehow or other you are absolved from responsibility. Under this government, 300,000 jobs are already on the way out. That is a scandal of monumental proportions.

The government has already proven that it cannot manage an economy and it is going to try to do even more. Its emissions trading scheme has as few friends as had Charles Manson. No-one is left there backing it because those who believed it was going to deliver green outcomes are disillusioned. They know it will fail. Those who have to bear the cost of this scheme—$13 billion in the first year and going up every year from then on—know that it is going to cost jobs. It is high time that the government stopped hid-ing the truth when people’s jobs are at risk.

When I was in Gippsland during the Gippsland by-election, I was impressed by the fact that the owners and operators of the power stations in that area had levelled with their workers about the impact of the ETS on their jobs. The unions had levelled with the workers. The unions were kept informed. I spent half a day with a union official on the polling booth, and he spent that time expressing his concerns to me about the emissions trading scheme and its impact on the Gippsland community. And, of course, the coal workers of Gippsland responded in the only way they could—they rejected Labor in droves in those coalmining towns because they understood what the emissions trading scheme was going to mean to their jobs.

It is high time that the unions and employers in other parts of Australia levelled with their workers about their prospects under the emissions trading scheme. What will be the impact on cities like Gladstone and Mount Isa in Queensland, La Trobe in Gippsland in Victoria and regions like the Hunter and the Illawarra in New South Wales as a result of the emissions trading scheme? The New South Wales government has done some modelling, although it has not been prepared to release it. The person who did that modelling, Mr Danny Price of Frontier Economics, said the impact would be ‘very high’ and ‘very severe’. He said:

In those regions, the effect on regional GDP would be many, many times more than the national effect forecast by the Treasury …

So somebody who has done some modelling says the impact is going to be very severe. I congratulate the mayors of Gladstone, Newcastle and Mount Isa, who today were prepared to go public on what they know will be the impact on their cities—the lost jobs, with the closures of coalmines and alumina refineries, and the new developments they had hoped for that will not happen. In a city like Gladstone, for every job lost because of the close-down of the coalmining industry or the alumina refinery, there will be eight or 10 lost in the city. The impact of this emissions trading scheme will be absolutely catastrophic for these people.

I think it is high time the member for Flynn levelled with the coal workers in his electorate about how many of them are going to lose their jobs. Their bosses already know that their mines cannot survive Labor’s emissions trading scheme. It is time that the member for Capricornia told the truth to the coalminers in her electorate about how many of them are going to lose their jobs. It is high time the member for Dawson told the people of Mackay how many jobs will be lost in the mine-servicing industry as a result of the emissions trading scheme. They cannot remain silent; they must tell the truth about the thousands of jobs that will be lost in that sector. The mining industry’s latest estimate is that at least 10,000 jobs in the front line of the coal industry alone will be lost as a result of Labor’s scheme. Members of parliament who represent those people must stand up and be counted.

But it is not just the coalminers. It is not just those people in heavy industry. If you have a food-processing industry in your electorate, you can also expect to see hundreds of jobs lost. Labor’s scheme is not going to exempt the food-processing sector from the ETS. New Zealand and most—I think all—of the other countries in the world with ETSs have exempted food processing. Australia is not going to do that. Why would anyone process dairy products in Australia when, if they did it in New Zealand, Europe or other places, they would not have to buy permits? The reality is that there will be jobs lost across the dairy sector in Australia in particular because of this ETS. Not only will farmers pay; their processors will also pay under Labor’s ETS. Has the Treasurer gone to the workers of Golden Circle in Brisbane—and there are 1,000 of them—and levelled with them about how many of their jobs will be lost as a result of his emissions trading scheme? They use energy, so permits will be required, which will make their jobs less viable.

It is not just in those sorts of manufacturing and industrial sectors that these issues arise. We learn today about Envirogen. That is a green company, a company that is actively involved in promoting green energy. They will lose 100 jobs as a result of Labor’s ETS, and 300 jobs that were on the drawing board will not eventuate. Labor talks about jobs but it does not deliver. When we were in government, between 1996 and 2007, 2.2 million Australians found jobs. Already, 300,000 of those have gone and Labor has plans to take many more of them away. All the hard work and all the progress is being eroded—and so quickly—by this Labor government.

The latest person to jump on Labor’s jobs bandwagon is Queensland Premier Anna Bligh. In a desperate bid to save her own job, she said Labor would create 100,000 new jobs hand in hand with Prime Minister Rudd. But the reality is that this is the woman who is leaving behind a $74 billion debt. She was warned last year, when the debt was $65 billion, that Queensland would lose its credit rating but she kept on spending like a spendaholic. The ALP’s stimulus package cost $10 billion and was supposed to create 75,000 jobs. It did not create any. It was not even claimed that the $42 billion package would create any new jobs; it was just going to save 90,000. How much is it going to cost Anna Bligh to create 100,000 new jobs, when Labor cannot create any with $52 billion? The reality is that Labor has lost its way on jobs, and there are going to be a lot more jobs lost in Queensland if the emissions trading scheme and the industrial relations policies of this government are put into place. Anna Bligh must level with the Queensland people about the jobs— (Time expired)

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