Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

I am glad that the member for Wide Bay, the Leader of the Nationals, has made a timely intervention because it gives me the opportunity to respond to his comments about an emissions trading scheme in which, if I read them correctly in the Age, he said something to the effect that it is a ‘job-destroying rabid dog’ scheme. So imagine the instructions that the Leader of the Opposition gives to the Productivity Commission: ‘I want you to consider the matter of an emissions trading scheme. Ignore the comments from my senior colleague that it is a job-destroying rabid dog scheme when it comes to your views.’

Seriously, that is where members of the opposition are at on this issue. And then we saw the release from the Leader of the Nationals in the Senate, Barnaby Joyce. Senator Joyce has seen fit to put his views on the record and state with absolute crystal clarity what the Nationals’ position on an ETS is. It has got nothing to do with deferring. It has got nothing to do with referring matters to the Productivity Commission. It has got nothing to do with waiting for any more time to allow other countries to do what the opposition cannot get its act together to think about: what it wants to do. It is all to do with the fact that the National Party do not want one at all. Why do we know that? Because Senator Joyce says that ‘delay is a vote against the ETS’ and then goes on to say that the goal of the Nationals is:

… to stop the scheme and utilise whatever mechanisms it possibly can to do that …

So what we have today is a position that has come out of the party room of the opposition where economic and climate change policy is being determined by climate change deniers, agrarian socialists and hokey contrarians. Frankly, it is not good enough, and the opposition leader should show some leadership on this issue.

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