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

The member for Flinders says, ‘And Germany,’ and there is no doubt that he is correct. Why would we want to be out of step with those countries? What possible argument is there for doing that? That is the problem with rushing into this scheme and trying to reinvent a carbon trading scheme without regard to developments overseas. There is a better way to go about this, and that is to defer consideration of the bill until the Copenhagen summit is concluded, we have seen the American legislation and the Productivity Commission has reported and done the analysis that has not been done by the government. I move:

That all words after “That” be omitted with a view to substituting the following words: “the House defer consideration of the bill until the following have occurred:

(1)

the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit at the end of this year has concluded;

(2)

the Barack Obama administration in the United States has clarified its intentions in this area;

(3)

the Government has referred its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) to the Productivity Commission so that it may conduct a six-month review to:

(a)

assess the national, regional and industry sectoral impact of the CPRS in light of the global financial crisis;

(b)

assess the economic impact of the CPRS in light of other countries either not imposing a price on carbon comparable to that proposed for Australia or imposing such a price after different assumed periods of delay; and

(c)

conceptually and empirically examine the relative costs and benefits (including emissions reductions) of the key alternative scheme designs against the CPRS; and

(4)

the Productivity Commission’s reports on these topics have been publicly released”.

See this speech in context