Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This the first time we have had a fair dinkum opportunity to debate this question. It was sloganeering from one end of the country to the other until we actually got a bill. Then the government decided that it was going to restrict the opportunity to speak so that people like me are only allowed to have five minutes and could not even speak on the second reading. That is about as sensible as this government can get, I suppose. The euphemistic title of ‘Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme’ must have been dreamt up by their best spin doctors. This is an ETS, an emissions trading scheme. If it looks like an ETS and it smells like an ETS and it quacks like an ETS, it is an ETS!

There are two very salient points that I would like to make in the five minutes available. The first is this. The government was euphoric yesterday when it saw that for the first quarter of 2009 we did not in fact see GDP fall into decline. We had a very small growth. I took the trouble to look at the figures to see precisely why that was so. The main target of this ETS proposal is to attack the biggest enemy that the people who are the green believers have, and that is coal. Yet the real irony is that the reason our GDP did not shrink for the first quarter is because coal exports held up. In fact, in that quarter we exported $12.8 billion of coal. We also exported $13 billion of metal ores and $3.4 billion of rural products. The two sectors that will be hit hardest by this ill-thought-out, fundamentally flawed legislation, which I am pleased we will be voting against, are the rural sector and the coal sector, and coal provides the vast majority of electricity for the people of Australia.

Yet nowhere is there an honest declaration of the fact that this scheme will put up the cost of everything that happens in our economy. We heard the CEO of Santos on radio the other day say that the reason he might support this legislation was that, as long as the price of coal went up—and I am paraphrasing his words—so that it made his product of gas competitive, it would be a good idea. In other words, we are introducing a tax to make what is a cheap source of energy for this country expensive so that the producers of some other products can in fact say that they will give us our source of energy. At the same time we are depending on the exports of that very same commodity to keep our GDP growing. What hypocrisy is this!

The second point that I would like to make concerns a very interesting article I came across in the New York Times, and it concerns a debate which is yet to be had. If we are serious about carbon pollution we should be discussing black carbon—soot—and we should be discussing people. The really shocking part of what I am going to talk about now is that something is going to be done about the appalling conditions in which tens of thousands of people live right across India and Africa and Asia—with their cooking stoves, using dung to cook their food, destroying the lungs of their children and the women—only because doing something might serve some vested interest. We are only going to talk about doing something, about giving them new stoves, because it might serve the great god of greenhouse gases. It would not be because it has been killing the kids or because these women have had no quality of life but because someone finds that it will assist their argument on climate change.

The final paragraph of this article reads this way—and I might say that the person who is propounding the need to look at black soot is Dr Ramanathan, who is a former member of the IPCC. He is the eminent man on black soot and he is the man who says that something has to be done about changing those stoves. The person working with him says:

I’m not going to go to the villagers and say CO2 is rising, and in 50 years you might have floods. I’ll tell her about the lungs and her kids and I know it will help with climate change as well.

There is a time in this debate when we have to be honest and say we have to put people first, have the argument that is fair dinkum and look at the real issues that have to be addressed before we launch into such legislation.

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