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

The Prime Minister was plunged into darkness today as the lights went out in question time. I am afraid that he wants the lights to go out in small businesses all around Australia. So indifferent is he to the consequences of his poorly designed emissions trading scheme—the one that he demands we must vote for on Thursday—that he does not even know what impact it will have on the price of milk. When the question was asked by the Leader of the Nationals, ‘What impact will the scheme have on the price of milk?’ it was greeted with laughter and derision from the members of the government. That is how little they care for the challenges of Australians meeting higher prices as a consequence of a poorly designed scheme. He was asked too about the impact on taxis, buses and rail—again, no idea. One begins to wonder whether the Prime Minister really knows what he is asking the Senate to vote for this week. Does he have any idea?

So we asked him a very straightforward question about the differences between the way in which his scheme deals with agriculture and the way the Waxman-Markey legislation deals with agriculture in the United States. Virtually anybody with any interest in this topic, keeping up to date with the coverage in the press in Australia, would know that, under the Rudd scheme, emissions from agriculture will be included in the future but not in the near term. But there is little or no availability to agricultural offsets and little or no availability for green carbon, whereas in the United States agricultural emissions are excluded but there is enormous availability for agricultural offsets and, indeed, a very long list is written into the legislation. That is a very significant difference. The Prime Minister did not have a clue. He had no idea what we were asking him about; he was completely clueless.

Here we are a great agricultural nation. It is a vital part of our economy. If we go along with the Prime Minister, we are about to vote for a scheme that will put Australia’s farmers—just looking at the farm sector for one minute—at a massive disadvantage to their competitors in the United States or in Europe because their competitors will have access to revenue from agricultural offsets, from improving soil carbon and from all manner of differing tillage practices that will result in generating carbon credits in the United States and in Europe, but not here. That is a fundamental question, a vital issue of design and just one of many. We have a Prime Minister who demands indignantly that we must vote for his scheme and he had no idea what we were talking about. He had no idea what ‘Waxman-Markey’ was or who that was; he was clueless.

At 11 o’clock yesterday, the coalition, together with Independent Senator Xenophon, released a Frontier Economics modelling study that demonstrated why Labor’s emissions trading scheme—which they have named in true Orwellian style the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, overlooking the fact that we are all made of carbon and carbon is in fact the source of life—is not just flawed but friendless. The Frontier research showed that an emissions trading scheme can be made to be greener, cheaper and smarter. What was the reaction of the government to this scheme?

This was not a Liberal Party publication or a Senator Xenophon publication. Speaking on behalf of the coalition, we had gone earlier in the year to another leading economics consultancy, the Centre for International Economics, and sought advice on the government’s proposals. David Pearce, the executive director there, came back and said, ‘The government has failed to model alternatives to its scheme.’ It has failed to do that. We begged the government to do that. ‘No way,’ they said. As always with the Rudd government, there is no way but their way. They are absolutists. So we asked Frontier Economics, who is a leading firm—probably the leading consultancy in this area and the firm that designed one of the world’s first carbon trading schemes, the New South Wales Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme—to do that work.

We commissioned the work that the government was not prepared to do. This very eminent firm, whose professionals are just as competent and just as skilled as anybody working at the Treasury or anybody working in the Department of Climate Change, came up with a report that showed that, with changes to the design of the scheme, we could achieve a cheaper scheme, a greener scheme and a smarter scheme—cheaper, greener and smarter.

What was the Rudd government’s response? At 9 am, a full two hours before the Frontier study was released—that is a full two hours before he could have had any idea of the details of the report—the Minister Assisting the Minister for Climate Change, on the other side of the table here, went out and did a doorstop interview and said, ‘It won’t work.’ He did not have to read it.

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