Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

When it comes to the question of putting a cap on carbon, the Leader of the Opposition says, ‘Not interested’. In their scheme there is no cap on carbon. Therefore, how can you know whether it is going to have the cumulative impact that you need to have in order to have a real impact on the global reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, which our nation—one of the hottest and driest continents on earth—needs for the future?

Secondly, who pays for their scheme? This is where it gets really interesting, because the Leader of the Opposition lets all the major polluters off the hook. They have been through his door and said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t charge us; charge the taxpayer instead.’ But here is a question: who are the taxpayers? They are working families—and they get slugged as a consequence of what this Leader of the Opposition has put forward. Thirdly, on the compensation for families—having been slugged through extra tax—is there $1 of compensation? No, there is not. Against these three measures, this climate con job is a fail, fail, fail. That is the bottom line when you contrast the two schemes. Their scheme does not work. It slugs taxpayers instead of big polluters and, on top of that, it is unfunded.

I go back to what I thought was one of the intriguing conclusions by the Leader of the Opposition: that this was still a market system. We had the supreme irony in this parliament that the Labor government supports a market approach to dealing with climate change and the Liberal and National opposition support a command and control system by doing it through red tape and regulation—something which I think would appeal to the sense of irony of those opposite. But I conclude with the immortal words of the former Leader of the Opposition, who said:

Tony himself has in just four or five months publicly advocated the blocking of the ETS, the passing of the ETS, the amending of the ETS and if the amendments were satisfactory passing it, and now the blocking of it.

His only redeeming virtue in this remarkable lack of conviction is that every time he announced a new position to me he would preface it with “Mate, mate, I know I am a bit of a weather vane on this, but…”

Can I just say to the Leader of the Opposition, and I conclude where I began: where is the conviction? There is no belief in the science, and that is why this policy simply is without any foundation at all. (Time expired)

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