Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

Obviously I do not agree to the amendment moved by the Prime Minister and I do support the motion moved by the Leader of the Opposition. The Prime Minister has run from this debate since 6 December last year, when the Leader of the Opposition first called on a public debate at the National Press Club or another venue on the supposed ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’. The Prime Minister in fact disappeared from the battlefield altogether after Copenhagen. On 21 December he returned to Australia—that was the last time he said anything—and then he disappeared until 21 or 22 January, when he returned from a month off, after a month of hiding in Kirribilli House.

The Prime Minister disappeared from the debate because he knew that the whole debate had changed because of the failure of Copenhagen. The Leader of the Opposition’s offer to the Prime Minister to debate him remained open all that time. From 6 December to today, the Leader of the Opposition has been prepared to debate the so-called ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’ referred to by the Prime Minister. He has referred to it as the ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’ on at least 22 occasions that we can find, dating right back to 7 August 2006, when he said to Australia’s Christian Heritage National Forum these words, dripping in sanctimony:

Finally, there is the challenge of global climate change. It is a fundamental ethical challenge of our age to protect the planet—or, in the language of the bible, to be proper stewards of creation.

Of course, the Prime Minister cannot say anything without over-hyping and over-egging the omelette. On this occasion he was invoking the Bible for the ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’. More recently, on 28 October 2009, the Prime Minister said at the Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science:

Perhaps the most “wicked” problem facing us as a nation and a world at the moment is climate change. It is the one of the greatest scientific, economic, and moral challenges of our time.

He has said a very similar thing on at least 20 other occasions going back to 2006 and yet he would not debate the new Leader of the Opposition; he would not seek to take the opportunity, which you would have thought he would have taken, to put his case to the Australian people about why his great big new tax on everything is so critically important to Australia today.

Copenhagen was a failure. He returned from Copenhagen, licked his wounds and sat quietly at Kirribilli House for a month, trying to avoid any public scrutiny. He has come back to the parliament today and, in fact, said that he thought this was the place to debate the great issues of the day. In fact, in answer to the first question he said:

So, Mr Speaker, the honourable gentleman asks: ‘Shall we have a debate?’ I thought that that was one of the reasons the parliament was here assembled—to debate the big challenges.

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… let us have the debate in the people’s house.

On that basis, the Labor Party will support the Leader of the Opposition’s motion to have 30 minutes of debate each from the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in the people’s house. If the Prime Minister was genuine about the remark he made at the beginning of question time, we would allocate an hour to debate this subject here and now: a full 30 minutes each on the policy of the emissions trading scheme itself—the great big new tax on everything—versus the coalition’s direct action plan on climate change.

The Australian public are wising up to this government and wising up to the Prime Minister in particular. Members of the Labor Party could not have helped but notice over the summer, over the barbecue test, how many people—average Australians—are saying to us: ‘When is this government going to start doing and stop talking? Why is the Prime Minister all talk and no action—commitments made but commitments not kept; commitments made to win the 2007 election but not kept?’

The public does not remember a commitment for a great big new tax on everything before the November 2007 election. They also do not remember the new line of the government, which is that the government will not act before the rest of the world acts on climate change. But how does that fit with the fact that we were asked to vote an emissions trading scheme into place before the Copenhagen conference in December 2009? If that had occurred, of course, we would have been acting before the rest of the world and, as Copenhagen showed, that was a fiasco and a disaster.

And yet we return to the parliament and the first thing that the government is introducing today is the emissions trading scheme—the great big new tax. Yet again it is asking the public and asking Australia to move before the rest of the world does anything. Is this emissions trading scheme going to come into place before China and Brazil act, before India acts, before the former Soviet Union, Russia, acts and before South Africa acts? The government is saying one thing out of one corner of its mouth and acting in the other way out of the other corner of its mouth, and the Australian public are awake to it.

We have given the Labor Party the opportunity today to debate this issue for a full hour, putting both sides of the debate. I assume the Labor Party will vote against it; the government will vote against that opportunity. They will squib the debate. I ask the question: will the Prime Minister be speaking to the emissions trading scheme legislation—will he introduce it if it is such an important part of the government’s agenda—or is he backing away from it? Is that why over the last couple of weeks he has tried to create distractions about a whole lot of other issues, whether they were his seven speeches across the nation—as with the seven days of our Lord creating the world, Kevin Rudd travelled around Australia, giving one pearl of wisdom each day, one in seven—

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