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

—I am sure the member for Solomon, when he is not arguing with people in nightclubs, would have been putting that down for his reading when he got back to parliament.

The Prime Minister has spent seven days trying to shift the debate from the emissions trading scheme to any other issue. On the weekend he tried again to shift the debate to the private health insurance rebate. He does not want to talk about the emissions trading scheme anymore, because he knows what the coalition knows: that the tide has gone out on the government’s great big new tax on everything because of the failure of Copenhagen.

What the public want is direct action. The public want practical programs that will achieve something. The member for Flinders, the shadow Treasurer, the Leader of the Opposition and others have come up with a direct action plan that the public will endorse because Australians like practical action—direct action that brings about change. They are sick of people talking about things that will happen in 2050 or 2046 or 2032. They want to know what the Prime Minister is going to do this year about the issues that concern them. And they know, instinctively, that a great big new tax, coupled with rises in interest rates, is leading to an increase in the cost of living which they find is squeezing their household budgets. Particularly people with mortgages but also self-funded retirees, pensioners and people on fixed incomes are finding the cost of living very difficult to cope with. So will the Prime Minister speak on the emissions trading scheme bill and debate the issue here? I am sure the Leader of the Opposition will. He should debate it today, for an hour. This is, apparently, the most important moral challenge of our time, and yet for six weeks he has avoided any real debate on this issue.

The coalition’s plan for direct action will do many things. It will deliver practical environmental benefits and it will achieve the same five per cent target at a lower cost than the government is committing to. We will have a five per cent target for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, but without the tax that the Labor Party is foisting on the Australian people—every small business, pensioners and other households across Australia—without the compensation that they are promising, as the minister knows. It will deliver direct incentives to reduce CO2 emissions, it will do so at no additional cost to households and it will protect Australian jobs: there will be no net job losses through the coalition’s policy.

Electricity prices will not be forced up. We will not try to penalise people and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by forcing up the price of electricity, which is the core of the government’s emissions trading scheme. The way they wish to bring about their reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is to say, ‘If we force up electricity prices out of this world then people will cut back on their energy consumption.’ That is at the centre of the government’s policy.

It will not push up the cost of groceries. We have seen recent indicators that grocery prices are going through the roof, and people in my electorate of Sturt know it full well. Electricity prices have risen 14½ per cent in the last 12 months, public school fees have risen 7½ per cent, gas prices have gone up nine per cent and water and sewerage have gone up 14 per cent. People out in the street know that the cost of living is going up, especially for the consumables they use every day. The great big new tax will only add to the woes of households, whereas the coalition’s direct action policy will not push up the price of groceries.

We will deliver a climate action policy that is easily implemented but does not involve the money-go-round which is the government’s policy. We will deliver better water efficiency for our farmers and we will protect Australian small businesses from a sudden and massive rise in costs. The direct incentive that we will put in place will deliver better soils for Australia. It will create incentives to plant 20 million new trees and for more productive farming practices, and it will reduce emissions through using solar technology. We will aim to create another million solar homes across Australia over the life of the coalition’s policy.

We will put incentives into place to allow Australian households to make a practical contribution to reductions in CO2 emissions. One of the great failings of the government’s policy is that it does not bring the Australian people with it. It punishes them, it penalises them, but it does not say, ‘If you take practical, direct action yourselves in your own households and in your own local community, you will be rewarded for that.’ The coalition is all about reward. It is all about choice. It is all about incentive. That is what we did for 11½ years in government, and if we get the chance again this year, if the Abbott government is elected, that is what we will do again. There will be choice, incentive, opportunity and reward—not the penalty, the punitive taxes and the punishment of small business that we see coming from the Rudd government.

Most importantly, the benefits of reducing these emissions will stay in Australia. We will not be exporting the benefits of reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to countries overseas. We will be using them here in Australia, and we will continue the commitment to solar rebate. We will extend that, whereas the government scrapped it. In electorates like mine, a very important part of the policy is that we will fund a study into undergrounding power lines, which are a blight on the urban environment. I think all Australians would support their burial. That also has, of course, the benefit of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The Prime Minister’s amendment is another study in spin from a Prime Minister who only really specialises in spin. He will do everything now to try and destroy the coalition’s direct action policy, because he would prefer, amazingly, to have a $114 billion new tax rather than $3 billion of spending over the next four years that will actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions. His amendment is a desperate snatch for a straw in the wind to try and turn the debate back on the coalition. But the Australian people are waking up. The Australian people know that in the Leader of the Opposition we have a man of action who supports direct action, as opposed to a former bureaucrat in Kevin Rudd, who is now the chief bureaucrat in charge of all aspects of government policy. That is why he believes that discussion is decision. It is why he believes that a review, an inquiry, a summit or more consultation—endless consultation—is actually making a decision in the interests of the Australian public.

The Australian public want to see a reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions. They want to see action on climate change. But they do not want a great big new tax. They do not want to export the benefits from our reduction in emissions. They do not want to get so far in front of the rest of the world that Australia suffers economically as a consequence and we lose jobs. That is what the government is offering the Australian public. The coalition stand for reducing our greenhouse gas emissions but without the punitive rising in costs and without the punitive taxes that the government envisages.

If the Prime Minister had any guts, he would vote for this motion. He would suspend the standing orders to allow a full hour to debate our policy versus his policy without having to clutter it up with a debate about who will and will not have the debate. That is what this motion is about: allowing a full debate with the Prime Minister first, followed by the Leader of the Opposition, to put the cases of their political parties on what is apparently the greatest moral challenge of our time. We will be voting against the Prime Minister’s amendment and in favour of the opposition leader’s motion so that we can have that debate here in the people’s house and tease out all the issues that the Australian public want to hear about.

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