Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

It is a con, as the honourable member interjected. It is a big new tax that will raise money to fill Labor coffers in government but will do nothing to make our climate different or to make our environment better. If the CPRS wanted one final humiliation, one final rejection, it was rejected by the world at the Copenhagen conference. Despite the Prime Minister spending tens of millions of dollars lobbying the world, despite sending a delegation of 120 or 140—or whatever it was—across to Copenhagen for the big talkfest, despite all the propaganda, nobody at Copenhagen was interested in the CPRS. I did not hear anybody talking about a CPRS. The final communique said nothing about a need to have a big new tax to reduce the temperature.

16:37:04 Indeed, there was quite a bit of talk about how they could fund some kind of new world governing body to manage the climate into the future. There was talk about a global tax on financial transactions and the Prime Minister himself was party to discussions about a new tax on aviation and shipping. No-one was interested in the CPRS, but our Prime Minister was so desperate to have new taxes that he was even prepared to talk about a new tax on aviation and shipping.

Last week, we had the Minister for Trade going to London to complain about the British Labour government having introduced a new tax on people travelling to and from the UK. The Minister for Trade, Mr Crean, rightly said that this was a penalty on Australians, a penalty on trade and a penalty on international movements in and out of the UK. Yet our own Prime Minister, only weeks earlier, was advocating a tax on all international movements, which would have been devastating for Australian trade and for Australian business. But no-one was interested in the CPRS. No-one in Copenhagen was the least bit interested in the tax that Labor say we in Australia have to have and if we do not have it then we do not believe in climate change. Labor believe that if we do not have their CPRS in exactly the form they want, we are somehow or other a climate change denier.

I thought it was rather interesting that when President Obama wanted a handful of world leaders to draft a communique coming out of Copenhagen, he did not even invite the ‘friend of the chair’, Kevin Rudd, to participate in the drafting of the communique. In spite of the 100-plus people we had at the conference, President Obama did not think anyone from Australia had any role to play in drafting the Copenhagen communique. The thing was such a fiasco. Labor was so locked into a CPRS that they were not even relevant in the international debates in Copenhagen because the world knows that a big new tax will not deliver for the environment.

How is a higher price for milk going to lower the temperature? How is putting up the cost of a bus ticket going to save the polar bears? How is making everything we do in life, including the education of our children, more expensive through a big new tax going to lower the sea level? Labor have never attempted, and they are not today attempting, to explain how their giant new tax is actually going to alter the climate.

No-one has ever attempted to explain to me how having bankers and traders on the top of a multistorey building in Sydney, Copenhagen or New York selling one another pieces of paper is actually going to make the sea level go down. How are you actually going to reduce the sea level by selling paper to one another? That is simply a nonsense and that is the basis of Labor’s whole giant CPRS taxation scheme. If you actually want to reduce CO2 emissions and if you want to have less carbon in the environment, you have to take direct action. You have to do things. You do not sell paper to one another. You do not set up a massive new bureaucracy.

If you had any doubt about what the real intent of the scheme was, you only have to look at a conference recently held in London that was publicised as being ‘aimed squarely at investment banks, investors and major compliance buyers and focused on how they can profit today from an increasingly diverse range of carbon-related investment opportunities’. The conference was entitled Cashing in on Carbon. So there are winners from a CPRS—the bankers and the traders and, through taxation, the Australian government’s treasury.

It has been suggested that to support the $120 billion CPRS there might be $3 trillion worth of paper traded. So this is a scheme about selling paper. It is not about delivering anything by way of practical action. That is why the coalition have been able to announce today a scheme that will deliver at least as much in carbon reductions as Labor’s CPRS—I think we can do a lot better than the five per cent target—for just a small fraction of the cost, about one-twelfth of the cost.

How can the coalition deliver the same CO2 reductions and meet exactly the same reduction targets on exactly the same timetable for one-twelfth of the cost? The reason is that we will get into it and do it. We use direct action. We do not just trade pieces of paper. We actually do things. The community can be involved in the lowest cost options. The market will decide what the lowest cost options are. We will actually deliver significant reductions and we will do it from the beginning. Our scheme will deliver practical environmental benefits by direct action—by actually doing things rather than putting in place a giant new tax. We will achieve the five per cent target at a lower cost. We will achieve the 140 million tonnes reduction that Labor is aiming to achieve by 2020, but we will do it at a fraction of the cost. There will be direct incentives.

We will impose no additional costs on householders. We do not have to have a compensation scheme because the cost of electricity and the cost of food will not go up. Labor need such a gigantic taxation scheme because they are putting up the cost of everything we do. The cost of milk and bread will go up, so people will have to be compensated for that extra cost of living. The power stations will become nonviable, so they will have to prop them up in order that we have enough electricity to keep going. But, if you do not put up their costs in the first place and you actually reduce their emissions through direct action, you do not need that great big new tax—that increased cost on all Australian consumers. If you are not going to impose those costs, then you can keep the jobs in Australia rather than having manufacturing move to other parts of the world.

I was appalled in question time today to yet again hear the Prime Minister vilifying Australian industry and Australian manufacturers, accusing them of being dirty and a blot on the environment, and criticising power producers, even though they are amongst the most efficient and environmentally friendly in the world. He criticised and vilified those people—the demons that have to be taxed. They have to be persecuted in order to protect Labor’s emissions trading scheme.

But these manufacturers, these power stations, will respond to this new tax in one of two ways. If they can afford to, if they are able to, they will pass on those costs to consumers, so Australian consumers will pay. In some instances, though, they will not be able to do that; they will simply close. So the manufacturers will move to China or India, where there will never be a CPRS, where there will never be an emissions trading scheme. So we lose the jobs, we lose the Australian industry and we import the product from another country. So global emissions will actually go up. The savings we make by closing a power station or cement works in Australia will be more than offset by producing the same commodities in a country where there are no such rules or requirements, where they can export the product back to Australia at a lower cost.

This government need to be honest with the Australian people. They cannot explain how the CPRS is actually going to lower the temperature. They cannot explain how it is going to do things for the environment. They do not even try. The moment anyone makes any criticism of the CPRS, they are immediately dismissed as a climate change denier, somebody who does not want to do anything to make our environment better. That is a very low standard of debate—name-calling rather than dealing with the facts or explaining them to the Australian people. Is it any wonder that they are deserting this scheme? They no longer believe that it can work for them; they just see it for what it really is: a great big tax. They want direct action. They want a program of measures that will deliver results, and that is what they have today—an agenda for real action.

The second thing Labor need to do is explain it to the people who are going to lose their jobs. They need to explain it not just to those people who are going to have to pay higher costs for almost everything that they do but also to those people who will lose their jobs because an Australian industry has closed and will instead operate out of China or another country where there is no new tax scheme of this nature. We have already had the case of the cement works in Rockhampton—and I notice the member for Capricornia has chosen this moment to walk out of the parliament. Here is a case of an Australian factory closing. This factory closes and they say they are doing it because of Labor’s CPRS, that it is cheaper to import the cement from China. Then, on the other side, China’s emissions from producing cement are substantially higher than what that factory in Rockhampton would have produced. Those circumstances are an illustration of what is going to happen around the world—Australian companies will be taxed out of existence and other products will be imported from other parts of the world.

We are delivering a scheme that will not increase electricity prices and will not increase grocery prices. It will protect Australian business from sudden and massive rising costs. It will actually deliver a more productive country. The work and the incentives we will provide—the work with carbon sequestration in our farms, the better use of biochar and a range of other soil technologies—will actually make our country more productive. Labor want to put farmers out of business. They want to make food processing uneconomic in this country. They want to withdraw water and other resources from Australian farms. We want to make them more productive. We want to be able to produce more food even though we are in a situation where the environment may be more trying than it has been in the past. And it can be done. There are many people around the country who have told the minister that it can be done, but he will not defend them. He will not stand up for them. He is not prepared to have these new technologies encouraged and implemented in Australia as part of a worthwhile direct action plan to deliver CO2 reductions in our country.

We need to also provide direct incentives to reduce emissions through better use of solar technology and some of the other exciting new technologies that are around. In Labor’s CPRS there is not one dollar for extra research, not one new dollar for developing any kind of new technology. There is no hope offered in that scheme; it is just a taxation system. It is a way for the government to raise hundreds of millions of dollars which will be spent in buying permits from Russia and China and others, while our scheme will create Australian jobs and spend Australian money on abatement measures in Australia. The government would prefer to have people buying pieces of paper from the Russians or the Chinese or anybody else who will sell them and be involved in this trading scheme, which will simply put up the cost of everything we do in Australia. There is a way to address climate change issues without a great big tax. We have heard something of it today—a scheme that will deliver direct action and direct results and will do it better and faster. (Time expired)

See this speech in context