Peter Lindsay (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, member for Oxley. I understand that. But this is a group that represents a very significant contribution to our economy, and which could be badly damaged by what is being proposed by the government. The Minerals Council have every right to have a view, and they have certainly had that view. They have welcomed the coalition’s policy that we will be providing an incentive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without negatively impacting on jobs, investments, export and growth. It is a wonderful outcome. The Minerals Council of Australia has welcomed the shift to a policy design to use incentives as a driver to reduce emissions rather than an approach that is preoccupied with penalising business to raise revenue.

The current proposal, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, places a $120,000 million impost on the Australian economy. It returns about $75,000 million to households and motorists in partial competition for price rises in electricity and consumer goods without a single cent being invested in the research and development of a low-emissions technology. It is a real shame.

I was in a parliamentary delegation to the United States last September and I went to the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York. World eminent scientists said Kyoto was a failure because it did not invest in low-emission technologies. It set targets but it did not invest in how you met those targets. They warned us that if Copenhagen was to go, it had to invest in low-emission technology. Copenhagen was a failure, Kyoto was a failure, the CPRS of this government will be a failure because it does the same thing. It does not invest in low-emissions technology. But the coalition’s proposal provides incentives, money, dollars to businesses to invest in low-emissions technology, and we are going to see that. For example, there is the NBD proposal in Townsville by James Cook University. The writer of the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald today, David Marr, showed pathetic journalism. He talked about this particular project and he talked about the opposition leader saying that the project was about turning algae into cattle feed. But what Mr Marr did not say was that it also produced biodiesel from sunlight, from CO2, from emissions—a valuable process that business can make money out of, for heaven’s sake. It was not the cattle feed side of it that was important; it was the biodiesel. It was the use of sustainable green energy—sunlight—to do this. It was the wonderful outcome that you took the CO2 from a power station and turned it into something that was of value. That is happening at James Cook University, it is working now, and those are the sorts of things that the coalition will be promoting and providing incentive for because that is the way it has to go.

The [Minerals Council] remains committed to the development of a climate change policy that includes a carbon-price incentive, promotes low emissions technologies, drives a global protocol that includes all major emitters and includes a complete mix of low-emissions energy sources.

That is a worthy ideal, and it is the sort of thing you would expect from the leadership of a body such as the Minerals Council, and I thank them for that leadership. I plead with the government: please give up on your great big new tax on everything and have a look at how we might do this in an alternative way, with no increases in grocery prices and no increases in electricity prices.

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