Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to rise to support the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2010 and the associated bills that are before the House today. This scheme is a comprehensive and effective response to climate change. It has been developed against a backdrop of overwhelming scientific evidence, international political consensus and, until a few weeks ago, with national political consensus and, importantly, in negotiation with the previous leadership of the coalition. It is a balanced, costed and market based response to one of the greatest challenges of our times. Put simply, the CPRS caps and reduces Australia’s carbon pollution for the first time ever. It makes polluters pay for their carbon pollution and takes the money raised from the polluters and provides cash assistance to working families. The government’s approach is measured and presents a wide-ranging scheme which is designed to redirect the Australian economy towards a low-carbon future.

In the last few weeks we have seen the Leader of the Opposition bring out his alternative policy. Really, when we drill down and look at this policy I think the Australian people will see that he is more interested in cheap political gain than in any real action on climate change. The Leader of the Opposition’s so-called direct action climate change proposal is nothing more than a climate change con job which will impose a tax on the Australian people and, in his own words, allow big polluters to continue with ‘business as usual’. Last week we saw the Leader of the Opposition describe the coalition’s newest policy as a carefully costed and capped policy, when in actual fact it is uncosted, uncapped and unfair on the Australian people. In the words of the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, the coalition’s latest response to climate change is an attempt to ‘concoct a window display without putting a price on carbon pollution’. In the same article, he appropriately described it as the ‘policy equivalent of dessert without a main course’.

What we have seen with the coalition’s policy is an absolute smokescreen when it comes to any real action on climate change. Instead of putting a cap on carbon, the Leader of the Opposition’s plan is actually designed around big polluters being encouraged to continue to emit carbon, whereas the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme makes polluters pay for their emissions. The Leader of the Opposition’s policy is based on the idea that the government and the Australian people, not the big polluters, should foot the bill in abating emissions.

We have just heard the member for Boothby talk about being upfront. One thing we can say about the opposition’s policy is that they have not been upfront with the Australian people about where the money for their $10 billion scheme is going to come from. All we know is that the burden will fall on taxpayers. Will the money be cut from the budget, perhaps from services, as we heard in question time? The Leader of the Opposition is well renowned for the cuts he made to public hospitals. He cut close to $1 billion out of the public hospital budget. Or will the money come from new taxes? We are not sure, because the opposition have not been upfront with the Australian people about where their cost is going to come. When we talk about being upfront and clear about what our policy is—the government’s policy compared with the opposition’s—we know that whereas we have been very clear about the compensation scheme and where the money is going to come from the opposition have not.

The Leader of the Opposition’s policy was clearly developed in a cocoon, in which he is in denial about the reality of climate change. Outside this cocoon, the real world is literally heating up. The world has just come out of the hottest decade in history. While last week the government reintroduced the CPRS into the House, the Leader of the Opposition was busy holding a private audience with Lord Monckton, a person whom even conservative journalists and the likes of Senator Barnaby Joyce have publicly been trying to distance themselves from. To put him in perspective, Lord Monckton is a person who believes that climate change is the trojan horse for a centralisation of communist power after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That sounds quite extreme, but if we turn our thoughts back to late last year, the shadow Treasurer was accusing the G20 of being part of a socialist conspiracy. So I guess Lord Monckton’s views do sit quite comfortably with the Liberal Party.

While the government has based its response to climate change on the global scientific consensus, including the work done by Australian scientists from the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, the Leader of the Opposition seems to be taking his scientific advice from an eccentric English mathematician who finds himself clearly on the fringe.

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