Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have just listened to the member for Kingston and I could spend the next 20 minutes responding. I will give some time to addressing the comments she made. I happen to visit her electorate from time to time. I know it well—my wife was raised in Adelaide. I happen to know that the electorate of Kingston has a significant body of residents who gain their living in agricultural areas—wine and many other things. I thought she might be interested in an article published in the Perth Sunday Times on 27 December, in which the Australian Food and Grocery Council disputes her government’s estimate that the cost of a shopping trolley would only increase $68 per annum. A noted economist from ABARE called that ‘rubbish’. The Food and Grocery Council suggested a figure of $520 a year. This is the point for the member for Kingston. I quote from the council:

It seems the only way the government could have got this figure would be to base their modelling on significant reductions in Australian manufactured goods and a significant increase in supplies from cheaper priced countries such as China.

The member for Kingston has a constituency based to a great extent in South Australia, a state heavily reliant on food production and food processing. There are 300,000 Australian workers in the food industry—and the Food and Grocery Council says, ‘If you want to do what they have claimed, you better get everything from China.’ That is not a bad starting point.

The member for Kingston lectures, as everybody does—including someone from my side—that this is a market response. How can it be a market response if the government has about 10 or 15 centimetres of legislation? A market is cold turkey. If you are going to compensate everybody who turns up with a case, where is the discipline upon those people to reduce their emissions? The member for Kingston put the argument for a ‘pay to pollute’ response to the climate change legislation. She ran off all the repetition of her colleagues. Japan, she said, is going to have an ETS and then she said ‘or might do’. I think New Zealand has some form of legislation but it is not happening.

The minister got up the other day and said that there are 32 countries with an ETS. Well, the next speaker after me might name those countries. But I can tell you that they do not include Japan, they do not include India, they do not include China, they do not include Brazil and they do not include South Africa. They were the group who showed the door to our Prime Minister—who was going over to Copenhagen to run the show. They showed him the door. They made their decisions in his absence and would not give him the time of day—he and his 114 public servants—and a group of Third World countries set the agenda at Copenhagen. And what was their message? It was: ‘We will advance our economies and, if that means more CO2 in the atmosphere, it is up to you, the so-called developed countries. I love the fact that even our Prime Minister thinks we are so rich that we can donate to China, India, Brazil and all these countries, but the reality is that they took no notice of him and would have taken no more notice if this parliament had passed this legislation prior to Copenhagen.

It is said that the coalition is out of touch, but it is offering incentives not penalties. As I have been saying for decades, there are great technological opportunities for Australia and most of them exist today and we may like to take the opportunity to be involved. The member for Kingston also accused us of picking winners. What is the compensation fund that is proposed by the Rudd government but picking winners? At one stage the electrical generators were going to get $3 billion. They asked for $10 billion and suddenly they are getting $7 billion. Is that picking winners? After the election, were the ACTU and associated unions winners? Were the employers winners? They are trying to keep this economy afloat with exports, and what is happening to them? There is a strike going on during the building of the biggest industrial program in Australia because the workers involved want to keep a motel-style room empty to store their toothbrushes in while they are away for their six days off. And do not tell me that they hang their clothes in there. I get on the same planes as they do—and they wear them up there and they wear them back. I sometimes wonder if they ever take them off. So do not give me that sort of stuff.

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