Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, we won’t go into the colloquial terms that people would like to use to describe it! But it is remarkably insignificant and ridiculous when put in context with what the Prime Minister claims he is going to achieve with it.

While we are talking about con jobs and being honest with the Australian public, you really need to ask: who were the dills, the peanuts or whatever you want to call them on the front bench who tried to pass off a few hot summer days in Victoria towards the end of last year as evidence of climate change? One after another they stood here at the dispatch box and tried to claim that a single hot weekend in Victoria proved that man-made climate change was real. It was summer. It was hot. But one weekend of hot weather proves absolutely nothing. We are talking about long-term climatic trends, not a single hot weekend. It would be just as stupid for me to stand here in this place today and say that it is raining outside; therefore climate change is over. It is this futile, juvenile, stupid argument that has been put forward in this place which has added to the confusion in the community.

Under the Rudd government’s model we run the risk of jobs being exported from Australia to nations which do not even have a comparable scheme. A fear that is regularly expressed to me in my electorate is that we will be sending our jobs offshore. We will also export our carbon emissions to those nations, and the net result will be a deterioration in the world’s environment because the nations which take the jobs have less stringent environmental protocols than Australia. If we have learnt anything from the Copenhagen fiasco it should be that there is no prospect of a global agreement anytime soon, so any scheme which transfers jobs from Australia in high-emitting industries to foreign nations is likely to result in a poor global environmental outcome. And I fear that this scheme will add to economic uncertainty in Australia and export jobs to foreign nations, resulting in increased global emissions.

I call on the Prime Minister to start being honest with the Australian public, to actually try and explain the emissions trading scheme and admit what the costs will be in terms of job losses and household cost-of-living increases—and admit that the claimed environmental benefits are insignificant without a global agreement. As I indicated the previous time I spoke on this legislation, this government has asked us to vote to give foreign companies a competitive advantage over our own businesses, to vote for more expensive power and transport costs, to vote for more expensive food and to vote for increased costs for small businesses. But at the same time the government failed to make the case and answer basic questions about the impacts of this legislation. We do not know how much it will cost to build a house in Australia. How many jobs in regional areas will be lost? How does Australia cutting its emissions, without global consensus, achieve anything whatsoever? What will be the impact on the household income, for example, for a dairy farmer with a higher electricity bill which will not be compensated? And the minister for aged care did not even touch this subject the other day, when she was asked in question time: how much will aged-care services increase as a result of this legislation? The government has a strategy for spin but has not trusted Australians with a full explanation of the complexity of this massive new tax and how it threatens job security without achieving significant global benefits.

I want to contrast, in the time I have left, the government’s plan with that which has been put forward by the coalition in the past week. Now we have a real choice, which Australian families will welcome, between direct action, which they will understand, practical environmental projects they can work with and appreciate in their own communities, and this great big new tax—which, again, the government has just been too arrogant to try to explain.

One of the great benefits of direct action—and particularly in my community of Gippsland, where there is, I must confess, still quite a bit of division in the community about what the causes of climate change are—is that it does not really matter whether you believe activities by humans are causing the climate to change; these are positive environmental measures in any circumstances. On that point, I think it is foolish of us to believe for a second that the science is completely settled. I, for one, have a view that we live in a very variable climate in Australia; it has been changing for many decades. And the practical custodians of the land, our farming sector and people in it I speak to, are very much aware that they work in a variable climate and they adjust to it all the time. Whether or not it has been affected by emissions from human activities is not particularly relevant to the position being put forward by our plan, where there are real opportunities to invest in the future of productivity—for example, of agricultural land by sequestering carbon in the soil. So these are practical environmental measures. This is direct action which the community can understand and which will still achieve the five per cent target that has been agreed to by the Labor government. One of the other great benefits of the scheme being put forward by the opposition is that it is incentive based. It may allow for production, for example, to increase on some of our less arable land, through sequestering carbon in the soil to improve food security in what is very much an uncertain and variable climate at the moment.

I believe the practical, direct action will be welcomed by our agricultural sector and the farmers I referred to before as the custodians of the land, because they are some of the great beneficiaries under this plan. Our farmers are the real, practical environmentalists in Gippsland. They are the ones who have been adopting technologies as they have come online, who have learned new skills and who have made their land more productive. They are the ones who are actually out there getting their hands dirty and doing that practical work while we have bureaucrats in faraway offices telling them what to do.

You would never hear from the minister for agriculture, for example, what a great job Australian farmers are doing, because, if you ask him, anything to do with the agricultural sector is all about climate change and it is all the National Party’s fault. So our plan supports practical environmental measures, which makes sense regardless of your views on man-made climate change.

But, as I referred to earlier, one of the most disappointing aspects of the debate so far from my perspective is that it has unnecessarily divided Australians for, I believe, the government’s political advantage. The government is being deliberately divisive for those purposes. The advertising campaign I referred to earlier has scared people, particularly children. You hear them coming out with it in the schools. I know we all visit schools on a regular basis. They have been terrified by some of the advertising material that governments have been putting forward.

I would rather see us debate this issue in terms that we can all agree on, particularly the sustainable management of the environment. There is not a single Gippslander that I have met who has not got a passion for the environment of our region, and they will support practical environmental measures every day of the week. The people of Gippsland have embraced the Landcare movement. They have been huge supporters of Landcare. It is somewhat ironic that, when we hear talk about the environment, we have the situation where the government has actually cut the funding for Landcare facilitators.

See this speech in context