Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This afternoon I rise to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2009-2010 and cognate bill, and I am forced to speak on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2010 that the government brought before the House without notice. The manager of government business came into the House and guillotined a very important debate for both sides of the House. I have to speak in this place for those people who have no voice. I want to use this opportunity of the debate on the appropriation bills to talk about the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill as it was brought forward by the Labor government. The member for Gippsland and I are wondering right now where it has gone since we were here last. Where has it gone? Has it gone to the Senate? Will it disappear into the ether or is it really going to come forward again in the upper house?

It was last year that my inbox, along with the inboxes of many of my coalition colleagues, was literally inundated with thousands and thousands of emails calling on me, as the member for Maranoa, and many of us in the opposition to stand up to the Labor government in relation to their plan to put a new tax on everything. That was meant to be the solution to carbon pollution and emissions as they saw it. As they saw it, that would help reduce the temperature of the planet. But it was nothing more, as the Australian public rightly knew, than a great big new tax. It would have hit families and households. It would have hit family budgets. Of course, we all know that it would have done very little, if anything, for the global environment. We told the Australian people the truth: it was a tax that would be imposed by the government, managed by an international finance and trading system and would have little significance in reducing carbon emissions.

Our Prime Minister, the people’s prime minister, who was elected at the last federal election, planned before parliament rose at the end of last year to ram through this Labor legislation so that he could take it to Copenhagen. He was so desperate to have this piece of paper in his hand to wave around when he arrived in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was going to be a world leader and he was going to negotiate for the world to follow him and the model that he had got through the Australian parliament and which would now be law.

But thankfully the coalition and the crossbench senators prevented the Prime Minister from doing just that. And of course we all know what the outcome of Copenhagen was: pretty much nothing. It was a great big talkfest costing millions and millions of dollars of Australian taxpayers’ money. Were we surprised on this side of the House? No, we were not, because we had a Prime Minister and a Labor government that would not listen to the voice of the people or to rational debate.

The Prime Minister was also hell-bent on impressing the President of the United States. He really gave no consideration to Australian families or Australian businesses. He was far more interested in impressing the global leaders and the President of the United States and in stepping onto the world stage. He was not worried about families out there struggling with a mortgage and high grocery prices. He wanted to be on the global stage with a piece of legislation that had passed—thankfully, it did not pass—both houses and had become law. He was willing to sacrifice jobs and he was also willing to allow families to be hit with an increase of up to 25 per cent in household electricity bills.

The Prime Minister was willing for mining jobs in Central Queensland to be lost, because that is the net effect of what would have happened. He was also willing for dairy farmers in the southern downs in my electorate of Maranoa to be hit with the extra costs—and these are figures by ABARE; they are not figures by the coalition or another independent think tank. As the member for Gippsland would also be aware, if the ETS had passed it would have hit dairy farmers, based on ABARE figures, with an additional $9,000 cost per dairy farmer.

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