Luke Hartsuyker (Cowper, National Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

I am coming to petrol. But I am sure the constituents in the electorate of Lyne who are struggling to pay their electricity bills will be sending the member for Lyne a very clear message—and that is, ‘I don’t want to pay more for electricity in order to cool the planet.’ I think the electors of Lyne, the next time they get into their cars, will be keen to send the member for Lyne a message and say, ‘I don’t want to pay more for petrol to drive my car; I cannot handle these increasing costs of living—you have to do something about it. You were the one who was sent to Canberra to represent the people of Lyne, and you voted against the students, you voted against small business and now you are voting against everybody to impose a tax.’

And how does this tax work? I had an interesting debate with the member for Page on the issue of the carbon tax last week. She was asked to explain how the carbon tax worked. She did her best, I must admit. She was quite gutsy going on to the radio station, because there are not too many people out there who are pleased to have the new tax levied upon them. She was explaining how you have to put a price on carbon and da da da. I really do not know what she was going on about, but she was doing a pretty good job of trying to explain this jumbled mess that the government are proposing to impose on the Australian people despite their solemn promise that they were not going to impose a carbon tax. During the interview I volunteered and said, ‘I can tell you how the tax works: it drives the price of electricity up so high that you can’t afford to run your air conditioner, you can’t afford to heat your home, you can’t afford to cook a meal’—that is exactly how the carbon tax works—‘and it drives the price of petrol up so high that you can’t afford to drive your car.’

That is the magic of this tax—when you impose the tax it cools the planet and everyone feels good; everyone feels that warm inner glow because they know they are contributing to a better planet. Let us not even consider for a moment the fact that China’s emissions are increasing at a massive rate, which makes anything that we might do in this country seem a mere sideshow, or that India’s emissions are also increasing at a massive rate.

This government’s hypocrisy is demonstrated by the fact that it is happy to let coalmines export coal, yet apparently we have to do something about coal industry emissions. It is a very counterintuitive argument, and it comes as a great surprise that the member for Lyne can stand there and support a carbon tax that will penalise pensioners, a carbon tax that will smash small business and a carbon tax that will hurt families. It is a carbon tax that is not going to provide the sorts of solutions required. How do you solve the emissions problem? You certainly do not solve it by lumping a tax on people. You do not solve it by having an emissions trading scheme. You solve it by actually doing something about it, by actually investing in the technology that is going to achieve a reduction in emissions.

We know that the demand for electricity is relatively inelastic, and that is what the Prime Minister is not telling us. The member for Lyne is not telling his constituents that in order to achieve a reduction in demand for electricity, the price rises will have to be massive and the initial $26 a tonne carbon price that we are likely to see—$300 on your electricity bill, 6½c a litre on fuel—is going to be a mere kiss compared to the impact of the tax when the Prime Minister really gets stuck into the tax on a basis that is going to achieve what the Greens are going to demand. It will be interesting to see, with the Greens really in control of this government, how the final make-up of this tax occurs.

Do the Greens really care if they bankrupt small business? Do the Greens really care if people are losing their jobs? I am sure they do not. They have not cared in the past. They have had no care and no responsibility, living in a dream world. But now they are actually going to have to start being accountable for the things they do in guiding, and I suppose effectively leading, this government down a path that is going to destroy the economy, destroy jobs and lower Australia’s standard of living. That is the question that the member for Lyne needs to answer to his constituents when he goes out there spruiking this tax. He is going to have to answer to them why he is voting to lower their standard of living, because that is precisely what he is doing. The government will put up this smokescreen that says ‘polluters will pay’. They will stand up on the pulpit and say, ‘Polluters will pay.’ The reality is it is people who pay, because businesses are there to make a profit. If they do not make a profit, they go out of business. The only way they can maintain their profit stream and remain viable is to put their prices up, and who is going to pay for that? I don’t think the member for Lyne is going to be forking out from his pocket to compensate the people of the electorate of Lyne. I don’t think the government is going to be forking out anything like the amount of money that is going to represent the costs that consumers face. It is a massive confidence trick. It is a massive fraud.

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