Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

The headlines last Friday said it all: ‘PM’s broken promise will hit families hard: $300 TAX SLUG’, and that is only the beginning of the new taxation regime this government is determined to impose upon the Australian people. But what is also fundamentally at stake in this debate is the credibility of the Prime Minister, the woman who leads this country, and the people who sit behind her. She said to the Australian people on 16 August 2010:

There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.

Was she telling the truth? Were the Australian people expected to believe her, on the eve of an election, when she said that there will be no carbon tax under the government she leads? Maybe I should put a good construction on this; maybe she was telling us the truth. Maybe when she announced the reversal of policy it was early advice of her resignation and she is no longer going to be the leader of the government. Or was she telling the Australian people, ‘Actually I do not lead this government at all; it is actually Bob Brown who is the leader of this government.’

If anybody can remember the pictures in the Prime Minister’s courtyard, when the Prime Minister came out surrounded by a bevy of Greens and Independents, Bob Brown shoved her away from the microphones so that he could make all of the key announcements. Maybe the Prime Minister is right: she does not lead this government and therefore she is free to break all of her promises. Indeed, wasn’t it strange that the Treasurer was not in the Prime Minister’s courtyard? It was completely taken over by Greens and Independents and there was no room for the Treasurer, even though the Prime Minister was announcing the biggest new tax in Australian history. The Treasurer was not even there to be involved with this big announcement.

What is more, the gossip tells us that the Prime Minister did not even consult the cabinet about it before she made the announcement, let alone the zombies who have all disappeared from this chamber. They were not consulted either. The Prime Minister just said, ‘We’re going to have this great big new tax.’ With all of my attempts to excuse her I really cannot explain away why on 20 August, right on election eve, she said:

I rule out a carbon tax.

The Treasurer said similar things. He ruled it out; it was not going to happen. This government has not told the truth to the Australian people. Some people actually believed her when she said that there would be no carbon tax. The Commonwealth Bank’s ACCI survey of business expectations says, ‘Eighty per cent of small business took her at her word and have not factored a carbon tax into their business plan.’ When she said no, people said, ‘We believe no.’ In fact, when she said no, was she already meaning yes, or have the Greens taken over and delivered this new tax to all Australians?

What we need to be aware of with Labor’s great big new carbon tax is that this is a tax on everything we do, every day of our lives. This great big new tax will add to the cost of every item on every shelf in every store. It will not just add to the cost of those items; it will add to the cost of everything we do with those items. Indeed, it is designed to do that very thing. It is designed to make things so expensive that we do not do them anymore. We cannot afford to run our air conditioners, so we turn them off. We cannot afford to run our lights, so we live in darkness. That is the purpose of this tax—to change people’s behaviour.

The cost of things on the shelf will go up. The cost of petrol that we use to drive the goods home to our houses will go up. The cost of the refrigerator that we put our fruit and vegetables in will go up. The refrigerator itself will cost more. The electricity to run it will cost more. When we cook the meal the stove will be more expensive. Electricity and gas will be more expensive. When we take the garbage to the dump, it will cost more. Transport, to cover the fill, will be more expensive. It will cost more to build your house in the first place, as it will cost more to build your roads and streets, install the services, operate the sewerage systems and the like. They will all cost more.

Your car will cost more. Your bus fares will cost more. Your aeroplane fares will cost more. If you want to go somewhere, it will cost you more. Your holidays will cost more. Indeed, the Minister for Tourism is on the record as saying that a carbon tax would kill the aviation industry, both domestic and international. So he knows that this tax will be very damaging to the Australian people. Your birthday cake will cost more and your funeral will cost more. This is an invasive tax that you will pay again and again and again. It will multiply and cascade through the cost of everything that you buy. It is $300 for electricity now, and we know that this is a tax which is also designed to go up, up, up and up. The government intends to continue to collect more and more. We know that this will tax everything that we do.

There is another thing it will tax that ought to matter to all Australians: it will tax your job. It may well tax your job out of existence, because this government is designing a tax that will put an extra burden on the price of doing everything in Australia. It will be more costly to manufacture here. It will be more costly to visit this country. It will be more costly to grow food in this country. It will be more costly to do the things that we need to do to earn our way in the world.

The Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency said on the ABC only yesterday that it was too early to tell how a carbon price will affect farmers’ costs. Yet if he had read the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics paper of August 2009 he would know that they estimated that the additional charges will cut a beef farmer’s income by 13.6 per cent, dairying by 9.7 per cent, sheep by 11.4 per cent and wheat and other crops by 8.5 per cent. But if you move to manufacturing you get exactly the same story. We are told that shopkeepers expect that they will have to put up prices—80 per cent said they will have to put up prices and 70 per cent said they will have to get rid of staff. That is the direct effect of Labor’s great big new tax.

Let us look at what Labor intends to do with the revenue it proposes to raise from this massive new tax. Firstly we are told that everyone is going to get compensation. The government is going to give everybody compensation, or even make a large number of families better off, the Prime Minister said. Only Labor could believe that a new tax will make people better off. I have never seen a tax that makes people wealthy, but this government thinks it is going to do that. It is going to provide compensation to people, so why turn off the light bulb? Why make a change? Why save CO2 emissions if, in fact, you are going to get more than adequate compensation for every additional cost you have? There are no grounds for making the savings that the government wants us to make. So in reality the tax will not even work. It will not reduce CO2 emissions at all because the government intends to compensate people. Of course, we know that all will not be compensated and that most Australians will be worse off.

The government also intend to spend some of this money on green programs, things like reducing CO2 emissions. Maybe they will have a new home insulation scheme. That is something they could spend it on—four dead, 200 homes burnt down, billions wasted. Maybe a new green loans fiasco—where millions have been spent training people but there are hardly any loans to be given. Or what about the green car fund? We could reinvent that—axed at the beginning of this year because it had not brought any new technology to our country in spite of the spending of tens of millions of dollars. And what about cash for clunkers? We have got the money now. We can afford to have cash for clunkers—axed before it even began. Now we will have a new tax to pay for this kind of nonsense.

Labor cannot be trusted with $12 billion a year. So perhaps they could have a citizens assembly to decide how to spend the $12 billion. What we do know is that Labor will waste this money. They intend to give $2 billion away, incidentally, to other countries to spend because they know they will waste it themselves. They have got more confidence that maybe Libya or Zimbabwe can spend it more wisely than they.

This is in fact a tax that everyone will be paying. The Treasurer said today that some people are not paying enough tax. I do not think there is anyone that Labor thinks is not paying enough tax. What this will do is affect families. Families should be suspicious that another promise will be broken and there will be no real compensation. This government has not been truthful and it should not be trusted to deliver compensation or any kind of program that will make a difference to our climate. (Time expired)

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