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

The government wants us to believe that their great big new carbon tax is just a tax on big corporations and on big polluters; on the ugly people who produce our electricity and the ugly people who create our manufacturing industries and our export income. The government wants us to believe that it will actually have no effect on ordinary people; that this is something benign for them and will do nothing to affect their cost of living. The reality, of course, is that that is not true.

This is a tax that will affect every household in Australia. It will affect them every time they go to the shop, it will affect them on the way to the shop and it will affect them on the way home. Everything that they do will be taxed again and again. The price on every item on every shelf in every store will go up and up as a result of this tax. This is not a one-off tax like a GST that is refunded in various elements through the process. This tax cascades; it is there again and again and again. And all Australians will pay.

If you wanted any confirmation, the front page of the Daily Telegraph on the day after this was announced, read, ‘Carbon-fuelled food prices. The price of food will go up as a result of Labor’s carbon tax’. And it is not just that there will be increases in the cost of producing the food but there will also be increases in the cost of selling and transporting the food. A national survey of more than 500 food and grocery retailers said that 83 per cent intend to pass on the cost of their carbon tax by way of higher prices. Frankly, I wonder where the other 17 per cent are. But the reality is that grocery retailers intend to pass on the cost. In the same survey of 525 members, 78 per cent said that this will affect the number of jobs in their shops and the number of hours that people will work.

Even today it goes a step further. The Coca-Cola Amatil chief said:

Australia is in danger of becoming entirely dependent upon imported food—

and he continued:

… the federal government’s proposed carbon tax would further undermine the competitiveness of Australian manufacturers.

He went on to say that he is concerned about the survival—the very survival—of Australia’s food manufacturers ‘if the government were to push ahead with plans to tax carbon emissions’. He added:

I’m really worried about the competitiveness of food and beverage manufacturers in Australia.

And why wouldn’t he be concerned? Australian food and beverage manufacturers are going to have to pay taxes that their competitors around the world will not have to pay. If we import our food and our processed vegetables from overseas there will be no tax but, if we in fact process and preserve and package Australian food and vegetables, they will indeed be taxed under Labor’s scheme.

The Prime Minister has said that agriculture will be exempt from her proposed carbon tax. But who would believe her? Those words are coming out of the same mouth, the same lips, which said on 16 August 2010:

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

She said in August that there would be no carbon tax under her government and she made it even more emphatic a couple of days later when she said:

I rule out a carbon tax.

The same lips are now saying that we will exempt agriculture. Who would believe her? Who believes anything she says? Indeed, the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency at the table threw doubt on the validity of this whole commitment on ABC Rural on 28 February when he said:

… it’s too early to tell how a carbon price will affect farmers’ costs.

So you have the minister in charge of implementing this scheme not sure how much it is going to cost. He does not even know what the impact will be on farmers and he is not even prepared to recommit to the promise that this tax will not affect farmers.

But let us make it absolutely clear. Could any farmer go to the bank manager and plead with the bank manager for some carrying-on finance and be confident of success? The bank manager would ask him, ‘Have you made any provision in your budget for the effect of the carbon tax?’ The farmer would probably say, ‘Oh, no, Julia has told me that I won’t have to pay the tax.’ Do you think the bank manager will believe that? This is the Prime Minister who said that we were not going to have the tax in the first place, so why would anybody believe her now when she says that farmers will be exempt?

Farmers are not exempt. She is only proposing to exempt farmers from the tax on carbon emissions—and for how long, who knows? They have made it clear that the only reason they are introducing that exemption is because they cannot measure emissions. It is also true of course that under Labor’s proposed rules they would not allow farmers’ sequestration of carbon in the soil to be counted. They will not allow carbon exported in grain or other farm products to be counted. They will not allow carbon in pastures, or in most trees even, to be counted. So in effect, they do not have a system in place, otherwise, there is no doubt that the tax would also apply to the farming sector.

Professor Garnaut advocates the inclusion of agriculture, and he is their major guru in this area. This is the same guy who actually suggested that farmers should give up farming cattle and sheep, and grow kangaroos. Kangaroos are what we should have in this country and they should be the future of farming in this nation. The Financial Review editorial, that gives a lot of advice to everybody, also thinks that farmers should be included. So I can understand why farmers are anxious that the promise made by the Prime Minister that they will be exempt will in fact be like all the other promises—not worth a cracker. It will not be honoured, like her word in so many other areas.

This does have a significant impact. ABARE in its modelling in August 2009 said:

… these additional charges—

the effect of a carbon tax—

would cut beef cash incomes by 13.6 per cent, dairying by 9.7 per cent, sheep by 11.4 per cent, wheat and other crops by 8.5 per cent.

And that is not all. The impact of this tax will flow through into the food processing sector. The government has not said that they will be exempt so when the food is being packaged, when the food is being processed, when the sugar is being crushed, and when the milk is being processed, will those processes be exempt from the tax? The reality is that that is highly unlikely. So these costs will indeed be passed on to consumers.

These costs will make our food more expensive and this will be a price that consumers will have to bear. The dairy industry has calculated that a carbon tax of $26 a tonne would add $7,500 a year to the cost of an average dairy farm. The reality is that Labor does not care. Labor is quite happy to import the food from other countries that do not have a carbon tax and have no plans to have a carbon tax, because they have no commitment to ensuring the food supply of Australians.

The other thing that we have been asked to believe is that there will be compensation paid to the low-income families who will have to bear this higher cost. Again I say: this is a promise that has come from the same lips as those that said, ‘There will be no carbon tax.’ Why should families believe that they will ever get that compensation, or that it will be adequate, or that it will last for more than a day after the next election, or that it will be paid to people in a way that is meaningful? The clear facts are that the government cannot be counted upon to honour its word in that regard.

Today the Prime Minister even went further. She said that the assistance is going to be ‘fair and generous’, and the Leader of the Opposition made the very valid point that if people are going to get so much compensation why would they change their behaviour? Why turn out the light bulb if you are being paid compensation for the extra cost of electricity? In reality, this scheme will not even work, because the people who are supposed to be changing their behaviour are going to be given additional compensation. But we know that there are many people—most people in the chain—who will indeed be worse off and it will be a cost that they have to pass on to consumers.

If this tax is $26 a tonne, we are told that the top 200 companies will pay $3.3 billion in tax. That leaves at least $9 billion in the first year to be paid by small business, to be paid by families, to be paid by people who must wear that cost and who cannot pass it on. The reality is that this is a government that cannot be trusted to deliver compensation. It cannot be trusted to guarantee a clean and reliable food distribution system in this country. It is a government that has slashed every year into important rural research and development projects. It has slashed expenditure on quarantine that is to make sure our industry is able to protect itself from pests and diseases in other parts of the world. It has no sympathy for those who produce our nation’s food.

The other quite curious argument the government is using is that we must have this tax so that we can deliver certainty. Well, last week we had plenty of certainty. The coalition had said there would be no tax. The Labor Party had said there would be no tax. There were no doubts whatsoever. Indeed, another survey has said that well over 80 per cent of businesses believed the Prime Minister and had not factored a carbon tax into their future business operations. So the Labor Party are not delivering certainty. They are in fact delivering uncertainty. They have announced a tax and all they are able to tell us about it is that it is going to start on 1 July 2012. We do not know how much it is going to be. We do not know how long the rate will stay at that amount. We do not know who is going to pay. We do not know how much prices are going to go up. We do not know who is going to be compensated. We do not know any of those fundamental issues. How has that delivered certainty to the Australian people? It has delivered uncertainty in massive doses.

That point has also been picked up time and time again by business commentators on this issue. Adding to the uncertainty that is provided in a difficult economic environment by changing economic circumstances around the world, Australia now has a new layer of investment uncertainty. We have the threat of a great big new tax called the carbon tax that this government intends to impose and we have a greater level of uncertainty. There is an uncertainty in the business community. There is an uncertainty amongst Australian families because they do not know what impact it is going to have on them. There is an uncertainty in the workplace because we do not know which jobs Labor are going to sacrifice on the altar of the carbon tax.

We do know that for every one job created—and most of those jobs will be subsidised jobs—over three will be lost in other sectors. That was the clear evidence of the questions put to the government today, to which they could not respond. There will be jobs lost and there will be further uncertainty in households because of the certain knowledge that everything they buy will be more expensive. It will cost more to go to the stores. It will cost more to travel. It will cost more to do the things people want to do.

What the government are doing is creating uncertainty. They have taken away the bipartisan position that both parties went to the election on: the clear commitment that there would be no carbon tax. Only one party promised a carbon tax, and that was the Greens. So whose word should we be taking on this tax? Is the Prime Minister’s word worth anything when she makes a promise with her own lips—‘there will be no such tax’—and then is elbowed out of the way by Senator Brown in her own courtyard to announce the biggest tax that Australia has seen in decades? Those are the people we need to watch, and they have no commitment to excluding agriculture from the carbon tax. They have got no commitment to compensation. They have got no commitment to helping struggling Australian families. You cannot impose a tax that collects $12 billion in its first year, and even more year after year after year, without that having a significant impact on all Australians. Families will find the cost of living so much more difficult to manage as their electricity costs go up, their food costs go up, their jobs are threatened and their lifestyles are threatened by a tax that we do not have to have.

There is a better way. We can reduce CO2 emissions by positive, direct action. Labor always turns to punitive measures—more taxes, more revenue so they can waste more, spend more and deliver less—and Australian families are so much worse off. We need a strong, reliable, secure system, which this government will never deliver. It will only deliver more and more and more taxes.

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