Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

What an astonishing turnaround today from the coalition. It comes in day after day saying that it knows the impact of the emissions trading scheme and the fixed-price permit on households. That is its central proposition. We have had shadow minister after shadow minister coming in and making claims as to the impact that this will have on households. The proposition is that there is all this uncertainty, that the price is unknown, and therefore this is bad. Well, you can make that proposition if you want in a democracy, but you cannot reconcile it with the other proposition, which is that they know the impact of the price of carbon on households. You can have one, you can have the other, but you cannot have both—and that is what they have said today.

They have said there are two problems: they do not know what the price is, but on the other hand they do know what the price is because they tell everyone every day what the impact will be. In fact, what they have told the Australian people about this impact varies day by day, week by week, month by month and shadow minister by shadow minister. The shadow environment minister, about whom I will have a lot to say in my allotted time today, last year said it will be $1,100. That was on 6 January. This year, on 25 February, just a few days ago, he said it will be $300. But then they have gone on to say it will be $1,000 and then they have gone on to say it will be $500. So: just pick a day, just pick a number. They know the impact of a carbon price which they complain has not yet been determined. You cannot have it both ways, but this coalition always does want to have it both ways.

The coalition have said that the fact that the price has not been determined at this point will create uncertainty. There is no more guaranteed way of creating uncertainty in relation to the efforts of an Australian government to limit carbon emissions than to declare that you will roll the program back. That is what the coalition have declared—that if a carbon price is introduced and an emissions trading system is designed to be implemented then we will get what the previous Treasurer of this country used to describe as ‘rrroll-back’. Remember the Treasurer, at this dispatch box, saying how bad it would be for the Labor Party, on the GST, to implement ‘rrroll-back’? Well, here they are, the kings of roll-back, because they would roll back the entire emissions trading scheme and replace it with what? They would replace it with the most expensive dog’s breakfast that this country has ever seen—a $30 billion slug on Australian taxpayers made up of $10½ billion of the order of magnitude of the black hole identified by the Department of Finance and Deregulation and the Department of the Treasury in the coalition’s costings of its commitments, all unrepudiated and all unrepealed, going into the last election. They are the official estimates of the size of the coalition black hole, which happens also to be the estimated cost of their direct action plan—that is, $10½ billion.

Where does the balance of $20 billion come from? I can tell the people of Australia what would happen. The coalition are saying that they too will sign up to the target of reducing unconditionally Australia’s emissions by five per cent to make them comparable with 2000 levels by 2020. That is the same unconditional target that the Australian Labor Party has embraced. The coalition say they are embracing the same target, a five per cent reduction. The problem is that the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency estimates that the $10½ billion direct action plan will only do a quarter of the job. Therefore, three-quarters of the job needs to be done through the purchase of international permits. Therefore, the coalition’s $10 billion black hole becomes a $30 billion black hole. The Leader of the National Party says, ‘This MPI is about the impact on households.’ What about the impact of $30 billion in extra taxation on Australian households? That is a gigantic impact. It is equivalent to some of the biggest budgets—the health budget, the education budget—of this country. They say that they will whack a $30 billion tax on Australian households. They say the coalition are for low taxes.

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