John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Food Security) Share this | Hansard source

Your own Treasurer quoted from a $45 a tonne paper today. So the average dairy farm is going to be out of pocket by about $13,000 or $14,000, simply for electricity. That is just for electricity. That is not transport. That is not fertiliser. It would be nice if those dairy farmers were able to recoup that money, but we are price takers, not price setters. The price cut in milk might be good for consumers in the short term but not in the long term: given that their house prices are going to fly up and given that we are talking about a carbon tax at $45 a tonne, they are going to have to pay $600-odd or more for their domestic electricity use.

The Prime Minister and the Labor government claim that Australian agriculture will be excluded from the carbon tax. Given that the Prime Minister stated a day or days before the election that we would not have a carbon tax at all, I actually think Paul Keating would roll over in his grave with jealousy—

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