Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Industry and Science) Share this | Hansard source

There is one job that this carbon tax is intended to save, and that is the Prime Minister’s job. What price will we pay? Thousands of Australian jobs will be exported overseas and thousands of Australian businesses will go to the wall. For what reason? For the reason that this is a desperate minority government and a Prime Minister who will do ‘whatever it takes’, in the words of Graham Richardson, to grease up to the Greens and give them what they want so she can hold onto that mantle of power.

The more desperate the minority government becomes, the more desperate the Prime Minister becomes in trying to save her job, the greater the lack of judgment we see. We see scores of members on the other side wondering: why when making this announcement did she allow the Greens to colonise the Prime Minister’s courtyard and effectively show the Australian people the reality of the desperation of this minority government? There is one thing I can guarantee you: the more desperate this Prime Minister becomes, the more she will fail in her judgment and the more, unfortunately, Australians will suffer.

We heard her speak before about people being misleading. Let me tell you: the person who has more front than a mall full of shops is this Prime Minister. The mother of all untruths in the whole of political history has to be the one she told on the eve of an election. She was a woman desperate, a woman being leaked against, a woman being knifed with a former Prime Minister out to get her, and she was saying anything—in the words of Graham Richardson, ‘Whatever it takes.’ She said whatever she thought she needed to say: ‘There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.’ She also said, ‘There is a great divide in this parliament.’ Yes, there is. On that side they are interested in one job: the top job; the PM’s job. On this side of the House we are inundated by calls from communities desperate for financial security, desperate to make ends meet and desperate to hold onto their jobs and businesses. We know there are small and medium-sized businesses that do not have the clout of big unions or the entree into the government, and they have told us they are hurting. They cannot afford another cost to seriously jeopardise their already thin margins.

That is the big divide: there is one job that is important on that side—the job of the Prime Minister, which will allow the Labor Party to hold onto power. They are desperate because they are about to lose power in New South Wales. They are about to lose the heart of the Labor Party, and it is going to hurt them, big time. So they need to hold onto this one job.

We hear the Prime Minister quoting this CEO and that CEO. Behind the scenes, when people talk about what they really think, manufacturing and businesses are not happy at all. But the Prime Minister, of course, with her very tricky words, would like us all to enter the fantasy land she lives in on top of the faraway tree, where everyone out there in business wants this carbon tax and that it is the answer to all the problems. We know that is not true. She arrogantly dismisses the concerns of BlueScope Steel and she told us during question time, ‘They’ll just get on with it; they’ll just find something else to do’—effectively she said, ‘Tough: you’ll just have to put up with all the pathetic decisions we make, every decision that drives up cost and every decision that makes Australian businesses uncompetitive in the face of imports.’

We have seen their mining tax. We have seen them go back on all sorts of promises, whether it was cash for clunkers and the Green Car Innovation Fund or securing our borders. But the mother of all deceptions was the promise not to introduce a carbon tax. She will keep her job for a short time, but during that time what will it cost Australians and what will it cost the Australian economy? She has reversed the public good. Usually we ask people to sacrifice a little of themselves for the greater good; on this occasion it is Prime Minister Gillard and the Labor Party asking thousands of everyday Australians to sacrifice their livelihoods and their standard of living for her job. What an arrogant Prime Minister. What an out-of-touch Prime Minister. What an absolutely delusional Prime Minister.

As the shadow minister for industry, it is my solemn duty to inform the House that this backflip is on the back of so many reversals and contradictions that have had an extraordinarily bad impact on Australian businesses. I note from some of the Prime Minister’s statements that she thinks the implementation of this job-destroying new tax is going to result in businesses using less energy. But what she does not acknowledge is that in many cases the lights are going to get switched off forever and that this will be the industrial sunset for much of Australian manufacturing.

Already in the past three years Labor has presided over sustained contractions in Australian manufacturing that have been the worst ever recorded by the AiG and the PricewaterhouseCoopers index. More than 87,000 jobs have been lost in Australian manufacturing during that time. And just to add to this depressing picture, insolvencies across Australian businesses have hit record levels in each and every one of the years of the Rudd-Gillard government. We have been lurching backwards in a period when manufacturing has been consistently expanding in places like the US, Italy, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. So much for trying to help working families or even the newly unemployed families and so much for moving forward.

Not content with crippling a sector to which they have made all sorts of promises and whispered all sorts of sweet nothings just to get elected, the government now want to tax Australian manufacturing out of existence. As the shadow industry minister, I am constantly impressed by the resilience, the determination and the innovation of Australian manufacturers, but at the same time I hear the constant refrain from them—from one end of the country to the other—that they cannot afford to stay in business if they are forced to compete with imports that do not have the cost of a carbon tax placed on them. Already, they have to compete against imports which have been manufactured by countries with cheaper wages but which do not the same environmental occupational health and safety laws as we have. This one additional cost is going to drive many to the wall.

We have not heard from the government what they are going to do with government procurement. Are they going to say when they put out a government contract that they will put an extra tax, the carbon tax, on those who tender from overseas or are this government going to continue the practice of favouring foreign companies that are not subjected to the same laws, regulations and costs as those in Australia? Are they going to say that they will favour cheap tenders and give Australian taxpayers’ dollars to foreign companies that are not subjected to a carbon tax? I bet you that is what is in their plan because that would be utterly consistent with their secret plans, like the secret plan to send Army camouflage fabric to China. If they can get away with it, the government will.

Is it any wonder in this current environment that we have Managing Director and CEO of BlueScope Steel, Paul O’Malley, saying that this government is engaged in economic vandalism, that it has an anti-manufacturing focus and that it displays complete ignorance? There is no shortage of industry leaders and bodies lining up behind him to make the same points. If the Prime Minister thinks that industry and workers out there want this tax, she is utterly and thoroughly deluded. She would stand there and say black is white until she was blue in the face just to keep her job. She will say and do anything. Everyone knows, even the people who sit behind her, this Prime Minister has worked all her life to get to the top job and she will do anything, sell anyone and sacrifice as many Australian jobs as possible if it means that she keeps her job.

This carbon tax will make our industries less competitive against imports and will not only export Australian jobs overseas but also export carbon overseas to countries that use more energy and put more emissions into the atmosphere by making the same things that we do. As long as they have a competitive advantage over us and no carbon tax, the incentive will be for them to produce more, to make more, whilst they retain that competitive advantage. It is not only a policy that will destroy Australian jobs and send them offshore but also a policy that will result in even greater emissions. In an act of trademark Labor stupidity, it is helping to increase the amount of carbon in the world’s atmosphere, but that breathtaking stupidity means nothing if it means that the Prime Minister will hold onto her job.

I realise that the Greens are hell-bent on taking us back to a pre-industrial era, and we see the Labor Party complicit in all of that, but it is no surprise when they have a Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research such as Kim Carr who has rightly filled the business community with dread, given that his close to two decades in parliament have produced barely a whimper of economic literacy and only resulted, in government, in disastrous policies that have threatened to remove the incentives to innovation. The Prime Minister stood there in question time and said ‘Oh, manufacturing will be fine; they will just innovate.’ So what have they done? In government they are trying to rip out the most important incentive to innovation, the R&D tax incentive. The Prime Minister is all talk. She also talks about looking into the future and transforming the Australian economy.

Industry and workers know that the future under a carbon tax means almost no manufacturing. The future under a carbon tax is tens of thousands of people unemployed. The future under a carbon tax is the single greatest disruption to the Australian economy and the destruction of Australian jobs that we have seen. If you do not believe me, Prime Minister, instead of just speaking to the big end of town, why do you not go out there to small- and medium-sized businesses who invite you to go and speak to them, small- and medium-sized businesses who have mortgaged their house and taken the risk to compete out there in the marketplace, who are as efficient as they can possibly be, who are working on very small margins?

Why don’t you have the guts, be woman enough, to go and speak to them, look them in the eye and tell them this carbon tax is good for their business? Tell them that this carbon tax is going to create more jobs and then you will see—from real people who have spent real money and made real sacrifices to carve out a living, to get some independence in their lives—the incandescent anger right around Australia. If this Prime Minister cannot see how angry people are, if she does not understand that they are being pushed to the wall with the ever-increasing cost of living and the insecurity about whether or not they are going to keep their jobs, then she is truly the most delusional person who has ever occupied the position of Prime Minister. As much as Labor might—

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