Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence Materiel) Share this | Hansard source

Is that right? The contribution was about the biggest destroyer of jobs in Australian history. You just have to go back to quotes from previous debates to see how ludicrous those comments were in the past and how ludicrous these comments are today. They should be dealt with with the derision they deserve.

Economic reforms—structural changes to our economy—create new industries and new jobs. That was the lesson of the eighties and the nineties. Remember the fear campaigns about tariff reductions and other reforms of the Hawke and Keating governments. It was said that those governments were selling out, that industries would be destroyed, that jobs would be destroyed and that businesses would close. What did those reforms do? They did the reverse. Big economic reforms in the eighties and nineties made Australian businesses more competitive by forcing them to innovate.

The lesson for us here, when we are contemplating these reforms, is that economic reform and structural reform create new jobs. The Hawke and Keating reforms set the Australian economy up for this century, to compete in new markets like China and East Asia, to make sure that we did not become the poor white trash of Asia. Creating new jobs is all about identifying the challenges of the future and acting upon them to give businesses the certainty they need. This reform is not easy; we do not say that it is. It is going to require a lot of hard work by all of us, but the longer we wait the more this will cost. If carbon pollution is going to be capped in the future businesses want to know what the rules are as soon as possible. They want certainty. The sooner that we set the rules the sooner they can make long-term investment decisions that will create the jobs of the future.

If we fail here the cost of our indifference will be paid by our children and our grandchildren in their jobs, because the longer we take the more it will cost and the harder it will be to cut emissions and transform our economy to a low-carbon economy. The cheapest and most effective way to do that is by putting a price on carbon. That is what the member for Wentworth has said on many occasions. He has tried to convince his party of that. That is what John Howard, the former Prime Minister said on many occasions, and tried to convince his party of. That is what the member for Flinders said when he was at university. In his honours thesis he said:

… a pollution tax is both desirable, and, in some form, is inevitable …

He said:

… even if some of the Liberal’s constituents do respond negatively, a pollution tax does need to be introduced to properly serve the public interest.

See this speech in context