Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Is it any wonder that you cannot trust this government with the welfare of the families of Australia? When the Treasurer was nailed, he tried to weasel out of it by telling this parliament: 'Suddenly out of the blue it came.' Well, this suddenly came out of the blue on no fewer than eight separate occasions. This is a government which is utterly incompetent, utterly untrustworthy and is going to make the welfare and the wellbeing of the people of Australia worse and worse year by year if it gets its way, because of its toxic carbon tax.

We hear the Prime Minister saying, 'There will be compensation.' Let the people of Australia understand: the compensation will be temporary; the tax will be permanent. The compensation will be whittled away; the tax will be ratcheted up. We know that the Greens think that it will have to be at least $40 a tonne to drive a change from coal to gas. And what is the point of having it if it does not drive a change from coal to gas? But it is supposed to do more than that; it has got to drive a change from fossil fuels to renewables. To do that, it will have to be $100 a tonne. There is no carbon tax that is high enough to satisfy the Greens. There is nothing that this Prime Minister will not end up doing to satisfy the Greens, because the Greens are the people who keep her in power—or keep her in office. She might be in office; Bob Brown is in power, and that is why the future of the families of Australia is in peril from a bad government that just gets worse every single day.

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