Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Childcare and Early Childhood Learning) Share this | Hansard source

I am delighted to speak on today's matter of public importance, the imminent risk of the government's decision to delegate the carbon tax to an unelected committee. Since the government is determined to quote Professor Garnaut, we should put one of Professor Garnaut's quotes front and centre in this debate—that is, that 'Australian households will ultimately bear the full cost of a carbon price.' We already know that a carbon tax will attack the living standards of forgotten Australian families and households.

I received a letter this week from a young mum in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, where the Treasurer believes our two-speed economy is going at full throttle. This is a young mum who wants to get back into the workforce, but is worried about the skyrocketing cost of child care and about being able to give her family all that she hopes and dreams of. So what is the Prime Minister's response? She is going to hit her with even higher costs of living. For starters, a $20 to $30 per tonne carbon tax will raise power bills by 25 per cent. It will add 6½c to the cost of a litre of petrol. Up go grocery prices by five per cent—and that is all just for starters because Labor's shaky, flaky single-issue partners in government, the Greens, say the tax must be $40 a tonne to drive change from coal to gas. Then it would have to go to $100 to drive the change from fossil fuels to renewables. We know that that is exactly what the Greens want to do. I am at a loss as to how I should respond to Tanya from Kalgoorlie, but I might also add that she wrote at the end of her email: 'I would have written this letter to the appropriate minister from the ALP, but it has become very clear that the Labor Party is not listening to middle-income Australia.'

Labor set the tone for the debate on unelected committees in the last parliament, when they kicked off with the 2020 Summit. Having sneaked into government with 97 per cent of the former government's agenda, they had to bring a summit to Canberra to tell them what they had to do. 'We're not sure of our agenda. We've sneaked into power. What should we do?' The citizens assembly is another example of this. It popped up during the last election campaign. It was to consist of 150 members from across Australia, one from each electorate, and we pointed out to the Prime Minister then that we already have such an elected assembly in parliament. But again it was an initiative designed to tell the government what to do and what to think. Wind the clock forward to the Murray-Darling Basin debacle. The government flicked the development of a basin plan to the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, absolving itself of responsibility for the outcome, and kept referring to the Murray-Darling Basin Authority as the independent authority. What a mess! Members of this parliament, in a committee chaired by the member for New England, have had to travel around the basin, picking up the pieces and cleaning up the mess because, again, we saw the decision making of this parliament hived off to an independent committee. We had to bring the decisions back into the parliament where they belong.

We now have a proposed independent committee to set Australia's emissions reduction level, to break the deadlock between the Labor Party and the Greens, and to resolve the hissy fits of the Prime Minister and Senator Bob Brown. Professor Garnaut's final carbon price report is quite prescriptive. There is $11.5 billion—55 per cent of which goes to households and 35 per cent to businesses. It will be budget neutral. There will be tax cuts and a tax-free threshold. Pensions might be indexed. Petrol taxes are in the mix. Transitional assistance will be provided and so on. No fewer than three independent bodies will be set up to implement it—one to tell us what our future targets and scheme caps should be, another to tell us what assistance should be provided to trade exposed industries and a third is the carbon bank to administer the final emissions trading scheme. But if the government disagrees with recommendations then it has to come back to parliament and so on. The problem here is not the existence of sound, independent organisations to manage whatever disastrous policy emerges from this mess. The problem is the referral, handballing and dumping of the decision making that belongs in this parliament to outside bodies.

Like many, I watched the Garnaut National Press Club address today and paid particular attention to the questions. During the questions, Professor Garnaut was asked: 'What target would the independent committee set? Would it be more than five per cent?' His answer was: 'Well, the independent committee would look at this in more detail. It would have the resources on the job to do it properly. It would have a whole seven months to do it.' So one can only conclude that the independent committee might well set a target of greater than five per cent. The point of this is not so much the five per cent target but the clear impression that the responsibility for the setting of the target does not lie within this parliament but lies with one of these three independent committees. Do people really think that if the committee that determines a target of more than five per cent does not have its advice taken by the parliament that all of the other work that is being done by independent committees outside this place would stand up? It would not. To me, that is a strong indication that this government is devolving responsibility to a body that is not elected. Every other piece of advice or decision hangs off that target. The Prime Minister needs to 'fess up here. She has no idea what to do with this train coming down the track.

I represent a rural electorate, like many members in this place. I refer now to the Australian Farm Institute report which says that the impact of a carbon price on Australian farm businesses—the case I am going to use is grain production—is going to be quite devastating. The proposed carbon price mechanism will increase the price of energy and hence the cost of farm inputs that involve the use of energy in their production or delivery. It does not matter how many tax offsets or structural adjustments you put in. It does not matter whether agriculture sector emissions are in or out. The on-farm costs will rise and, for my own electorate, disturbingly so. The report notes the impact of a carbon tax will be relatively greater for the smaller New South Wales farmer, with the lower productivity of a modest sized grain farm hit harder by the rise in costs. This simple report comes up with the figures the government apparently needs a full-blown committee to consider. Even at a modest carbon price scenario of $20 a tonne, this would add $15,000 to the bottom line of this farm business. Farmers have enough to cope with—droughts, floods, locusts, mice and the scourge of other things that they face—without adding the carbon tax.

As I said, the Prime Minister has no idea of what to do with the carbon tax problem. But what the coalition says to this government is that, no matter how many independent committees, expanded government bureaucracies, experts or actors you wheel out to ram your message down the throats of the Australian people, nothing is going to substitute for your government's shocking leadership, the incompetent way that you have managed this debate, your muddle and your confusion. The simple truth is that the government's carbon tax will impose excessive deadweight costs on the Australian economy. A carbon tax will increase the cost of living. It is, most disturbingly, a tax which is actually designed to go up as soon as it commences. It will transform into an emissions trading scheme down the track. It will start as a carbon tax at some level yet to be set—the mystery will be revealed by the multi-party committee—but as soon as it is legislated it is designed to go up. Compare that with the GST where checks and balances and legislation were put in place and agreements were made to make sure that that did not happen. This is a tax that by its very design will go up the minute it hits the pockets of everyday Australians.

The government is not brave enough to put its stamp on this tax. It is not brave enough to bring the decision making that it should be doing across the parliament inside the parliament. Instead, it is hiving it off to a committee of unelected people that will have, as the member for Flinders pointed out, extraordinary power. The wide-ranging discussion we heard at the Press Club indicates that Professor Garnaut's committees will have their fingerprints all over all sorts of aspects of government policy, particularly tax, pensions, FBT and fuel prices. How could they possibly get it right? How could they possibly make it budget neutral in the end? I do worry, as I said, about those deadweight transaction costs with money moving around the economy. Who knows where it will end up?

If the Prime Minister wanted an actor to help get the message across, she would have been better off choosing Chopper Read than Cate Blanchett because Chopper Read was quoted in the press on the same day as Ms Blanchett and Michael Caton saying, 'Look, I just make it up as I go along.' It appears that the Prime Minister and this government are also making it up on this topic as they go along.

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