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

I think he does. In effect, this explains why the member for Wentworth, in his contribution to the CPRS debate last year, said this would be fiscal recklessness on a grand scale. So companies keep polluting and taxpayers keep paying and potentially a whole lot of taxpayers' money is flushed down the toilet and the pollution goes up rather than down. It is the sort of plan that you have when you do not think that climate change is real. Well, it is real. Climate change is happening and human beings are contributing to it and it is a serious challenge. Cutting carbon pollution in our economy is not an easy task. It involves hard economic reform, effectively severing the link between economic growth and the growth in the amount of carbon dioxide that the economy produces. It is not easy but we have to do it. It is simply in our economic interests to do it. There will be a binding international agreement in the years ahead and Australia will have to comply. If we act now, Australian companies will have time to adjust. We can reduce the amount of carbon pollution we produce gradually, over time, and that will help to support Australian companies and support Australian jobs, but the longer we wait, the faster, eventually, we will have to cut our emissions, and that invariably will hurt Australian companies and hurt Australian jobs. That is why it makes economic sense to act now.

There has been some discussion here about what other countries are doing. India has a carbon tax on coal. China is launching a pilot emissions trading scheme in six provinces, including Beijing and Shanghai, in 2013. The US has committed to a 17 per cent reduction in emission levels by 2020. The United Kingdom produces about the same amount of emissions as Australia. Their Conservative government announced just last week that they will cut their emissions by 50 per cent by 2027. And here we are, producing roughly the same amount of emissions as the United Kingdom, and we are having a fight about cutting emissions by five per cent.

The British Prime Minister, of course, is not the only conservative leader to be doing something serious about climate change. As Paul Kelly pointed out in the Australian today, it is conservative governments around the world that have been leading the fight to tackle climate change. Whether it is Germany, Britain, France or South Korea, or the former Governor of California, it is conservatives who have led the way. Even in Australia, every single former leader of the Liberal Party supports taking action to cut climate change through putting a price on carbon—but not the current Leader of the Opposition. Andrew Peacock, John Hewson, Malcolm Fraser, Malcolm Turnbull and even John Howard all support putting a price on carbon. If Robert Menzies were alive today, I suspect he would back it as well.

But not this Leader of the Opposition, because he is in the embrace of the same people who thought that smoking did not cause cancer. Remember those debates in 1995 about whether smoking was addictive and whether smoking caused cancer? Senator Minchin, the man who put in a dissenting report to a Senate report in 1995, said he did not believe that smoking was addictive and did not believe that passive smoking caused cancer—the same person who helped the Leader of the Opposition get a job. There is another member of this parliament who in 1995 said: 'I say to those people who believe tobacco is a dreadful product: make your case. They have not done so.' These people in the House and in the Senate, the people who thought smoking did not cause cancer, are the same people who think that climate change is not real. And they are the same people who in the party room last week said to the Leader of the Opposition that even they thought he was being too negative, because now the Leader of the Opposition does not even support the Howard government's policies. Things he supported when he was a member of the Howard government he is now opposing—proof, if you ever needed any, that this is all just about politics.

The Leader of the Opposition is very different to John Howard. He opposes everything and stands for nothing. Remember what John Howard was like when he was the Leader of the Opposition? He supported reforms like floating the dollar. He supported reforms like cutting tariffs. But not this Leader of the Opposition. The answer to every single question we ask of this Leader of the Opposition is no. If we put a motion into this House supporting motherhood, the answer would be no. If we put a motion into this parliament supporting the Queen Mother, the answer would be no. If we put a motion into this parliament supporting the Queen and the Queen Mother, if we had a motion that entrenched the constitutional monarchy forever, he would oppose it. If we had a motion supporting budgie smugglers at the beach, he would oppose it. He opposes everything and stands for nothing. He is like that guy in drag in Little Britain: 'Computer says no'—except that in this case it is, 'Abbott says no.'

The people of Australia deserve better than that. They pay us money to come to Canberra to work together on the big reforms and the big issues to make this a better place. They expect us to work together. They expect something better than somebody who sleeps on a couch during important divisions and when he is awake just says no. (Time expired)

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