Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

While it is tempting to spend my time rebutting the member for Melbourne's speech, I will try to resist. But I will say that in this House I have never heard so much emotional claptrap so removed from reality. The member for Melbourne thanked the people of Melbourne for putting him here for this momentous occasion. I was in Melbourne last week and it seems to me that there are a lot of houses and a lot of buildings in the middle of Melbourne made out of concrete. They have glass windows. They have trams running on steel tracks using electricity to drive them around. While the good folk of Melbourne might have a desire to improve the environment, they do not appear to be doing too much of it themselves.

The member for Melbourne's scare campaign of referring to catastrophic climate change is nothing short of ridiculous. The member for Melbourne is still using the images of the Murray-Darling Basin after suffering 10 years of drought to demonstrate his argument. If the member for Melbourne would like to get out of the capital city and go to look at the Murray-Darling Basin, he will find out that it actually has rained, we are not in drought and the system has not run dry, as he would lead us to believe. The interesting thing is that the good folk of Melbourne, supported by the Greens during that drought, started a pipeline to pipe water from the Murray-Darling Basin for the good people of Melbourne to flush down their toilets. This is gross hypocrisy.

Professor Garnaut, who did the original report on climate change and an emissions trading scheme for the Rudd government, said that regional Australia would have an economic downturn of 20 per cent and the cities would have one of eight per cent. When the member for Melbourne comes in here with a scheme where the people of his electorate undertake the same amount of hardship as the people of my electorate, we might start talking. This is nonsense.

We talk about 100 per cent renewable energy in Australia. How do you make a solar farm or a wind turbine without a steel mill? How do you make a wind turbine without an iron ore mine and a coalmine to make the steel to make the turbine? Do the good climate fairies come in at midnight and put these turbines up to generate the electricity? This is an absolute nonsense.

This is, indeed, a historic occasion, but I suggest that we do not want to get too far ahead of ourselves. This is the third time I have spoken on this subject in this place. On the previous two occasions that I spoke, the members of the government and the more recent Greens member had breathless anticipation of worldwide change, but it did not quite happen—so we have not got there yet. Do not count your chickens until they hatch. As I said in my very first speech on the subject, in 2008, this is going to have a devastating effect on the Australian economy.

This bill has been couched as compensation and it has been couched as tax reform. Pardon me—I thought the idea of this legislation was for it to have some sort of environmental effect. We are talking about global environmental effect; Australia does not live in a bubble. As a result of this tax and of the belief by some that it will come about, we are starting to see changes of behaviour, but not the sorts of changes of behaviour that the breathless member for Melbourne spoke about. We are starting to see Australian industry move offshore. For instance, about 100 tonnes of concrete are needed to secure each of the wind turbines which are supposedly going to generate all our power. But guess where that concrete is going to come from. It is not going to come from the plant in central New South Wales at Kandos, because, due to the uncertainty over the economy and due to the price of carbon, it has closed—cement is a triple emitter.

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