Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Hansard source

In moving this motion to extend the amount of time available for debating the carbon tax legislation, the Leader of the House has shown once again hypocrisy of the government in that it has a built-in guillotine for the vote on these 19 bills while at the same time it pretends that it thinks there ought to be more time for debating the bills. The point made by the previous speaker was very sound. The point is that, when you get legislation which will have such a huge impact on people's lives, there ought to be proper time for scrutiny of those bills, which means that they should normally have been referred to the five specialist committees of the House and not the stitched-up kangaroo-court committee we have—which is dominated by Labor and the Greens—and that we should have been able to then reflect on the proper analysis that had been done by those five committees.

In the course of contemplating this motion I took the time to look at the agreement between the Australian Greens and the Australian Labor Party. Set out in this agreement between the Prime Minister and the Treasurer and Bob Brown, Christine Milne and Adam Brandt it says:

2. Principles

The Parties agree to work together to pursue the following principles:

(a) transparent and accountable government;

(b) improved process and integrity of parliament …

And yet these same Greens, who hold themselves up to be some sort of paragon, have agreed to a guillotine and are not allowing proper scrutiny of the bills that would be achieved, as I said, by them going to the appropriate specialty committees for proper analysis and report back to the parliament. In fact, what is happening is that the debate is being truncated and the bills will be sent off to a heavily biased committee which, no doubt, because of a lack of time that has been allowed for people to make submissions, will be very limited in truthfulness in its reporting of the way the Australian people feel.

On that point, it is quite interesting that only yesterday I met with a group of children from a school in my electorate. When we got to the question-and-answer time, the first question they asked was my opinion on the carbon tax. I explained to them why it was a bad tax, why it should not be introduced and how Australians would suffer at the hands of what is a cascading and compounding tax. I went on to explain how there were no exemptions from the tax because everybody uses electricity. At the end of my answer to that question, there was a huge round of applause from kids who are aged eight. In other words, there was a huge awareness of just how bad this tax is. Added to that is the fact that the timetable for allowing submissions to be made to the truncated committee, which will have at least the facade of conducting an inquiry, is structured such that people will not have time to prepare those submissions and make their point of view heard.

The point has been made by many speakers on this side, and very truthfully, that there is no mandate for this tax. On the contrary, there is a mandate for no tax. Everybody in this chamber except the member for Melbourne, the sole Greens member in this place, said there would be no carbon tax. We said we would not have a carbon tax and have said that all the way along. The Prime Minister, of course, said, 'There will be no carbon tax by any government I lead,' and the Treasurer said that it was all a beat-up by the opposition and there was no way there was going to be a carbon tax. This was deliberately said so that people would think, 'I guess we can vote for them because they are not going to introduce a carbon tax.' Had the Labor Party in fact said, 'Yes, we will have a carbon tax,' right down the barrel of the camera, as the Prime Minister chose to make her statement, I have no doubt there would be a different situation in this House today. We would be sitting on opposite sides and the Greens would not have all the influence that they have in demanding what policies go through.

In that same agreement between the Greens and the Australian Labor Party, there is a paragraph relating to the fact that the Greens will have their way and that a carbon tax will be put in place. The agreement also provides that the Greens will have access every week to the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and other ministers. It says that the Greens Treasury spokesperson and Mr Bandt will receive:

… economic and financial briefings from the Treasurer and the Minister for Finance and the Secretaries of the Departments of Treasury and Finance and Deregulation at regularly agreed times.

It is also interesting that this agreement—and it was pertinent to last night's debate, I suppose—says:

Should Senator Brown, Mr Bandt and other Greens … with portfolios, wish to propose new policies, these proposals may be formally submitted to the Office of the Prime Minister and forwarded to the appropriate Department and Minister for analysis. Where the proposal is likely to involve costs, it may also be sent to the Department of Treasury, and the Treasurer, and the Department of Finance … for costing.

This would obviously remain confidential, unlike what would happen should the opposition request that service. No wonder the Greens were prepared to go along with the government last night. They were in a secret agreement whereby they could have an advantage not available to the rest of the parliament, except, of course, for the government.

So, while we say that the Greens and the government agreed to 'transparent and accountable government' and 'improved process and integrity of parliament', what is happening with the debate on these bills is the exact opposite. It is a farce that these 19 bills are part of a cognate debate.

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