Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

and we heard it here first. It is no longer opposition policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by five per cent. It is no longer their policy. Let's talk about what used to be their policy until you heard this announcement first today in the House of Representatives. It used to be opposition policy until about a minute ago that they would also meet the targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. How are they going to do it? They are going to do it through the tax system. They say that they are going to do it by direct investment, by picking winners. They are going to go out to industry, they are going to pick winners and they are going to pour billions of dollars of taxpayers' money into picking those winners. They cannot tell us how much it is going to cost to reach the five per cent reduction target. But you know what? We have done the numbers. We know those across the chamber cannot actually add up but we have done the numbers of how much is actually going to cost them to meet their five per cent reduction target and guess what? It will cost every household in Australia $1,300.

We had a few cameos from the shadow minister opposite and I actually wanted to share a cameo of my own with colleagues. We have a typical middle-income family—I actually do not think that $160,000 a year is a typical family income so here is a family income that I think is a little more typical—mum, dad and three children aged four, seven and nine. Dad is earning $52½ thousand a year, mum is working part time earning $17½ thousand a year which gives a total of $75,000 a year family income. They will get $332 extra in government payments and a $982 tax cut. They will receive around $1,300 in carbon price assistance under our plan. The same family will pay $1,300 to the big polluters under the opposition's plan. So this family, even after any impact of carbon pricing on their cost of living, will be more than $700 a year better off. With that $700 they could invest in more energy efficient appliances—maybe replace their heater or the hot water system—and bring their electricity costs down some more.

There is something that I want to share with you about electricity prices. The shadow minister talks about the price of electricity going up—and it is quite shocking how much the price of electricity has been going up in some of the states and territories. The carbon pricing legislation has not been introduced yet. Could it be that the state and territory governments are not running their electricity systems as well as they should be and that those price effects are affecting ordinary working Australians? Could it be that this is not a pre-emptive price increase related to the carbon tax?

I think that it is important to put on the public record the fact that our economy and jobs will continue to grow strongly under these clean energy bills. We estimate 1.6 million more jobs will be created by 2020. Treasury modelling shows that average incomes will continue to rise and they will be around $9,000 higher in 2020 and around $30,000 higher in 2050. Would you ever hear that from the opposition? No; they are in the business of going around and scaring the daylights out of people.

It is also worth having a look, I think, at the average price impact on an ordinary family. Independent Treasury modelling shows that pricing carbon pollution is expected to have a 0.7 per cent impact on the price of living. That is less than 1c for every dollar spent—not even 1c for every dollar spent. The shadow minister was here when the Howard government introduced a GST. What impact did the GST have on the price of living? The GST had a 2½ per cent impact on the price of living—more than three times the impact that pricing carbon is likely to have.

So when this 0.7 per cent impact happens after 1 July—which, mind you, is after the time that people have received their lump sums to help with the price impact—what will the price of Weet-Bix increase by? It will increase by 0.00024c per Weet-Bix. An $11 packet of mince will rise by 4c. A $3.75 fillet of ocean trout will increase by 1½c. The shadow minister was banging on about the price of a loaf of bread. Let us look at how much a loaf of bread will increase. I was going to say 'rise' but that would have been a bad joke, wouldn't it?

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