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

Yesterday we voted against a big, harsh, punitive, toxic tax which will implicate and impact on every family in this country. Unlike the goods and services tax, which the government likes to compare their carbon tax to, we took that tax to an election and asked the people for a mandate to implement it.

Before the election, the Prime Minister, who runs away from every censure motion like a coward, in fact said that there would be no carbon tax by any government she would lead. Six weeks after being elected, she announced we would have a carbon tax—not because she was intending to take it to the Australian people as we did with the goods and services tax, but because she had stitched up a deal where the Greens were very much part of her decision to implement this tax. She will hang onto power at any cost to the Australian people.

We have said that we will abolish that tax—and we will. The carbon tax is for the Labor Party what Work Choices was for us. The Labor Party said they would abolish Work Choices, and they did. We have said we will abolish their carbon tax, and we will. The important point to make is this: the carbon tax has no exemptions. It is a cascading and compounding tax which gets into the nook and cranny of every aspect of everybody's life.

The fact of the matter is that unlike the GST, which is a value added tax whereby with the tax that is paid on transactions between the creation of a good or service and its final consumption there is a refund of the tax paid. This carbon tax will have the tax paid at every transaction and it will be a tax paid on a tax paid on a tax paid on a tax. It compounds and it is cascading.

It will affect everybody every time they turn on a light switch, turn on air conditioning, buy ice cream at the supermarket, use the sewerage system, use the water system or get on a train. It will impact on every form of public transport. It is said that there is no carbon tax on petrol for the family car, but the tax will be the electricity that is used to run that petrol station. It is a tax on electricity because it is an artificial hike in the price in the energy source which produces electricity in this country for 90 per cent of our needs.

Coal fired power stations are the cheapest way of producing electricity. The market says so. The market has said this is the price. That is why so many other countries around the world want to buy our coal. It is because they too want to have cheap electricity. What this tax does is put an artificial domestic tariff on the cost of coal to force up its price to attempt to make other forms of energy sourcing competitive.

To call it a market based mechanism is to distort the language beyond belief, but the facts that we are seeing are that the government says that by its tax it will injure the Australian people; it will injure Australian families. It will particularly injure senior Australians because they are on fixed incomes, where the latitude for disposable income shrinks every time the cost of the essentials rises. Electricity, gas and food are all part of those essential costs.

The government, in its printed documentation, says that it will injure families to the tune of $9.90 a week. That is what their modelling shows. And then they come in with some other modelling and say, 'We will compensate you for the injury we cause you $10.10 a week.' Twenty cents is what this government, who cannot even get its projections on a budget accurate, says it can model down to for compensation to make you so-called 'better off'.

And that is on a price of $23 a tonne, but in fact it will rise to $29 a tonne and $36 a tonne. Ultimately it will go to $350 a tonne in 2050. It will require $3.5 billion to be spent overseas buying abatement certificates. That is $3.5 billion every year that will not be available in this country for manufacturing, retail or the jobs that Australians can normally expect would be created. By the time we get to 2050 it will be $57 billion annually. This is money that belongs in this country for our people. It is our obligation under our constitution to give the Australian people peace, welfare and good government. That is our responsibility—not to penalise people because the government of the day thinks that it somehow can create a tax which it says will then keep it in power.

If we look at how people are going to be affected, you heard my colleague the member for Menzies outline in his address examples—cameos—of families and how they will be impacted. They were not high fliers like the Minister for Social Inclusion. These were ordinary folks. She scoffed at them because they were a family who worked hard and could earn up to $160,000 a year. That is somehow outrageous, according to her. It could be a nurse and a policeman. It could be a teacher married to another teacher. It is ordinary families who are scoffed at as not counting by the minister for so-called 'inclusion'. If we are to be truly concerned about inclusion, which is where we come from, then everybody in our community is to be considered valuable and part of our community. Every opportunity should have the right and the opportunity to aspire to a better life, and it is our obligation to set the scene whereby through their hard work and their effort they can maximise the result of their hard work and their effort. It is not to be scoffed at by the minister for inclusion. I think she would probably be more aptly named the minister for exclusion.

But let us go back to what we did yesterday. On the vote on the second reading of the tax bills it was 74 to 73. When we went to the final vote we were missing one vote on our side because we had had somebody suspended for one day. But the fact of the matter is that, of the people who were elected in this chamber, all but the Green went to the last election saying there would be no carbon tax. The only way we can have any honesty in this place is for the government of the day to take this to an election and let the people speak. When the people came into this chamber yesterday, they were the people who the Leader of the House called 'the people of no consequence'. They were the people who came and showed their willingness to stand up for what they believe in. Let's have an election. (Time expired)

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