Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

In Canada, the province of British Columbia's carbon tax is around A$28. Those are the facts for the Leader of the Opposition. Of course, what he does not want people to recognise is that in South Korea they have just legislated to have an emissions trading scheme. California is moving to an emissions trading scheme. He does not want any of those facts recognised, because he wants to play his fear campaign. What he does not want recognised as well is that he stood alongside Prime Minister Howard in the 2007 election, when Prime Minister Howard promised that the emissions trading scheme that the Leader of the Opposition believed in then would be a world-class emissions trading scheme—more comprehensive, more rigorously grounded in economics and with better governance than anything in Europe—the platform he went to the 2007 election on.

Since then, what the Leader of the Opposition has done is to decide that his narrow political interest is best served by fear campaigning. The problem for the Leader of the Opposition is that whilst it has been easy to run around the country making all of these huge claims about carbon pricing, it is not going to be sustained when it happens on 1 July. When the sun sets on 1 July and people are still digging coal, when the sun sets on 1 July and the prices in the shops are not astronomical, when the sun sets on 1 July and power prices have not gone up by 30 per cent, when the sun sets on 1 July and you can happily walk down the streets of Whyalla, what is the Leader of the Opposition going to say? He will have been exposed before the whole Australian community as someone who has been on a campaign of deceit for month after month after month just in his naked political interest.

Opposition members interjecting—

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