David Bradbury (Lindsay, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer ) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Wakefield for his question. Pricing carbon is the cheapest and most efficient way of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and tackling the challenge of climate change. It is a significant economic reform that will drive investment in clean energy and will help cut greenhouse gas emissions by 160 million tonnes in 2020. That is the equivalent of the emissions generated by 45 million cars. At the same time, by 2020 our economy is projected to grow by around one-third, with 1.6 million new jobs being created and average incomes rising by around $9,000 per person. Because we are a Labor government we are determined to implement this important change in a way that ensures we look after hard-working Australians. That is why we are increasing payments to families, pensioners and eligible self-funded retirees. That is why we are also providing tax relief to individuals and small businesses. That tax relief not only involves incentives like the instant asset write-off, but it also involves the tripling of the tax-free threshold.

We know that there is a lot of misleading information being spread out there about the carbon price but, for the record, the carbon price will have an average impact of 0.7 per cent, or less than one per cent. That is less than one cent in the dollar. This is less than one-third of the impact of the GST when it was introduced by the previous government. Today the ACCC has launched a new hotline and an online forum where Australians will have the opportunity to report businesses that they suspect are making false and misleading claims in relation to the carbon price. We know that most businesses will do the right thing, but rest assured that those businesses who jack up prices and falsely blame the carbon price will have the ACCC to deal with. The ACCC, of course, has the power to seek penalties of up to $1.1 million per contravention. While the government is out there trying to crack down on misleading claims, the Leader of the Opposition has been out there making a few of his own. Not only is he out there making misleading claims, he now thinks it is okay to encourage businesses to do the same. We all know he has been out there saying that price rises would be astronomical and that they would be unimaginable. He said that the coal industry would be killed off and that Whyalla would be wiped off the map. We have heard it all before from the Leader of the Opposition—first it was going to be a cobra strike, but now it is going to be a python squeeze. The only thing we can guarantee is that it would take a python to squeeze a few facts out of the Leader of the Opposition.

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