Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Action, Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

I support the motion. Let me start by saying that the reason this parliament needs to break and to visit the Australian people and to work with them is that, after today, we will face the results of a choice between the Prime Minister who gave us the pink batts program or the Prime Minister who gave us the carbon tax program. Let us look at what these two choices have given us and understand why we have to go to the Australian people, why we need to face the Australian people. And we should be facing them with an election immediately, whoever is finally given the poison chalice of the Labor leadership and the revolving door at 4.30 pm today.

There are 20 great failures which we have identified, which need to be discussed with the Australian people, in the climate and environment portfolio alone. The amazing thing is that, when you look at that list of 20 failures from this current government, 10 are from the member for Griffith and 10 are from the member for Lalor. They are equally bad. It does not matter who gets the conch, it does not matter who gets the nod, they are two failed prime ministers with a failed history in their own areas.

Let me run through 20 failures. Firstly, the carbon tax broken promise—that is a Gillard breach of faith. Let me remind the House of what the Prime Minister said before the last election. The day before the last election she said, 'I rule out a carbon tax.' Six days before the last election she said, 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead'—one of the more infamous statements in Australian parliamentary history. The carbon tax under the government she leads, which was voted for by every member of the current government, is a $36 billion tax. It is an electricity tax which was responsible for Australian families facing a 10 per cent average increase in electricity costs, after the GST is included, and for Australian manufacturers facing a 14½ per cent average increase in electricity costs. It was a tax created through a breach of faith and brought in in a way which damages the livelihoods of Australian families, Australian pensioners, Australian farmers, Australian small business owners and Australian manufacturers. That is the act of breach. That is the faith which has been broken and that is why, amongst many other reasons, we need this break from the parliament to take this matter to the Australian people.

I would also say that the grand irony of this broken promise is that Australia’s emissions go up, not down. Under the government’s own modelling, our emissions go up from 560 million tonnes to 637 million tonnes. What does that mean? It means it is all of the pain for no gain—not under our modelling, not as a consequence of our say so, but on the basis of the government’s own Treasury modelling. It was a broken promise, it causes pain and it does not even do its job. That is the first of the items.

The second of course is the home insulation program. It was linked to four tragedies. It was responsible for 224 house fires. It has seen 70,000 repairs. It cost more than $2.1 billion, of which more than half a billion dollars was to fix the roofs. That was the program that was delivered in defiance of 21 warnings by the now bidding-to-be-Prime Minister, the member for Griffith. When he was Prime Minister, there were 21 warnings—whether they were from the electrical and communications association, from the union itself, from state governments, from authorities—and I seek to table those 21 warnings to the government.

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