Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this matter of public importance. We have a crisis in this country. If you get out into your electorate and spend some time on the ground, which the previous speaker obviously does not, you will hear the tragedy of living in a country where the costs of doing business, the costs of trying to raise a family, the costs of trying to be educated have grown so high under Labor that, as I began by saying, we are now in a crisis in this country.

I never thought we would have sovereign risk in Australia. It was always our boast that, if you choose or chose to invest in this country, you could expect some stability in the tax regime or a lot of notice would be given if there were going to be changes to the costs of you doing business in this country, including the regulatory environment. But who could forget the shock of the mining sector when they discovered these new taxes—suddenly thrown into their midst without much notice at all and then negotiations with just a couple of the bigger operators. And these taxes have not even raised for the government the revenue they planned for. It is not just a case of the damage to our national and international reputation; so many of the mining companies are now thinking it looks pretty good in Brazil or in the African nations.

Let me talk about the manufacturing sector in this country and the extraordinary costs of energy, including refrigerant gases. If you have the sorts of rises in costs that I am about to enumerate for you, you actually lose jobs. My electorate of Murray has been so hard hit. We have lost half of our dairy farmers as a consequence of the absolutely shocking Murray-Darling Basin Plan, which did not take a triple bottom line approach at all but which was a captured process, with the Greens demanding the biggest possible volume of water to be thrown down the Murray River—and to hell with those who produced food—using their water security. So we lost half of our dairy farmers through the process of water buyback.

On top of that, let me tell you about the price increases of refrigerant gas as a consequence of the so-called equivalent carbon tax. These are real figures from real bills, real accounts from my electorate, which I will seek to table at the end of my remarks. So often when we ask questions at question time of the Prime Minister in particular about these horrendous carbon tax increases, she says: 'No, that's not true. That's about state infrastructure or it's about some other nonsense going on with the companies themselves.' These are actually itemised accounts which give you the carbon tax as a line item and the cost.

I will begin with the refrigerant gases. The R-22 refrigerant gas cost $56 in May 2012, plus GST. It has now gone up to $160. That is a 285 per cent increase. By the way, refrigerant gases are used in the dairy industry to cool the milk after you have milked the cows. These gases are used in cool stores so that fruit does not deteriorate after it is picked. Refrigerant gases are used in shops and supermarkets. These are very commonly used products. R404A is another very commonly used refrigerant gas. In May, it cost $44. After October, it cost $230 per unit. That is a 522 per cent increase. The gas R134A, in May 2012, cost $36. After October, it cost $112. That is a 311 per cent increase in the cost of refrigerant gases which are, as I say, a critical part of food preservation, of manufacturing and of selling products in shops that have not spoiled.

What about the electricity costs that have gone up? Unfortunately, food processing, which used to be the highest employer in this country, is now being decimated with almost a race to export not just the food but the companies themselves to New Zealand and other countries—our competitors. These countries do not have the imposts and costs that we have. Let us look at the electricity bills of the Mulcahy Pastoral estate, which are the biggest dairy farm in my region and, in fact, one of the biggest dairy producers in Australia. They actually value-add to their milk to make it a product they can deliver straight to the customer. This is a one-month electricity account of theirs and they have many such accounts across the enterprise. In August 2012, the cost of electricity for this particular part of their business was $7,069.97. The itemised carbon charge was $1,142.48. That is a 17.77 per cent increase in their electricity bill. Bear in mind that the GST is charged on the sum of their electricity charge, plus the carbon tax. So, for them, that is a 17.77 per cent increase in cost.

I have another bill—and, as I say, I will seek to table these with the itemised account—showing the carbon tax and a 20.06 per cent increase in their electricity charges. How can this pastoral company, this dairy farm, compete? How can it compete with New Zealand, which has a carbon tax equivalent charge of only 75c per tonne? How can we compete when our equivalent is $24.15 or 32 times higher than New Zealand's? And guess what? We compete head-on in the international export markets with their dairy products. How can our dairy producers compete with those costs around their necks? It is not fair. It means a loss of jobs in my part of the world. It means despair for farmers who have worked for generations to build up their herds and to build up the infrastructure on their properties. And what is killing them? Not drought, not pestilence and not plant disease. What is killing them is this Labor government's charges. That is disgusting when, of course, at the end of all of this we know that we not making one iota of difference to the greenhouse emissions around the planet. What a tragedy and what a travesty!

Let us look at child care. A previous speaker mentioned child care. If we do not have affordable child care in Australia, how does a mother return to work or how does a father participate in the workforce if he is sharing the parenting role with his wife. They are seeing their childcare costs rise by 30 or 40 per cent. We are told that with this new legislation, which was debated in the House this morning, we are going to see some $300 million go towards higher wages for some childcare workers, but not all of them. If less than half of the childcare workers are going to get a pay rise in some centres, obviously the rest of the childcare centres are going to have to put up their childcare fees in order to retain their staff. Who is going to pay? The mums and the dads—the single mums and the single dads who are trying to stay in the workforce. They simply cannot cope with higher childcare fees, yet this government brags: 'Hey, we've done a beautiful job in child care. We've brought in the fantastic new national standards accreditation scheme.' But the Australian Childcare Alliance are begging the government to delay the new regulations, which are supposed to begin on 1 January, because they say that, if no more money is provided by the government to parents and as well for more staff to be qualified, the whole system is going to collapse, particularly in the not-for-profit sector. They cannot go on with the sorts of fees and charges that they are trying to extract out of families through parents because the parents are often not paid enough to make it worth their while even to go back to work. I think this is disgusting.

The schools education minister, Peter Garrett, said no independent evidence was around 'to support claims of an impending shortage of early childhood education and care workers or a significant impact on childcare costs'. I suggest the minister had better get out more. He had better go and talk to some parents about the cost—often over $100 a day for child care.

What is blighting our productivity in this country? The fact is we have a very poor return to work rate for women after they have had their children. We have one of the lowest rates of women in the workforce in the developed world and yet we have some of the highest formally educated women of any country in the world. We have a shocking situation in Australia. Magnificent country that we are, we should be the envy of the world. In fact, we are the laughing stock of the world because we are taxing away, through the carbon tax and the carbon equivalent tax and the mining taxes, our natural competitive advantage. We are making our families fearful of the future and, in my area, we are killing an economy that was something to be envied by other parts of the world. It was the food bowl. As I speak there are bulldozers bulldozing hundreds of hectares of magnificent fruit trees because SPC Ardmona cannot compete any longer given their energy costs, their wages bill and the regulatory imposts that are now afflicting them. That is not fair. That is not honest. That is un-Australian. Bring on an election! (Time expired)

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