Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Clean Energy Legislation (Carbon Tax Repeal) Bill 2013 and related bills. Firstly, today should be a great day for our democracy. Today is the day that we restore trust in government to the Australian people. We know that the Prime Minister, when he was opposition leader, made it very clear that if the coalition were successful and he was elected Prime Minister that the very first order of business would be to come into this chamber and to table legislation to repeal the carbon tax. That is the promise that the coalition took to the Australian people. We are here today delivering on that promise.

What concerns me the most about the debate on the carbon tax is that I think our country has never seen so many half-truths, so many misleading statements, and so many outright lies than it has over this carbon tax issue. We can all remember before the 2010 federal election, with the poll only a few days away, the then Prime Minister looked down the barrel of a camera and pledged hand on heart to the Australian people that there would be no carbon tax under a government that she led. It wasn't only the then Prime Minister; it was also the Treasurer. just days out from the 2010 federal election, the then Treasurer said: 'Certainly, what we reject is this hysterical allegation that somehow we are moving towards a carbon tax from the Liberals in their advertising. We certainly reject that.'

We all know the history; we all know the betrayal. We all know how the carbon tax was introduced as legislation and passed by this parliament and how the public have been burdened and businesses have been burdened with that for the last few years. Let's look at some of what the previous Labor government said during their term of government when the coalition announced that they would repeal this bill. The Prime Minister, Ms Gillard, claimed the coalition was not like Labor. She said, referring to the then opposition leader: 'It is all too difficult. It is all too hard. He cannot do it now.' Well, we are doing it. We are repealing the carbon tax. Then there was Labor's climate change minister. He declared that Tony Abbott 'cannot and will not repeal the carbon tax'. We can and we will and we are.

Then we move on to the most recent election. This is where I am very confused about the position that the opposition now are taking. I have some flyers from the last election. I have an election flyer here for the member for Moreton. It says: 'Kevin Rudd and Labor have removed the carbon tax.' This is before the election. There is also a shopper docket on the flyer that has a few things listed on it:

School expenses: reduced

Gala apples: $5.12

Eggs: $4.02

Carbon tax: abolished.

At the last election, only a few months ago, the Labor Party were handing out literature to the public, not claiming that they were going to repeal the carbon tax, but claiming they had actually removed it. Yet we have them coming into this parliament today, telling us they are not going to vote for the repeal of this legislation. And it is not only the member for Moreton. I have here another Labor flyer from the last election. This time authorised by Senator Louise Pratt. It says: 'Kevin Rudd and Labor removed the carbon tax.' This is not after the election—this is during the election campaign—that the current opposition claimed that they had removed the carbon tax.

There is even one here, printed in my electorate on Milperra Road in Revesby. Again it claims that the Rudd Labor government has removed the carbon tax, saving the average family $380. Again, there is this row, a nice little photograph, of a shopper docket which says: 'Carbon tax: abolished.' Yet here we have them coming into this parliament today opposing the very legislation that repeals it.

You become lost for words. What this Labor opposition wants to do is impose years of cost-of-living misery on the struggling Australian consumer, the struggling Australian family. Not only that; they want this carbon tax to increase and they want it to spread and grow larger. They actually wanted to extend this carbon tax to our transport sector on diesel fuel. This Labor opposition wants to punish every one of those hardworking truck drivers out there in our cities and our country towns doing interstate haulage, so that every time they go and fill up at a bowser, they will be paying the carbon tax, which will increase year after year after year.

What the Labor Party does not understand is that this tax acts as a reverse tariff; it puts Australian businesses at a competitive disadvantage. We want to see higher wages in this country. But the only way we can pay people higher wages, the only way people can earn higher wages, is if we are internationally competitive. And that is where the great flaw in this tax lies, because it punishes an Australian business that produces a good in Australia. When the very same article, the very same item, is made overseas, the carbon tax is avoided. So is it any wonder that the unemployment queues in this country became 200,000 people longer over the previous term of the Labor government?

The misleading statements just go on and on and on. Perhaps the most misleading claim we hear is that this carbon tax is somehow taking action on climate change. We need to learn from the mistakes of the past six years of the Labor government. We need in this place to be honest with the Australian public. We cannot mislead them as happened here for the last six years. We need to be honest with the public and we need to admit that even if the carbon tax was kept in place and it reduced our emissions—by, let's say 10 per cent, which is way above the numbers that this government has promised, and let's assume, let's look at, say, the IPCC's estimates of warming that say 3.3 degrees over the next century—by how much would this carbon tax reduce the temperature? That is the ultimate question. For a carbon tax to be effective, how much will it reduce the temperature? Those calculations are done.

If we were to have a carbon tax that reduced Australia's emissions by 10 per cent between now and 2050 we would reduce global temperatures by 0.0015—that is, 15 ten-thousandths of one degree. So members of the opposition cannot come into this parliament and claim they are taking strong action when the fact is that, even if it were effective and even if the IPCC's estimations of warming were on the upper limit, we would get a reduction of 0.015 of one degree by 2050.

The other thing that is very misleading in this debate is the claim that other countries are taking action and that Australia is not out on its own. Greg Sheridan thankfully detailed this in a recent article in the Australian. He went through some facts. There are 195 members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Only 34 of those countries have anything even resembling an emissions trading scheme. Twenty-seven of those are in the EU scheme. We hear much about how China has reduced its emissions. The facts are that in China there are just seven designated pilot projects and only one, just one single project, has begun operation in Shenzhen. Guess what? All the permits are given away for free. It has absolutely no effect on China's carbon dioxide emissions. The Chinese are simply laughing at us. We know that unless China has a mass rollout of nuclear power stations throughout that nation the Chinese emissions of carbon dioxide are going to continue to grow and grow over years to come.

Let us have a look at some other countries. Japan has effectively abandoned all plans for an ETS. Japan has no economy-wide carbon tax or ETS. Japan has recently announced it will increase its targets for CO2 emissions, not decrease them. It is the same across in South Korea. Yes, South Korea has a plan but it is issuing all permits for free in the first period. Let's talk about the USA. The USA has no carbon tax. It has no ETS and is unlikely to ever have one. We hear about California—where 90 per cent of the permits for electricity generation are given away for free. As for Canada, we know Canada has no ETS. Canada has no carbon tax. In fact, the Canadian government only last week issued a press release from the parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister, Paul Calandra. He said:

Canada applauds the decision by Prime Minister Abbott to introduce legislation to repeal Australia's carbon tax. The Australian Prime Minister's decision will be noticed around the world and sends an important message.

… … …

Our government knows that carbon taxes raise the price of everything, including gas, groceries and electricity.

… … …

Our government has reduced greenhouse gas emissions while protecting and creating Canadian jobs—greenhouse emissions are down since 2006, and we've created 1 million net new jobs since the recession—and we have done this without penalising Canadian families with a carbon tax.

I could go on. It is the same in India; it is the same in Indonesia: no carbon tax, no ETS. Then we move to comparisons with the European scheme. We know that the price is currently around $7. In its first five years, the European scheme intended to raise 500 million a year whereas our carbon tax aims to raise nine billion a year. So all of Europe, the entire continent of Europe combined imposes a cost of just one-eighteenth of the cost we here in Australia are imposing on ourselves. That is the massive absurdity of this tax.

In the remaining time, I would like to look at the opposition's proposals to have an ETS scheme. What this actually does is sell out our national sovereignty. If we are to link the price of our carbon tax to the EU scheme, we will be allowing European beauracrats to set the price of the tax paid by Australian citizens, so the electors in my electorate of Hughes will not have the rate of the carbon tax that they pay decided by myself or by other members of the Australian parliament. We will be subcontracting those decisions out to unelected beauracrats in Brussels. We should support this carbon tax repeal. It must be repealed urgently.

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