Luke Simpkins (Cowan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I do welcome the chance to speak on the Clean Energy Legislation (Carbon Tax Repeal) Bill 2013 because I have always been against the carbon tax and I have always been against an emissions trading system, especially where the world does not operate an ETS and there is nothing that would not see Australia disadvantaged. What I am absolutely certain about is that there will never be a consensus on an ETS and there will never be a worldwide or comprehensive agreement on an ETS. If it could not be done with trade talks, it will not be done with a taxation and wealth redistribution scheme.

As the Prime Minister has said, the Labor-Greens carbon tax is socialism masquerading as environmentalism and its time is over. We have always said we were against the carbon tax. We are against it because of the way it was imposed upon the Australian people and we are against it because it is not in the interests of any Australian out there beyond this building. It was not and is not helping the lives of the people in Girrawheen, Woodvale, Ballajura, Warwick or any one of the 25 suburbs of Cowan. It does not help the people or businesses of Australia and it works against the retention of jobs in this country, at least the private enterprise jobs anyway.

We have always been against it and always said we would repeal it as a matter of urgency. That is a point not lost on my constituents, and I have fielded many questions about that in the last four years. A fairly persistent question was 'How would it be done?', and while people wanted it gone, there was a concern that it could even be done. But what we know is that if it was put in it can be taken out, and the legislation we are considering will do exactly that.

The Clean Energy Act 2011 and five associated charges acts will be repealed. The ACCC, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, will be used to enforce the changes. Prices will be monitored and enforcement will take place to ensure that prices will fall because there will be no carbon-specific price exploitation. The bottom line is that when prices went up due to the Labor Party's carbon tax, prices will come off in the same way, and the ACCC will be there to enforce those changes.

The industry assistance schemes put in place to return some of the money taken from certain industries in programs such as the Jobs and Competitive Program, the Energy Security Fund and the Steel Transformation Plan will be abolished from 1 July 2014. I also look forward to the abolition of the Climate Change Authority and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, delivered through the repeals of the Climate Change Authority Act 2011 and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation Act 2012. I also welcome the reduction of future appropriations for the Australian Renewable Energy Agency delivered through amendments to the Australian Renewable Energy Agency Act 2011.

Of course when we take this tax off, the compensation comes off as well. The former government was so interested in popular politics that they put this carbon tax in place to change behaviour and then compensated so that behaviour did not need to change. Therefore the income tax cuts put in place to compensate for the carbon tax will not be needed from 1 July 2015.

The carbon tax currently stands at $24.15 and will rise to $25.40 from 1 July 2014. If Labor stands in the way of lower prices then every Australian will continue to be hit by the effects of the Labor-Green carbon tax, and they will be hit again from 1 July 2014 with that tax lifting. I would also like to note that at the introduction of their carbon tax legislation, Labor spent millions of dollars of taxpayer funds to advertise how fantastic it was going to be and then just over 100 days later proposed major structural changes on top of the eight changes already undergone to this, their fantastic tax. It is no wonder that the Australian people felt so strongly about voting in the Liberal Party and the coalition, who had stated that they are 100 per cent committed to repealing the carbon tax.

There can be no doubt that the repeal of Labor's carbon tax was at the very centre of our policy platform. It was clear what we stood for and in that context the coalition won 90 seats out of 150 seats. That is what we call the will of the people being clearly stated. As the Prime Minister said before the election, the first bill introduced would be the repeal of the carbon tax—and it was. What a contrast to those on the other side; we say we will do something before the election and then do exactly that after the election. The contrast being with Labor at the 2010 election, where the then Prime Minister said, 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead'.

Of course, a similar thing did occur, again by Labor at the latest election. Senator Pratt of the Labor Party sent out a flyer into my electorate of Cowan with the headline of 'Carbon tax: abolished. Kevin Rudd and Labor have removed the carbon tax.' This, of course, was not true, but clearly an indication that in electoral trouble, Labor wanted to distance itself from its own policy.

Unlike the Labor Party, which went to the 2010 election promising that there will be no carbon tax only to introduce one after the election, we are committed to delivering on the commitments that we took to the last election. Leaving aside political history in this country, the bottom line is that we said we would get rid of the carbon tax and we will. We are the only political side that can be trusted. It is clearly the will of the people that we do so and, despite the viewpoint of the fringe extreme Left, the Greens and elements of the Labor Party, the clear majority of Australians have spoken. Despite others trying to be noisy, they are merely a minority viewpoint.

The reason that there is a majority view on this issue is also somewhat obvious. We know that there has not been any real warming of the planet since 1998, and up until a few years ago the drought in the Eastern States provided such convenient images of dry, parched and cracked earth, sheep or cattle on fields without grass and the Murray River looking particularly low. It certainly made for good imagery, but then the floods and the end of the drought reduced the credibility of the extremism. Australians began to see once again what was happening as cyclical, and the main issues of concern came back to areas such as cost of living, national security and other more immediate concerns. I do not think that it is that complex to see why public opinion shifted in this area.

The trouble with the stock standard tactics of the Left is that speaking in dramatic, extreme and shocking terminologies is nothing more than of short-term political benefit. Yes, concern is raised and people are motivated, but as time goes on the apocalypse does not actually arrive and the signs of the end of days do not seem to be particularly ominous. This is despite the Greens still pushing their wagon. To try to keep up the alarmism they keep trying to attribute bushfires or even typhoons to climate change. The point is that the climate change card has been overplayed and the Australian people are increasingly sceptical. The result is now that other issues have become more important and the carbon tax is now more a cost of living issue, particularly when the previous government's own modelling showed that our emissions will rise in 2010 from 560 million tonnes to 637 million tonnes in 2020.

I often wonder whether those on the other side—Labor and the Greens—think the Australian people are stupid. The fact is that the people in this country can see through such policies. They do not see the apocalyptic prophesies coming true but they do see their cost of living rising for no benefit. They are smarter than Labor and the Greens think they are and this has resulted in those on the other side wondering why the majority of Australians have swung against them. I can just imagine those responsible for the Labor and Greens election reviews scratching their heads, wondering what happened and why everything went so badly. Well, to help with the analysis: the Australian people are smarter than they were given credit for, and do not fall for the cheap politics that Labor has tried to play.

The Labor-Green opposition to our repeal of the carbon tax today is in defiance of the will of the people, and the defiance of that will is pretty arrogant. It is saying to the majority of the Australian people, 'You don't know what is good for you, and only the Labor Party and the Greens do'. That is wrong, and if Labor and the Greens block the will of the people here, the extra power and utility bills, and the extra prices that flow down correspondingly to the prices of goods and services for every Australian, will be entirely the fault of those who sit opposite, and the people will know it.

It would be wrong of me not to talk a little about the vested interests that stand behind and in support of the previous government. Of course, every university department or NGO with 'climate change' in their name knows that an increasingly dubious Australia or world is a risk to their jobs and their funding. At the UN climate talks in Warsaw, in defence of their position and funding sources, NGOs tried to embarrass the government by awarding Australia 'fossil of the day' awards. Sensing a threat to the bucket of money, they rushed to the defence of their self-interest. Apparently you were given these awards if you disagreed with these non-elected environmental group NGOs. If you do not want to give them money or redistribute wealth then they call you names. But, as I said, fringe left-wing groups are increasingly being seen as self-interested parties. Even some business groups that were in Warsaw are looking to make money from carbon prices and trading and therefore are also concerned that the Australian government and the people have decided that we are not going to help them make that money and we are not going to fritter away the taxpayers' money.

I am proud to be a member of this Abbott-led coalition government, particularly so when we send just a handful of diplomats to Warsaw, in such fine contrast to the delegation of over 100 for former Prime Minister Rudd's attendance at the utterly ineffective Copenhagen conference—the conference at which he, as Miranda Devine put it:

… staked the nation's entire prestige, and indeed alleged future survival, on the outcome of the global climate talks that he, singlehandedly, was going to guide, thanks to his Mandarin-speaking rapport with the Chinese.

Lo and behold, he was treated as an irrelevant joke in Copenhagen, and the talks were the flop every sensible person had predicted.

In what those on the other side would be better placed to judge, he 'flew into a narcissistic rage' and used terms and phrases that cannot be repeated.

As I have said many times before, I am no adherent to the theory of anthropogenic climate change. But, regardless of my viewpoint, what has changed in the political environment is that the people have moved on. The drought, the parched earth, the Murray-Darling river system problems, together with Al Gore's fictional movie An Inconvenient Truth, served to scare and alarm people. But the apocalyptic scenarios by Gore, Flannery and others, whose livelihood began to depend on the promulgation of fear, began to evaporate when there was so much water in Warragamba Dam that flooding became an issue. That is the problem, as I have already stated: when you talk up the situation in grand and terrifying terms, the whole campaign begins to fall apart when the people see the exact opposite of what you predict. I think a fair few people probably still have concerns about global warming, but when they see empirical evidence contrary to the predictions of those with vested interests they too begin to question whether the Labor Party's plans to hurt the Australian economy with a money-churning carbon tax are actually worth it.

I also note that the outgoing Future Fund chairman, David Murray, who last year described Labor's carbon tax as 'the worst piece of economic reform I have ever seen in my life', last week added to his comment by saying that 'the climate problem is overstated' and suggesting there had been a 'breakdown in integrity in the science'. It is interesting that there are other business leaders who are now brave enough to come out of the woodwork to voice similar opinions when they were not there years ago. As was rightly stated in a recent article in The Daily Telegraph:

Already climate alarmists are seizing on this year's early bushfires to rev up another panic in the public mind, and will use a hot summer, or any unusual weather, to prosecute their case for a renewed jihad on cheap coal-fired electricity, which is, of course, the source of Australia's competitive advantage.

They are not troubled by the appalling illogic of their position, in which, even if Australia retreated to the Stone Age and reduced carbon dioxide emissions to zero, there would be precisely zero effect on bushfire behaviour or summer temperatures or sea levels.

The carbon tax is an economy-wide tax that is hurting Australian people and businesses. If the opposition continue to try and stop the repeal of the carbon tax they will personally be responsible for higher electricity prices for families, pensioners and businesses and for fewer jobs and a slower growing economy. This is the reality if they try to stop us from implementing our mandate to scrap the carbon tax.

The coalition are totally committed to our promise to scrap the carbon tax as swiftly as possible because scrapping the carbon tax is very important for Australia's future. Scrapping the carbon tax will help families and pensioners across Australia. It will help workers and businesses. It will help businesses across Australia because it will reduce the cost of doing business and it will help make the position of workers more secure. It will make jobs more secure because, of course, it will help businesses across the country to prosper. As the Minister for Finance has previously said, look no further than the former government's own economic modelling. The modelling released by the former government showed that, as a result of their carbon tax, our economy was going to grow by $1 trillion less, in 2012 dollars, between 2012 and 2050—a whopping $1 trillion of economic growth was taken out of our economy as a result of Labor's carbon tax.

It must not be underestimated that repealing the carbon tax also delivers on a clear and emphatic commitment that we took to the last election. Unlike the Labor Party, we stick to the commitments that we take to an election after that election. By delivering on this election commitment we are enacting the will of Australians all over the country. As I often say when I visit students at schools within my electorate of Cowan, both sides of parliament believe in making the country the best is can be; where we differ is on what is the best way to achieve this. To this effect, both sides agreed on the target of a five per cent emissions reduction by 2020 but were divided over the means to achieve it. However, let us keep in mind that at the election Australians, when faced with a choice, made that choice. It is clear that they had faith in our policy to repeal the carbon tax and faith in the vision we had for environmental action. The fact that the Greens and Labor are now stunned by that choice is a problem for our political opponents, not for us, but if they reject the will of the people that will remain a problem for them way into the future.

See this speech in context