John Cobb (Calare, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Clean Energy Legislation (Carbon Tax Repeal) Bill 2013 and related bills. Like a lot of Australia, my electorate of Calare has farmers of wheat, cattle and sheep. People there do various types of horticulture very well. There is cold storage. Calare also has power generation, timber growing and processing, and dairy farming. We have any number of small businesses—some 13,000, I think—including hairdressers, coffee shops, restaurants and grain processors. Every one of these enterprises, particularly the small businesses, has suffered because of the carbon tax. I just heard the member for Lingiari say that, faced with the choice of doing nothing or doing something, Labor would always do something. In this case, Labor decided to make a hard job harder, and I mean seriously harder. A hairdresser or a coffee shop with a $10,000 electricity bill, which is maybe around what it is, had to pay another $1,000 a year because Labor wanted to lead the world. It wanted to lead the world, when the world was not willing to follow. It wanted to lead the world to make its own country less competitive, both domestically against imports and overseas against competitors. We are talking not just an odd bob or two; we are talking very serious reality, at a time when Australian manufacturing and food processing is struggling like never before—partly, it is true, not just because of the carbon tax but because of everything the previous government did over the last six years to make the costs of doing business more expensive. But the most obvious, the most drastic and the most immediate and unavoidable was without doubt the carbon tax.

I can quote endlessly on the costs of it. I will touch on a couple. I know two people in my electorate in the town of Manildra who are canola processes. The thing that the previous Rudd-Gillard governments never understood is that a small percentage of turnover can be a huge percentage of profit. The carbon tax wasn't even based on profit; it was based on turnover, it was based on an emissions. It had no relevance to whether you were making a quid or not, and if you were not making a quid you were in serious trouble. If you are not making a quid, every job you support, your town and your whole system is in chaos. That is what they created without the knowledge or the understanding of what they were doing—except their Prime Minister could stand on the world stage and say, 'We are leaders.' Leaders of what? Not leaders of anything successful, not leaders of anything that was measurable, not leaders of anything. We all believe in dealing with pollution. I fail to see we do not call it 'pollution'; it is always 'carbon emissions', not 'pollution'. I believe totally in being sensible about pollution. I have never been, nor am I ever likely to be, called a greenie. However, I have bores on my country—

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