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

You were better off when you were the Attorney-General rather than the guy who is pretending to be! 'Assistance', yes, well, they certainly needed it. They talked about assistance for households—fine, I am happy to do that. When you take with one hand you certainly need to give something back with the other. They made it possible for the bigger businesses to get government money to change the way they did things.

I said at the start that there are something like 13,000 small businesses in the seat of Calare. There are hundreds of thousands of Australians but not one cent goes to the biggest employer in Australia—small business—who, without exception, unless they did not use electricity or did not use gas or did not use trains or transport, did not receive one red cent. They were hurt deliberately, although it was probably ignorance—even the shadow Attorney-General would probably agree that there was some ignorance involved here because, when it comes to businesses, there is an awful lot of ignorance on that side.

Small businesses were hurt more than anyone with absolutely no outlet to improve what they did, without any reparations for the damage done to them. We are very proud of what we do in Calare. I always say that we are that part of Australia where we do not talk about what we do, where we do not shuffle paper, do not have huge law firms like the ones I am sure the shadow Attorney-General is involved with. We are not involved in those things that actually do not produce money. In Calare we grow things; we mine things; we make things and generate power.

Regional Australia has been and is hit far worse than any other part of Australia. Why? I will give one good reason: on the coast of Australia temperatures do not vary a great deal. Inland, they certainly do. In Calare, where it can get damn cold, they vary a lot. You can be in the middle of a 40-degree heatwave in the summer and it can be minus five in the winter, so we use a lot more air conditioning. We use a lot more heating than they do in Melbourne or Sydney or Brisbane.

Therefore, it costs us one heck of a lot more to pay for the carbon tax, which was designed by a government that thought the GFC was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Why is that? I do not suppose they actually wanted the world to be in chaos but what did it do? It created an excuse to borrow billions—hundreds of millions—of dollars to use on social programs.

I can imagine being in the Labor Party cabinet. 'Hey, boys! Did you realise the world is in so much chaos that we can borrow money and spend it on all those things we always wanted to do, which we've always pretended to be responsible about, but now we don't have to be.' And by God, they were not. Then came the point: 'We've got to be the leaders in cutting world pollution or carbon emissions so let's put in one of those things that the ex-Prime Minister of Great Britain said we were going to do anyway—let's make Margaret Thatcher's words come true. Yep, we are a socialist government. It worked quite well and we've run out of money so we will bring in a carbon tax—that will bring in a bit more—and at the same time we'll be world leaders in doing nothing.' Because it has done nothing.

I guess a lot of what I have said applies to most of Australia but whether it is western New South Wales or Queensland or wherever it might be, regional Australia has borne the brunt of this. Regional Australians are the ones who fire up the power stations. We are the ones who produce things like canola. All grain processing has become as dear as hell because it does use a lot of energy. However, it is very hard to have bread or anything else without it. It is a fact of life. So we will keep doing what we do but we are going to do it with a government that is going to kick this act right out of the football field.

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