Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment) Share this | Hansard source

I am delighted to take head-on the party that produced pink batts, green loans, cash for clunkers, a citizens assembly and a carbon tax that not one member opposite would support today. We gave them the chance in the House of Representatives, the Parliament of Australia, to support their own carbon tax, and not one member had the gumption, the courage or the honesty to admit that it is something they support. If it was such a fabulous success, isn't there just one brave soul, one little soldier willing to put up their hand? If it was such a success, why isn't there one of you?

What do we know? We know that it came at a cost of $15.4 billion and that in a best-case scenario, for $15.4 billion, they might have seen 12 million tonnes reduce at an average cost of $1,300 per tonne of abatement. So what does this mean? It means that Australians were paying higher electricity prices, with electricity up by 10 per cent, and higher gas prices. When we repealed the carbon tax, we took away two years of a $15.4 billion tax hit. Do you know what it came with? They like to talk about payments. It came with a $5½ billion gift to brown coal generators. Is there one of you opposite who will say that you think that is a good idea, giving $5½ billion to the very people that you demonised?

When we came in, we abolished that gift and we abolished the tax and we reduced emissions through the Emissions Reduction Fund and we reduced the cost of electricity and we reduced the cost of gas and the cost of refrigerants. That is the reality of this debate. We are doing it with an approach of a reverse auction, which has its antecedents in the reverse auctions that we see in Brazil and in South Africa and the ACT. The World Bank have recently, shock horror, adopted a pilot auction facility almost identical to our Emissions Reduction Fund. Of all the systems in the world that they could have adopted, the World Bank have adopted a reverse auction mechanism for payment on delivery of emissions reduction to those who would put up projects under the clean development mechanism. In reality, they have adopted an emissions reduction fund of $100 million, paid for by the United States, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland using a mechanism almost identical to the one here, that is operating and working at reducing emissions in Australia.

So what happens if the ALP gets its way? What does it mean for the Australian people? I know I am not allowed to lift above the table this headline, but it is entitled 'The report Shorten did not want you to see: ALP $600 billion carbon bill'.

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