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

$600 billion! Power bills up 78 per cent, thousands of jobs lost, economic growth shattered—that is their policy in a nutshell, using their own modelling from their own Treasury at the very time they were in government. This was not our modelling; this was their modelling of their policy of their time in government. So if they come back, electricity prices go up, gas prices go up, they fail to reduce emissions in any significant way and what they do do comes at an enormous cost. It is symbolism over real emissions reduction. It is phoney environmentalism. It is faux environmentalism.

It is about an approach which does not work, which increases electricity prices and which fits within the grand tradition of pink batts, green loans, a citizens assembly, cash for clunkers and a carbon tax that not one member opposite would support today. The great policy that they seem to champion does not have a single supporter, someone with the gumption to put their hand up. But we know that is what their plan is, because the shadow cabinet proposal was leaked.

What is their other policy? Their other policy is a 50 per cent renewable energy target. What was it that the member for Hunter said though when interviewed only recently on 26 July? He said, 'It's not a policy; it's an aspiration.' Today it was a policy, apparently. If it is a policy, let's see their costings. When asked how much it would cost, what did the member for Hunter say? 'No-one knows—that's the truth of it.' The member for Hunter can be a truth teller from time to time. He was truthful that no-one in the ALP knew. They had not done the work. They had made a statement. He thinks this is an aspiration. Do you know what? The environment department did calculate what that would cost, because we were interested if we were going to introduce such a policy. What was their figure? $85 billion—that is the cost of the policy.

Mr Butler interjecting—

Of course it is going to cost that. That is not in dispute. It is well within the bounds of the modelling that was also put out by Deloittes. We find that they had a carbon tax that no-one will support. They had a pink batts program of which they are rightly utterly ashamed. They had a green loans program, which was a catastrophe, and cash for clunkers and a citizens assembly that could not get off the ground, and they want to give us environmental advice. These people were not just phoney or faux environmentalists; they were environmental wreckers and a disaster.

When we came into office, we inherited the Great Barrier Reef on the World Heritage watch list and on track to be declared endangered. Do you know what the World Heritage Committee did? They took it away from the risk of endangerment. They took it off the watch list. They returned it to the full highest level, and the chair of the World Heritage Committee said in front of the world that, because of our response, Australia was a global role model. That is what this government has done: the Reef, we have reduced emissions—

See this speech in context