Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for his question. He, like all of us on this side of the House, is focused on reducing emissions whilst maintaining a strong economy. We are absolutely focused on meeting and beating our targets. We have strong targets, we have a clear plan and we have an enviable track record. We expect to beat our Kyoto 2020 targets by 411 million tonnes. To put that in perspective, that's almost a year's worth of emissions we'll beat our 2020 targets by. We have strong 2030 targets that imply a reduction of emissions per capita by 50 per cent. Already we've laid out in our plans how we're going to meet and beat those 2030 targets. Central to that is the $3½ billion Climate Solutions Fund and state deals like the New South Wales deal I just talked about.

The pathway to meaningful emissions reduction both before 2030 and beyond is the development and deployment of commercial technologies which strengthen the economy and don't weaken it, which reduce emissions whilst creating jobs. That's why last year at COAG, just before Christmas, we announced, alongside all state and territory governments, our National Hydrogen Strategy. Soon afterwards we committed over $500 million to that strategy. That includes projects like the Latrobe Valley Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain, in itself a $500 million project. We've committed $50 million to get that export supply chain in place for the future not just to reduce emissions in Australia but to reduce emissions around the world. We'll shortly release our technology investment road map, because our focus is on technology, not taxes.

There is an alternative, which is to tax Australians more. We have a real world example of what happens when you try to tax Australians more. It was the carbon tax those opposite had in place before they lost government. I have here a document, which is the projections from 2012 of what Labor—

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