Colin Boyce (Flynn, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution on the Safeguard Mechanism (Crediting) Amendment Bill 2022. I would like to make a comment on the previous member's contribution, and that is that all of the speakers from the other side that I've heard do not qualify or quantify the effects or the results of what they're proposing with this legislation. And the results will be enormous. They will be huge. None of them understand where they're going with it.

Basically the safety net mechanism is a tax—that's what it is—a carbon tax. If the Labor Party is good at one thing, it's imposing tax on our businesses, on our industries, on the Australian people. They're proposing to implement a 10 per cent increase on the transport industry through fuel excise increases and registration increases. There have been proposals on a superannuation tax on single-entity self-managed funds. There's also a franking credit tax. They are very good at imposing taxes. In respect of the safety net mechanism, in my electorate of Flynn there are 18 businesses that will be directly affected, those businesses emitting over 100,000 tonnes of carbon. In my neighbouring electorate of Capricornia there are 28 businesses, so of all of the businesses approximately 30 per cent are in Central Queensland. They are all related to heavy industry: to the coal industry, to the power generation sector, to the alumina sector, to the gas sector, to everything that generates income for the economy of Australia, and the ramifications are huge.

The ramifications of this tax have not been quantified by those opposite, and they don't know how to do so because they don't know where they're going with it. I have spoken to many of the proponents that are involved—not all of them—and one thread in the conversations that I had with them is common: where are we going to get the carbon offsets from, and how much are they going to cost us? There is a $75 cap on the price of carbon, and there is a $275 impost if they can't meet those carbon offsets of five per cent every year from now to 2030. The reality is they don't really know where they are going. They don't know how much it's going to cost them. They don't know how much in carbon offsets is available.

The member for Hinkler has rightly pointed out that they're looking at agriculture, to buy up agricultural land all over Australia, millions of hectares of productive agricultural land, to look for carbon offsets. There are other proposals—carbon sequestration, for example—and there is a proposal that I'm sure many are not aware of, and that is that Glencore, the largest coalminer in Australia, inject liquefied CO2 hypercritical fluid into the water aquifers of the Great Artesian Basin. They have a trial site at Moonie, near me in Darra, in the western Darling Downs. According to their papers, the test project they're proposing will cause 266,368 tonnes of carbon dioxide. They are proposing to inject 330,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the Great Artesian Basin test site, for a net yield of 57,000 tonnes. They also say in their technical water report that any injection site that they have and a zone around it will effectively render that water source useless. They say in their technical water report:

Future users should not be allowed to take groundwater supply from the zone impacted by the plume (Precipice Sandstone aquifer). This should include a zone around the impacted area from which water might be extracted by a well installed outside of the immediate residual impact zone.

They also say in their report that the waste is likely to result in the deterioration of the environmental values of the receding groundwater, so they are admitting that they cannot meet the environmental standards. What they are proposing in Queensland is to change the EP regulations to allow them to do this.

The problem I have with that is that, if those environmental regulations are changed—and I am talking about section 41(2C) of the regulations—that would open the gate for anybody and everybody to do the same thing. There are 215 companies that emit over 100,000 tonnes of carbon, and it is difficult to identify where these carbon offsets are going to come from and how much they are going to cost these companies if they can't meet those regulations imposed by this safety net mechanism. They will possibly look to carbon sequestration technology, and if those EP regulations are changed it will have an enormous effect on the greatest water source on the planet. The Great Artesian Basin is unique. It is one of a kind; there is only one of them. It's the same as the Great Barrier Reef. It is the outback's Great Barrier Reef. It is estimated to carry 65,000 cubic kilometres of fresh water. It covers 22 per cent of the area of Australia over four states. It covers 71 per cent of the area of Queensland, and it is the lifeblood of agricultural Australia. I am vehemently against anybody putting liquefied hypercritical fluid into the waters of the Great Artesian Basin. If I can borrow from Macbeth, 'They shall hack the flesh from my bones before I give up on this issue.' It's not happening on my watch.

There are other issues in respect of this safety net mechanism, and that's the hypocrisy that surrounds the whole thing. Why is the renewable energy industry not included in this safety net mechanism? Everybody thinks that as we move to the future and achieve 43 per cent carbon emissions, we're going to rely on wind farms, solar farms and alternative energy sources for our power. They are under some delusional idea that none of these industries create carbon. Well, they do. There's concrete, there's steel, there are plastics; there are all sorts of things. The member for Brisbane, in his contribution, wants to turn away from all of these fossil fuels. How on earth are you going to feed the world if you don't have gas to make fertiliser? If you do not have the hydrocarbons, petroleum and oil industries, how do you create plastic? The steel and cement industries, which give us our homes, buildings and roads, are all reliant on the fossil fuel industry. One thing about the Greens' arguments in all of these debates is that they have no alternative whatsoever as to how they're going to solve these problems, if indeed we were to do that.

One other thing that I would like to touch on is a synthetic gas that the renewables and energy sectors use, called SF6 sulphur hexafluoride, and it has been identified as being 23,900 times more potent than CO2 in the atmosphere. In Europe, in 2017, it was estimated that the leakage of SF6 was equivalent to the burning of 100 million tons of coal. SF6 is used by the electrical industry as an inert gas in switching gear in electric vehicles, wind turbines and all of these things. So I have a question for Mr Bowen in respect of reaching 43 per cent carbon emissions and the fact that he wants to install 40 wind turbines every month between now and 2030, 22,000 solar panels every day between now and 2030, and 28,000 kilometres of high voltage powerlines between now and 2030 to achieve their 43 per cent emissions target. How much of this SF6 sulphur hexafluoride is going to be used, and how much of it will leak into the atmosphere? One kilo of sulphur hexafluoride is equivalent to 23,900 kilos of carbon dioxide. Australia produces somewhere in the vicinity of one per cent of world carbon emissions, so what are we actually achieving by implementing this policy? That's where I'm going with this; it doesn't make sense to me. If carbon dioxide is such a terrible gas, why is it that, in a recent meeting with Glencore, CTSCo and the Clean Energy Council, Glencore said to me that their biggest client for compressed carbon dioxide is Coca-Cola? We're putting it into soft drink. We're putting it into beer. What is so dangerous about carbon dioxide?

One of the other issues is that before the election the Labor Party promised that no coalmine would be impacted by these policies. Obviously, that's not correct. I would say to the coalminers and the resource-sector workers in my electorate of Flynn: be mindful of the Labor Party. They do not support your industries, and they're after your jobs, and that's exactly what will happen, and the AWU recognises this. They want to implement import duties on all imported goods because they know this is going to cost jobs. They know that these costs that these big companies incur will be passed on. So I cannot support this bill the way it is, and I would like to hear from those opposite as to how they can qualify the net results of where they're going with the implementation of this bill.

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