Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

The member for McMahon; I'm not quite sure what his job is at times. This is the issue. The safeguard mechanism is just an anachronistic approach that somehow you create something by taxing it. The whole purpose of taxing something is it becomes a disincentive. Then we've got the next thing, the credit offsets. Where does this go? Obviously if you're getting credit offsets you're going to farmland, you're going to other areas and you're going to turn them into carbon sinks. I don't know how that works unless we're going to evolve to a higher form of termite. As we move farmland to basically carbon sinks, how does the land operate? How do we get a return off it? What do we do with that? You haven't got cattle, you haven't got sheep and you haven't got farming; you've got trees—trees you can't cut down; you have to stare at them. That apparently gives a sense of moral righteousness; there they are. Somehow in this absurd equation you've got to say, 'That works, but what happens if there's a bushfire and the forest burns down. Do we have to buy more offsets?' How does this crazy equation work?

They prefer all the nuances, complexities and craziness of this safeguard mechanism over trying, alternatively, to say, 'Hang on, if we're building nuclear submarines and we actually believe small modular reactors work in nuclear submarines'—imagine when these nuclear submarines come into port. What happens if they turn on a light and light up the port? That's nuclear power. We're going to rush off to the nuclear submarine and say, 'You must now turn off all your lights, because we don't want nuclear power in Australia. You can park your sub here, but you can't have any lights on at the dock. Don't run an extension cord off there or anything like that, because we don't allow nuclear power in Australia, although we have a nuclear submarine with highly enriched uranium in the port.' If you can explain that one to me, Deputy Speaker, you're a better man than I am.

I would humbly suggest if you're going to have nuclear submarines then you start by trying to catch up with the rest of the world on the development of small modular reactors so you can actually have a nuclear industry that employees Australians and pays them large amounts of money. I'll make a prediction to you. Since the rest of the world—as I said, Hitachi, Skoda, Rolls-Royce, Westinghouse, General Electric, myriads of Chinese companies, New Scale, Ontario power companies—are all developing small modular reactors and now even developing microreactors, which are about the size of two coffee tables, smaller than this table in front of us, I reckon in about 2050 they're going to be around. You're going to see them on Pacific islands. They're going to be everywhere.

Somebody will have made them, and that somebody, because it's up to 20 megawatts—that's 20,000 people, just so you know, as a rough calibration—is going to make a bucketload of money out of making them. But you know where they're going to be? The person who makes the money out of them is going to be in the United States of America, England, France, China, Russia, Canada, Argentina and Scandinavia. But they're not going to be in Adelaide, because we were changing the temperature of the globe singlehandedly with a safeguard mechanism. That's how we're going to do it: the safeguard mechanism—a new tax. In closing I say be very careful of a parliament that takes days, possibly a week, to change a flag on top of it, believing it has the capacity to change the temperature of the globe by a new tax.

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