Russell Broadbent (Monash, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I feel I've passed this way before many times—many speeches. If you listen to the member for Jagajaga today, you'd say that the Safeguard Mechanism (Crediting) Amendment Bill 2022 is the greatest thing since sliced bread. If you listen to the member for Corio, you get the same message, but there were some underlying messages that came through to me as I listened to a number of the speeches today. And, while the member for Corio is still here, I thought her speech was very effective on behalf of her electorate, but then she said, 'We've got to support businesses so they're not affected.' Hang on! All of the press releases and all the information says that all of these businesses are going to be affected. It's just about how much they're affected.

My concern with the legislation is that we don't know how much they're going to be affected. We haven't got any idea. Nothing I've read in all the information tells me exactly what it's going to cost. Now, I know governments can't get everything right, Treasury doesn't get everything right and the climate group don't get everything right, but shouldn't there be some reasonable guide where I can tell my community what it's going to cost? There are 215 of these big organisations across Australia, and of course this will capture more as time goes on, because as a business grows, they come under this target. It says here in Chris Bowen's own press release—to the ABC, of course—you can't reduce production to reduce your emissions, otherwise people would have an incentive not to grow their business. He said, 'No, you can't do that; we won't count that. We're going to do a separate assessment of every organisation and then tell you what your 4.9 per cent target is.' Who's going to make the assessment, for heaven's sake? I'm simple; I come out of business. I just want to know what you're putting forward, and what it's saying here is we want to give business the heads-up on where we're headed as a nation. But this 'Federal government to lower emissions ceiling on biggest polluters by 4.9 per cent each year' is supported by all these people. It doesn't say how; it just says this is what we're going to do.

As you know, this type of legislation was introduced by a previous government, and in that previous government I saw people on the other side heavily criticising the legislation at the time. In fact there wasn't one speaker from the Labor side supporting the legislation that was brought forward then—not one. So we've done a complete reversal where they're totally supporting the same type of program, but instead of making it voluntary, where businesses could do their very best to reduce those emissions—we were getting there; there's proof in the pudding—now they're saying, 'We're making it mandatory because we're the government that makes things mandatory. If business doesn't do what it's told, we'll make it mandatory and we'll get all these senior business leaders to bow down before us—

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