Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to move the following motion:

That this House calls on the Prime Minister to be upfront with the Australian people and small business about the impact of his great big new tax by:

(a)

Accepting the challenge of the Leader of the Opposition to debate the so called “greatest moral challenge of our times”, namely the impact of climate change and the benefits of the Opposition’s policy of direct action on climate change rather than the Governments great big new tax on everything as envisaged by its Emissions Trading Scheme; and

(b)

Allowing the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition to be allocated thirty minutes each a total of one hour, to have that debate immediately in the House of Representatives.

Leave granted.

If this, as the Prime Minister says, is the greatest moral issue of our time, it deserves to be debated.

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before the Leader of the Opposition gets underway, could he move the motion formally and then we can get onto the debate suggested—

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House calls on the Prime Minister to be upfront with the Australian people and small business about the impact of his great big new tax by:

(a)

Accepting the challenge of the Leader of the Opposition to debate the so called “greatest moral challenge of our times”, namely the—

Government Members:

Government members interjecting—

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have been asked to move the motion and I am doing it.

Government Members:

Government members interjecting—

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—He was given leave!

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Leader of the Opposition will resume his seat. I understand that people are a little bit testy about this. I am trying to clarify where we are at. The Leader of the House.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We on this side of the House are just after some clarity. The opposition leader asked for leave to move a motion. We have granted that.

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, move it.

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In fairness to the Leader of the Opposition, I interrupted him. If leave has been granted for the motion to be debated with the time limits outlined by the Leader of the Opposition—that is, 30 minutes for two speakers—then that is now clarified. I call the Leader of the Opposition to move his motion. I apologise to the Leader of the Opposition.

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am moving that so much of the standing and—

Government Members:

Government members interjecting—

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is that the motion you want me to move? Let’s have the debate. Let’s have him speak for 30 minutes and then I will speak for 30 minutes. That is the debate we want. That is what you gave leave for. Come on, let’s have him speak for 30 minutes and I will speak for 30 minutes.

Honourable Members:

Honourable members interjecting—

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! To clarify, I will ask the Leader of the Opposition: when he rose to his feet, he sought leave to—

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I sought leave to move that this House calls on the Prime Minister to be upfront with the Australian people and small business about the impact of his great big new tax by, amongst other things, giving the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition 30 minutes each, a total of one hour, to have that debate immediately in the House of Representatives. That is what I moved. That is what has been accepted by the government. I now call on the Prime Minister to speak for 30 minutes on this topic.

Honourable Members:

Honourable members interjecting—

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! I will again seek clarification from the Leader of the House. I want to indicate to members that the standing orders allow one person to deny leave. I think that I need to clarify that there is general agreement about whether the leave that has been indicated is about the full proposal that was put by the Leader of the Opposition.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Leave is being granted for the Leader of the Opposition to move his motion. That is what I was asked to do. He can move his motion. That is what the standing orders allow for.

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is the problem that the chair has, because it would appear that there is a desire to proceed with a motion but there is not an agreement about the proposed time limits. Therefore, if the motion were moved, it would then be debated with the time limits for a general debate.

Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Come on, Prime Minister, stand up or not!

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The member for Dickson! The Manager of Opposition Business has the call.

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, for the sake of clarity, the Leader of the Opposition sought leave to move the motion, which is his proposition. We understood that proposition was being agreed to, but if that was not the case—which was unclear at the time—the Leader of the Opposition now simply seeks to move the motion as he read out to the House, in which case he would speak for 20 minutes, the seconder would speak for 15 minutes, et cetera.

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I think it would suit the convenience of the House that it be noted that leave was sought to move a motion and leave has been granted. I call the Leader of the Opposition.

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you. The motion that I am moving today calls on the Prime Minister to have the debate that he has been squibbing for so long. The change that the Prime Minister wants to impose upon this country—

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, the Leader of the Opposition still has not moved a motion. Can he move the motion and then we will debate it.

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, for the third time, I move:

That this House calls on the Prime Minister to be upfront with the Australian people and small business about the impact of his great big new tax by:

(a)

Accepting the challenge of the Leader of the Opposition to debate the so called “greatest moral challenge of our times”, namely the impact of climate change and the benefits of the Opposition’s policy of direct action on climate change rather than the Governments great big new tax on everything as envisaged by its Emissions Trading Scheme; and

(b)

Allowing the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition to be allocated thirty minutes each a total of one hour, to have that debate immediately in the House of Representatives.

14:59:32This is the motion that I move, and I am grateful for the government giving leave for it to be so moved. If this really is the greatest moral challenge of our time, why won’t the Prime Minister stand on his feet in this House—not tomorrow, not next week, but now—and defend his policy for 30 minutes?

Let there be no mistake about exactly what this government wants to do. What this government wants to do is to impose on the Australian people the greatest single policy induced change in Australia’s history. It is the greatest single policy induced change in Australian history, and this Prime Minister consistently squibs debate. He squibbed debate back in December on the grounds that the opposition allegedly had no policy. We now have a policy. It is a very good policy. It is a better policy than the government’s because it is a simpler, cheaper and more effective way of addressing this issue than anything this government can do.

But this Prime Minister will not debate the issue. Instead, he is into defaming people about what they may or may not have said—distorting what they said—at public meetings many months ago. I call on this Prime Minister to stop defaming people and to start governing. I call on this Prime Minister to stop quoting from 20-year-old masters theses and to start debating and defending a policy. I say to this Prime Minister, in the immortal words of his predecessor, Paul Keating: ‘If you don’t understand it, don’t vote for it, and if you do understand it, you would never vote for it.’ That is the spectre that is haunting this Prime Minister now.

All he had in his manifesto at the last election was about six lines on this subject. He is now demanding modelling, costing and chapter and verse from the opposition. And we are giving it to him. But what we gave him today was 30 pages more than he gave to the Australian people before the last election. It seemed so easy then—everyone appeared to be in favour of an emissions trading scheme. But do you know what happened? Copenhagen happened. That is the one thing that this Prime Minister cannot accept. The rest of the world has moved on and the coalition has moved on, but this Prime Minister is stuck in the pre-Copenhagen past. He is stuck with imposing on the necessities of life of the Australian people a great big tax that the rest of the world does not want and will never impose. What we on this side of the House are trying to do in this fortnight is to do again what we did so magnificently in December last year. We are trying to save the Australian people from the Prime Minister’s great big new tax—a tax that we do not need and that will not work.

As I said, this is the biggest policy induced change in Australian history. It is the biggest change in Australian history because it raises the cost of energy, it raises the cost of power, it raises the cost of transport and, because it does all those things, it raises the cost of life. You cannot have modern life—the way of life that Australians have become used to—without energy, without power, without transport. The Australian public do not deserve this massive whack on their cost of living without the fullest possible explanation from this Prime Minister, and the reason he is so reluctant to give us the explanation is that he knows no-one will be convinced by it once it has been offered.

We all saw the Prime Minister floundering in this parliament a few moments ago when he was asked to explain the impact of his great big new tax on the price of milk. He just cannot do it. We all saw the Prime Minister floundering on the Today program this morning when he was asked the impact of his great big new tax on the price of bread. A Prime Minister who does not know the price of milk, who does not know the price of bread and who cannot explain the impact of his policies on the price of milk and the price of bread is no fit person to be the Prime Minister of this country. A policy that this government want to foist on the Australian people before they explain to them its impact on the necessities of life is not a policy that we should have to accept.

I think the Australian people are sick of being treated like mugs by the Rudd government. The Australian people are good people, idealistic people, people who want to do the right thing by the environment, but you cannot ask them to accept a policy that they do not understand and that its proponents cannot explain.

Today we heard the Prime Minister say that the cost of his policy on families would be $660. That might be the cost for some families, but the briefing which the government provided to the Daily Telegraph on 24 November last year said that the cost for middle-income families would be $1,100. That was published on the front page of the biggest-selling newspaper in New South Wales and there were no denials from the government. Silence is agreement. They know that their policies will cost $1,100—a $1,100 hit on the pockets of middle-income families in Sydney.

This is just the start: $660 now for some families and $1,100 now for other families. Imagine what the cost will be if it is not a five per cent reduction by 2020 but a 10 or 20 per cent reduction by 2020. If it is $1,100 for a five per cent reduction, imagine what it would be to give us a 60 per cent reduction by 2050. And this would be a 60 per cent reduction not for 21 million people but for the 36 million people whom this Prime Minister wants to welcome to our country without putting the preparations in place to keep it the country that we know and love and that we want to be sustainable far into the future.

The Prime Minister talked about our policy allegedly costing more than his. This is a Prime Minister who is pretty loose when it comes to going public with big figures about cost. This is the Prime Minister who went on national television on Sunday and made airy claims about something costing $100 billion. It is not a green faced Mr Rudd but a red faced Mr Rudd, because he does not understand figures and he does not know his own figures. Let us be absolutely upfront with the Australian people: yes, the coalition’s strong and effective climate change policy will cost $3.2 billion over the forward estimates period, as opposed to the $40 billion money-go-round envisaged by the Prime Minister’s great big new tax on everything. If we look forward to 2020, yes, our policy will cost a little over $10 billion. It is a lot of money. It is an enormous amount of money, but it pales into insignificance compared to the $114 billion churnaround which this Prime Minister wants to hit the Australian public with.

I want to make two points. The first point is that I accept that $3.2 billion is a lot of money and that it is going to require a big effort from my distinguished colleagues the shadow Treasurer and the shadow minister for finance to find the savings to generate that kind of spending. The shadow Treasurer has broad shoulders, he is a very capable person and he is up for the job. I want to pay tribute to the shadow Treasurer, the member for North Sydney, for the diligence with which he approaches this task. But I tell you what: when you are faced with a government that spends $17 billion on school halls and wants to spend $43 billion on a national broadband network white elephant without even a business plan, surely it is not too much to spend $3.2 billion on the greatest moral challenge of our time, and that is what we will do. We will spend $3.2 billion on the greatest moral challenge of our time, in the Prime Minister’s words, and we will find that money out of the budget. It is incumbent upon the government to explain what its policies will do to the Australian public.

We heard today from the Leader of the National Party that modelling shows that the Rudd government’s emissions trading tax will impose $9,000 on the costs of the average dairy farm. Those costs do not just disappear into the ether. Let us say I am a dairy farmer. I am under a lot of pressure from the bank. I am under a lot of pressure from the unions, who want to impose modern awards on me, with penalty rates for Saturday work and Sunday work. Then I get an extra $9,000 cost imposed on me courtesy of the Prime Minister’s great big new tax. What am I going to do? I am going to pass those costs on to the Australian consumer with higher prices for milk. You ought to be able to explain it, Prime Minister. You cannot just hide behind a whole lot of waffle about 2050. The Australian people want to know the impact of your policies this year, not your intentions, good or otherwise, for 2050.

The Prime Minister said in answer to the first question that I put to him this afternoon that the biggest polluters are let off scot-free in the coalition’s policy. Let us just think about who those evil villains are that the Prime Minister so lightly dismisses as the biggest polluters who are being let off scot-free. They are the power generators who give us the necessities of life. They are the power generators who keep the lights on in this parliament and in the great cities of Australia. He wants to whack on them a great big tax that will put up their prices, that will put up our prices, that will reduce their maintenance budgets and that quite possibly will render some of them financially insolvent. What will it do to the people of Melbourne if the great power companies that are supplying that city are no longer solvent? That is the risk that the Prime Minister’s policy imposes on the Australian people. By contrast, our policy directly tackles emissions without imposing new costs on business and consumers or presenting a new threat to Australian jobs. That is why our policy makes sense and his policy does not.

Let me, for the benefit of the Prime Minister, explain the essence of our policy. It is a very good policy and it is a policy that does not require legislation to get it through the parliament. It is a policy that the Prime Minister could introduce tomorrow if he wanted to. It is a policy which means we actually have a policy now—unlike the Prime Minister’s policy, which is dependent on legislation getting through the parliament, which he cannot guarantee.

Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When is your first saving coming?15:14:41

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I appreciate that the Minister for Finance and Deregulation has made great strides, but I really think that if he calmed down we would have a better debate in this country. Our policy will deliver the same emissions reductions as the government’s without the government’s great big new tax. Our policy is cheaper, simpler and more effective than the government’s because it relies on incentives, not penalties. That is the essential difference between our policy and the government’s. At the heart of our policy is an emissions reduction fund that will do precisely what is said to be necessary; namely, purchase the most efficient and effective ways of reducing emissions at the lowest cost. That is exactly what it is said we need and that is exactly what our policy will deliver.

There are many ways to reduce emissions. We can improve the carbon content of our soil and, in so doing, improve the productivity of our farms. There are many farmers who are already doing this, and I think those farmers deserve an incentive, not a penalty. Those farmers deserve a fair go, not a great big new tax, and to the extent that they increase the carbon content of our soil they can be helped under our policy. Under our policy we can then help fund the innovative technology for which Australians are famous.

In my first week in my new position I visited MDB Energy in Townsville. They are using carbon dioxide, waste water from power stations and sunlight to produce algae which can become biofuel and stock feed. I had the decency to visit that great innovative Australian company. The Prime Minister was 100 metres down the road and he would not take 10 minutes out of his schedule to visit this groundbreaking Australian company. I have more respect for the Australian people than to walk away from an example of world-beating Australian technology. I call on the Prime Minister to put in place a policy, as we have done, that will directly fund emissions reduction by paying Australian businesses to do what they do best: to farm more effectively, to innovate more creatively, to grow more trees and to do exactly what is needed to improve our environment.

I am a great supporter of the market. We in the coalition are going to the market and saying to all of the creative people out there, ‘You give us your best ideas for reducing emissions at the lowest cost and in the most effective ways and we will fund them.’ What we will not do, though, is fund a bunch of speculators to rip off the Australian public through a giant emissions trading scam.

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

RUDD, Hon. Kevin Michael, Griffith 11 3.18 pm Rudd, Kevin, MP 83T Griffith ALP Prime Minister 1 0Mr RUDD(Griffith—Prime Minister)(3.18 pm)—I welcome the opportunity for this debate on climate change and I am always taken when the debate begins with an intervention from the member for Sturt, who is on the record as saying that the coalition is the party of an ETS. This was not 20 years ago, not 10 years ago, not one year ago—it was just six months ago. That was last year, not this year. I move:

That all words after “That” be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:That this House condemns the Leader of the Opposition for:

(a)

being a weathervane on climate change policy;

(b)

presenting today a climate change plan that is nothing more than a climate con job; and

(c)

a con job which does less, costs more, and will mean higher taxes; and

If the Leader of the Opposition was going to engage in a debate about climate change policies and if you are planning a tactic like he has been planning today, you would have thought he would have been ready for the debate and engage in an exchange about his policy versus our policy, why his stacks up and why ours does not stack up. I listened carefully to his description of his own policy and, amidst everything else that the Leader of the Opposition said, there were about three, maybe four, minutes which were directed towards the plan he has released for the nation today as an alternative course of action. The rest was, let us call it, political rhetoric. If you are going to plan to engage in a debate in the House and if you are going to suspend standing orders to debate his plan versus our plan, let us have a debate about those alternative plans and their content.

On the future of climate change, three questions need to be asked. The first is: what is the science and do you accept the science? The second is: what are you going to do about the science, does it work, how much does it cost and who pays for it? And the third is: are you fair dinkum about the above or not? That is the absolute core of this debate. Let us go to the question of being fair dinkum and belief first. What underpins our entire discussion in this place is the fact that six weeks ago we were engaged in a debate in this place—and in the case of those opposite in their joint party room—where they were split right down the middle on this question. The majority of them voted for an emissions trading scheme. When it came to support for an emissions trading scheme, Mr Howard himself in May 2007 said:

It is fundamental to any response both here and elsewhere that a price be set for carbon emissions. This is best done through the market mechanism of an emissions trading scheme.

That was John Howard, Prime Minister, May 2007. That was the position of the Howard government. That was the position of the environment minister of the Howard government, the former Leader of the Opposition. That was the position of ministers of the Howard cabinet, including the current Leader of the Opposition. That was the position of the former Treasurer, Mr Costello. That was the position also of many other senior frontbenchers, who are now currently pretending they have a different position.

It was absolutely clear-cut that Mr Howard as Prime Minister, Mr Costello as the Treasurer of the Commonwealth, Mr Turnbull as the environment minister and Mr Abbott, when he was a member of that cabinet, all supported an emissions trading scheme for one reason: it was the lowest cost and most effective way of dealing with the challenge of climate change. Then it all changed. The reason it changed had nothing to do with policy. As the former Leader of the Opposition said of the man who succeeded him, ‘The political weathervane’—the current Leader of the Opposition—‘decided that the politics of this had gone wrong’, from his point of view. Having executed and supported every position on an emissions trading scheme known to man, suddenly he arrives on the Damascus road of having concluded it was wrong all along.

Underpinning this is the question of whether you accept the science. On the first test on the question of the science, we have the defining statement from the Leader of the Opposition, the alternative Prime Minister of Australia, that ‘climate change is absolute crap’. That is what he said—his words, not mine. He also reflects a view of Senator Minchin, a person of some influence within the Liberal Party, who was asked this: ‘What proportion of the Liberal Party are climate change sceptics and what do you derive from your discussions with them?’ Minchin said, ‘If the question is do people believe or not believe that human beings are causing or are the main cause of planet warming then I would say a majority do not accept that position.’

On the question of the science in this defining debate, let us be very clear about it: the Leader of the Opposition does not accept the science. He says it is absolute crap. Senator Minchin says the majority of Liberals think that it is absolute nonsense. It does get worse, because this goes to the underpinnings of the science. The current Leader of the Opposition, having become Leader of the Opposition, said:

It seems that notwithstanding the dramatic increases in man-made C02 emissions over the last decade, the world’s warming has stopped.

Can I just say that if that is the position of the alternative Prime Minister of Australia, we are in deep trouble. It goes on. The Leader of the Opposition earlier said:

… as you know, I am hugely unconvinced by the so-called settled science on climate change.

As if these views had not been consigned to the past but actually were part of his own view of the science now, in his speech the other weekend in Adelaide he said, ‘A temperature rise of four degrees Centigrade does not represent any great moral challenge for the future.’ I find that absolutely unbelievable. What would happen to the Murray-Darling? Ninety per cent of the agriculture would be wiped out. What would happen to the Great Barrier Reef? It would be utterly despoiled. What would happen to the number of days in excess of 35 degrees in a city like Adelaide? They would double. These are the questions and the consequences which flow from climate change in Australia. But the Leader of the Opposition says this is not any sort of moral challenge for the future.

Therefore, on this question of whether you are fair dinkum and what your fundamental beliefs are, I submit as the first point in this debate that the Leader of the Opposition does not, on his own admission, accept the climate change science. That is the first point of contrast. We in the government accept what the IPCC has said. We accept what the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia has said. We accept also what the Australian Chief Scientist has said. We accept therefore that it is too great a risk for Australia, for our economy, for our businesses and for our kids to ignore the science on the hope and belief out there at the extremes that somehow it simply will not happen.

Let us go to the second point of this debate: the actual content of an emissions trading policy versus that plan—that climate con job—that was released today. How does an emissions trading scheme work? It puts a cap on carbon. If we are going to reduce 138 gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere, we have to have a mechanism to do it. If we are going to act on capping carbon emissions then it follows that we must have a cap. That is the bottom line. An emissions trading scheme by definition is a cap-and-trade scheme. That is what we will do: we will place a cap on emissions. That is the reason in part that the previous Liberal and National government accepted an emissions trading scheme.

The second element of this is: who will pay for this scheme? Australia’s biggest polluters will pay—about 1,-000 of them. As a result of their payment, they will have incentives through permits to reduce their carbon emissions over time. That is the way it will work. It is called a market mechanism, which the member for Flinders, in his considered university thesis, saw as the only means by which you could do it.

The third element is how it is funded and what its consequences are for families. You will see in the government’s white paper and in our statements through the course of 2009 an absolutely clear exposition of what the impact will be for each category of family and each category of good and service relevant to those families, and the compensation scheme which applies to each of those families—what happens with low-income earners, what happens with middle-income earners, what happens with pensioners and what happens with those on other forms of benefits.

As far as the compensation arrangements are concerned, they are along the following lines. We have for 2.9 million low-income households an average annual price impact of $420 and average annual assistance of $610, with a net outcome of plus-$190; for middle-income earners—number of households 3.7 million—an average annual price impact of $650 and average annual assistance of $700, with a net outcome of $50; and for all households who receive some assistance—8.1 million households out of the 8.8 million households in Australia—an average annual price impact of $600 and average annual assistance of $660, with a net outcome of plus-$60. In summary, all low-income households will receive full assistance; 50 per cent of middle-income households will receive full assistance; practically all middle-income households will receive some assistance; and, in fact, 92 per cent of all households will receive assistance. On average, these households will receive $660 in compensation or be about $60-plus in terms of the implications of the CPRS in one year.

Those opposite ask: what is the detail of our policy? That is it. It is, first of all, a scheme which caps carbon pollution. Secondly, it does so by making the largest polluters in the country pay. Thirdly, it uses those funds to compensate the working families that I have just described. How does the alternative that has been put forward today—this phoney plan, this climate con job, by the Leader of the Opposition—go against those three measures? As to the first measure, are you credible about putting a cap on carbon pollution? No, you are not, because there is no cap. The reason there is no cap, ultimately, is that the Leader of the Opposition does not believe that the science is valid in the first place. The second is: who pays for the overall scheme?

An incident having occurred in the gallery—

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order!

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When it comes to the question of putting a cap on carbon, the Leader of the Opposition says, ‘Not interested’. In their scheme there is no cap on carbon. Therefore, how can you know whether it is going to have the cumulative impact that you need to have in order to have a real impact on the global reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, which our nation—one of the hottest and driest continents on earth—needs for the future?

Secondly, who pays for their scheme? This is where it gets really interesting, because the Leader of the Opposition lets all the major polluters off the hook. They have been through his door and said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t charge us; charge the taxpayer instead.’ But here is a question: who are the taxpayers? They are working families—and they get slugged as a consequence of what this Leader of the Opposition has put forward. Thirdly, on the compensation for families—having been slugged through extra tax—is there $1 of compensation? No, there is not. Against these three measures, this climate con job is a fail, fail, fail. That is the bottom line when you contrast the two schemes. Their scheme does not work. It slugs taxpayers instead of big polluters and, on top of that, it is unfunded.

I go back to what I thought was one of the intriguing conclusions by the Leader of the Opposition: that this was still a market system. We had the supreme irony in this parliament that the Labor government supports a market approach to dealing with climate change and the Liberal and National opposition support a command and control system by doing it through red tape and regulation—something which I think would appeal to the sense of irony of those opposite. But I conclude with the immortal words of the former Leader of the Opposition, who said:

Tony himself has in just four or five months publicly advocated the blocking of the ETS, the passing of the ETS, the amending of the ETS and if the amendments were satisfactory passing it, and now the blocking of it.

His only redeeming virtue in this remarkable lack of conviction is that every time he announced a new position to me he would preface it with “Mate, mate, I know I am a bit of a weather vane on this, but…”

Can I just say to the Leader of the Opposition, and I conclude where I began: where is the conviction? There is no belief in the science, and that is why this policy simply is without any foundation at all. (Time expired)

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The original question was that the motion moved by the Leader of the Opposition be agreed to. To this the Prime Minister has moved as an amendment that all words after ‘That’ be omitted with a view to substituting other words. The question now is that the amendment be agreed to.

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Obviously I do not agree to the amendment moved by the Prime Minister and I do support the motion moved by the Leader of the Opposition. The Prime Minister has run from this debate since 6 December last year, when the Leader of the Opposition first called on a public debate at the National Press Club or another venue on the supposed ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’. The Prime Minister in fact disappeared from the battlefield altogether after Copenhagen. On 21 December he returned to Australia—that was the last time he said anything—and then he disappeared until 21 or 22 January, when he returned from a month off, after a month of hiding in Kirribilli House.

The Prime Minister disappeared from the debate because he knew that the whole debate had changed because of the failure of Copenhagen. The Leader of the Opposition’s offer to the Prime Minister to debate him remained open all that time. From 6 December to today, the Leader of the Opposition has been prepared to debate the so-called ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’ referred to by the Prime Minister. He has referred to it as the ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’ on at least 22 occasions that we can find, dating right back to 7 August 2006, when he said to Australia’s Christian Heritage National Forum these words, dripping in sanctimony:

Finally, there is the challenge of global climate change. It is a fundamental ethical challenge of our age to protect the planet—or, in the language of the bible, to be proper stewards of creation.

Of course, the Prime Minister cannot say anything without over-hyping and over-egging the omelette. On this occasion he was invoking the Bible for the ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’. More recently, on 28 October 2009, the Prime Minister said at the Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science:

Perhaps the most “wicked” problem facing us as a nation and a world at the moment is climate change. It is the one of the greatest scientific, economic, and moral challenges of our time.

He has said a very similar thing on at least 20 other occasions going back to 2006 and yet he would not debate the new Leader of the Opposition; he would not seek to take the opportunity, which you would have thought he would have taken, to put his case to the Australian people about why his great big new tax on everything is so critically important to Australia today.

Copenhagen was a failure. He returned from Copenhagen, licked his wounds and sat quietly at Kirribilli House for a month, trying to avoid any public scrutiny. He has come back to the parliament today and, in fact, said that he thought this was the place to debate the great issues of the day. In fact, in answer to the first question he said:

So, Mr Speaker, the honourable gentleman asks: ‘Shall we have a debate?’ I thought that that was one of the reasons the parliament was here assembled—to debate the big challenges.

               …            …            …

… let us have the debate in the people’s house.

On that basis, the Labor Party will support the Leader of the Opposition’s motion to have 30 minutes of debate each from the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in the people’s house. If the Prime Minister was genuine about the remark he made at the beginning of question time, we would allocate an hour to debate this subject here and now: a full 30 minutes each on the policy of the emissions trading scheme itself—the great big new tax on everything—versus the coalition’s direct action plan on climate change.

The Australian public are wising up to this government and wising up to the Prime Minister in particular. Members of the Labor Party could not have helped but notice over the summer, over the barbecue test, how many people—average Australians—are saying to us: ‘When is this government going to start doing and stop talking? Why is the Prime Minister all talk and no action—commitments made but commitments not kept; commitments made to win the 2007 election but not kept?’

The public does not remember a commitment for a great big new tax on everything before the November 2007 election. They also do not remember the new line of the government, which is that the government will not act before the rest of the world acts on climate change. But how does that fit with the fact that we were asked to vote an emissions trading scheme into place before the Copenhagen conference in December 2009? If that had occurred, of course, we would have been acting before the rest of the world and, as Copenhagen showed, that was a fiasco and a disaster.

And yet we return to the parliament and the first thing that the government is introducing today is the emissions trading scheme—the great big new tax. Yet again it is asking the public and asking Australia to move before the rest of the world does anything. Is this emissions trading scheme going to come into place before China and Brazil act, before India acts, before the former Soviet Union, Russia, acts and before South Africa acts? The government is saying one thing out of one corner of its mouth and acting in the other way out of the other corner of its mouth, and the Australian public are awake to it.

We have given the Labor Party the opportunity today to debate this issue for a full hour, putting both sides of the debate. I assume the Labor Party will vote against it; the government will vote against that opportunity. They will squib the debate. I ask the question: will the Prime Minister be speaking to the emissions trading scheme legislation—will he introduce it if it is such an important part of the government’s agenda—or is he backing away from it? Is that why over the last couple of weeks he has tried to create distractions about a whole lot of other issues, whether they were his seven speeches across the nation—as with the seven days of our Lord creating the world, Kevin Rudd travelled around Australia, giving one pearl of wisdom each day, one in seven—

Damian Hale (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Hale interjecting

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

—I am sure the member for Solomon, when he is not arguing with people in nightclubs, would have been putting that down for his reading when he got back to parliament.

The Prime Minister has spent seven days trying to shift the debate from the emissions trading scheme to any other issue. On the weekend he tried again to shift the debate to the private health insurance rebate. He does not want to talk about the emissions trading scheme anymore, because he knows what the coalition knows: that the tide has gone out on the government’s great big new tax on everything because of the failure of Copenhagen.

What the public want is direct action. The public want practical programs that will achieve something. The member for Flinders, the shadow Treasurer, the Leader of the Opposition and others have come up with a direct action plan that the public will endorse because Australians like practical action—direct action that brings about change. They are sick of people talking about things that will happen in 2050 or 2046 or 2032. They want to know what the Prime Minister is going to do this year about the issues that concern them. And they know, instinctively, that a great big new tax, coupled with rises in interest rates, is leading to an increase in the cost of living which they find is squeezing their household budgets. Particularly people with mortgages but also self-funded retirees, pensioners and people on fixed incomes are finding the cost of living very difficult to cope with. So will the Prime Minister speak on the emissions trading scheme bill and debate the issue here? I am sure the Leader of the Opposition will. He should debate it today, for an hour. This is, apparently, the most important moral challenge of our time, and yet for six weeks he has avoided any real debate on this issue.

The coalition’s plan for direct action will do many things. It will deliver practical environmental benefits and it will achieve the same five per cent target at a lower cost than the government is committing to. We will have a five per cent target for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, but without the tax that the Labor Party is foisting on the Australian people—every small business, pensioners and other households across Australia—without the compensation that they are promising, as the minister knows. It will deliver direct incentives to reduce CO2 emissions, it will do so at no additional cost to households and it will protect Australian jobs: there will be no net job losses through the coalition’s policy.

Electricity prices will not be forced up. We will not try to penalise people and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by forcing up the price of electricity, which is the core of the government’s emissions trading scheme. The way they wish to bring about their reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is to say, ‘If we force up electricity prices out of this world then people will cut back on their energy consumption.’ That is at the centre of the government’s policy.

It will not push up the cost of groceries. We have seen recent indicators that grocery prices are going through the roof, and people in my electorate of Sturt know it full well. Electricity prices have risen 14½ per cent in the last 12 months, public school fees have risen 7½ per cent, gas prices have gone up nine per cent and water and sewerage have gone up 14 per cent. People out in the street know that the cost of living is going up, especially for the consumables they use every day. The great big new tax will only add to the woes of households, whereas the coalition’s direct action policy will not push up the price of groceries.

We will deliver a climate action policy that is easily implemented but does not involve the money-go-round which is the government’s policy. We will deliver better water efficiency for our farmers and we will protect Australian small businesses from a sudden and massive rise in costs. The direct incentive that we will put in place will deliver better soils for Australia. It will create incentives to plant 20 million new trees and for more productive farming practices, and it will reduce emissions through using solar technology. We will aim to create another million solar homes across Australia over the life of the coalition’s policy.

We will put incentives into place to allow Australian households to make a practical contribution to reductions in CO2 emissions. One of the great failings of the government’s policy is that it does not bring the Australian people with it. It punishes them, it penalises them, but it does not say, ‘If you take practical, direct action yourselves in your own households and in your own local community, you will be rewarded for that.’ The coalition is all about reward. It is all about choice. It is all about incentive. That is what we did for 11½ years in government, and if we get the chance again this year, if the Abbott government is elected, that is what we will do again. There will be choice, incentive, opportunity and reward—not the penalty, the punitive taxes and the punishment of small business that we see coming from the Rudd government.

Most importantly, the benefits of reducing these emissions will stay in Australia. We will not be exporting the benefits of reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to countries overseas. We will be using them here in Australia, and we will continue the commitment to solar rebate. We will extend that, whereas the government scrapped it. In electorates like mine, a very important part of the policy is that we will fund a study into undergrounding power lines, which are a blight on the urban environment. I think all Australians would support their burial. That also has, of course, the benefit of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The Prime Minister’s amendment is another study in spin from a Prime Minister who only really specialises in spin. He will do everything now to try and destroy the coalition’s direct action policy, because he would prefer, amazingly, to have a $114 billion new tax rather than $3 billion of spending over the next four years that will actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions. His amendment is a desperate snatch for a straw in the wind to try and turn the debate back on the coalition. But the Australian people are waking up. The Australian people know that in the Leader of the Opposition we have a man of action who supports direct action, as opposed to a former bureaucrat in Kevin Rudd, who is now the chief bureaucrat in charge of all aspects of government policy. That is why he believes that discussion is decision. It is why he believes that a review, an inquiry, a summit or more consultation—endless consultation—is actually making a decision in the interests of the Australian public.

The Australian public want to see a reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions. They want to see action on climate change. But they do not want a great big new tax. They do not want to export the benefits from our reduction in emissions. They do not want to get so far in front of the rest of the world that Australia suffers economically as a consequence and we lose jobs. That is what the government is offering the Australian public. The coalition stand for reducing our greenhouse gas emissions but without the punitive rising in costs and without the punitive taxes that the government envisages.

If the Prime Minister had any guts, he would vote for this motion. He would suspend the standing orders to allow a full hour to debate our policy versus his policy without having to clutter it up with a debate about who will and will not have the debate. That is what this motion is about: allowing a full debate with the Prime Minister first, followed by the Leader of the Opposition, to put the cases of their political parties on what is apparently the greatest moral challenge of our time. We will be voting against the Prime Minister’s amendment and in favour of the opposition leader’s motion so that we can have that debate here in the people’s house and tease out all the issues that the Australian public want to hear about.

Greg Combet (Charlton, Australian Labor Party, Minister Assisting the Minister for Climate Change) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We are having this debate in the House because the climate change sceptics—the people on the other side in this place who do not believe and who do not accept the climate science—have gained control of the coalition. The member for Warringah, supported by Senator Minchin and others in the camp of the climate sceptics, tore down the former leader, the member for Wentworth, supported at that time by the member for Flinders, who we know to believe in the climate science, over this issue. The member for Warringah—as the Prime Minister pointed out a short while ago—is, of course, on the record, when he had his seminal moment in Beaufort, Victoria, and really laid bare his beliefs about this issue—or lack thereof. I repeat what the member for Warringah said on that occasion, because it is an important insight into the policy position that has been announced today. On 2 October 2009 he said:

The argument on climate change is absolute crap. However the politics of this are tough for us. Eighty per cent of people believe climate change is a real and present danger.

That is an insight into what the Leader of the Opposition thinks about the climate science. He opportunistically went about using that issue to gain the leadership of the Liberal Party and to tear down the former leader, the member for Wentworth. Why was that the case? The member for Wentworth, as leader of the coalition, did what was responsible as a senior political leader in this country: discussed it with the government and negotiated an agreement to secure passage of legislation that would bring about reductions in Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. Like Mr Howard, the former Prime Minister, the member for Wentworth had a very clear view about the most efficient way of going about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and this is what Mr Howard, a mentor to the member for Warringah, said on 27 May after considerable consideration by the then coalition government of the climate science and the best and most economically efficient way to go about securing reductions in greenhouse gas emissions:

It is fundamental to any response both here and elsewhere that a price is set for carbon emissions.

‘Fundamental,’ said Mr Howard. He went on to say:

This is best done through the market mechanism of an emissions trading system.

And, of course, it is an emissions trading scheme that the Rudd Labor government has proposed in the form of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, because it is the most economically efficient way of securing reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

What we have from the other side here is political opportunism, a recognition on the basis of their lack of acceptance of the science—their lack of respect for internationally peer reviewed science in the IPCC fourth assessment report. They recognise it is a political problem, so they have to pretend they have a policy response to it. What we have seen today is a pretence. The policy response announced by the Leader of the Opposition this afternoon immediately before question time is a con job, and people will recognise that when they have a look at it.

What are the key elements of it? What are the key weaknesses in it? Let me run through them for the House. It is a lame con job and it will not work. It is about using a fund to pick winners. It is about government interfering in the marketplace to identify favourites. I notice that in the material that was released today there is a guaranteed proportion of the fund that has been put aside for particular activities in the rural sector—and I bet the National Party were pleased with that. We will see a repeat of the regional rorts before you know it if these people get control of this policy issue with this particular policy. It is about picking winners. We have already heard the suggestion from the Leader of the Opposition at his press conference: we are going to have algae fired power stations. There is no business case for that one. They will be picking winners using this fund, and none of it can guarantee reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that allow us to meet what will be international obligations. They have gone for the most economically inefficient way of going about a climate change policy. There are no market forces operating in this. It is a position completely contrary to what they espouse as their traditional philosophy of allowing the market to determine the most efficient allocation of resources. Here we will have the Leader of the Opposition, if he ever gets his hand on the treasury bench, picking winners with algae fired power stations.

It will be a more costly scheme, it offers no compensation to households, it involves no cap on emissions, we cannot achieve targeted reductions in carbon pollution, it will not link with international efforts and it shifts the cost burden from the organisations which are emitting carbon pollution in our economy to households and small businesses. The underpinning element of any public policy response in this area of climate change is respect for and acceptance of the science. There is no point having a policy such as has been enunciated by the opposition today, of course, if there is no acceptance of the science—and there is no acceptance of the science by those who now control the opposition. Let us not forget some of the things stated by members on their own side. Senator Minchin, on the ABC Four Corners show on 9 November, said on the issue of the science:

If the question is, do people believe or not believe that human beings are causing, are the main cause of the planet warming, then I’d say a majority—

of the Liberal Party—

… don’t accept that position.

That is, those who now are in the leadership positions in the coalition do not accept the science, and yet the scientific case for action on climate change is absolutely clear. Human induced emissions are increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2007 were nearly 40 per cent higher than those in 1990. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in its 2007 report that the world has already warmed as a result of human emissions of carbon pollution. Some of the key findings are important to bear in mind because they are absolutely pertinent to any public policy debate about this issue. Average surface temperatures have risen by 0.74 degrees Celsius in the last 100 years. Globally, contrary to the assertion of the Leader of the Opposition some months ago that we have experienced cooling, the fact is that 14 of the 15 warmest years on record occurred between 1995 and 2009. The projected global average surface warming is around 1.1 to 6.4 degrees Celsius. Those are the projections in 2010. No government, no major political party and no political leader of any responsibility or credibility can afford to ignore these warnings, and yet we know—and you will hear it time and time again—that in that seminal moment in Beaufort, Victoria the member for Warringah said what he really thought: ‘Climate change is absolute crap.’ No-one of responsibility and political leadership in this country or anywhere else can afford to ignore the science that is compelling. We need to respect it and we need to act with appropriate public policy responses.

Australia is extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. This is the driest inhabited continent on Earth. We face huge environmental and economic costs from climate change impacts, including on our water security, our agriculture, our energy supply, our health, our coastal communities and our infrastructure. Water availability is already being affected: a 15 per cent decline in rainfall has been experienced in south-west Western Australia, for example. If there is no action taken—if we cannot adequately address climate change and its impact on this country—irrigated agriculture and jobs in the Murray-Darling Basin may well disappear by the end of this century. Again I emphasise that these are the facts. These are the peer reviewed scientific findings. How can any person of responsibility and public leadership not respect it and take responsible action as a consequence? However, the Leader of the Opposition in a speech only days ago, on 30 January, said:

… even if dire predictions are right and average temperatures around the globe rise by four degrees over the century, it’s still not the “great moral challenge” of our time …

So it is all okay. It is going to be okay. They are not serious about it. It is ‘absolute crap’. They do not need to do anything. It is only a political problem, so you only have to put forward an ineffective policy response. The four degrees C temperature rise that the Leader of the Opposition referred to in that quote would be both an environmental and an economic disaster for this country. Under that four degrees C temperature rise—and this is not any moral challenge, according to the member for Warringah—Australia would face very serious threats. The Murray-Darling Basin would be beyond salvation. Eastern Australia would have 40 per cent more droughts and there would be a fall in irrigated agriculture of 90 per cent in the nation’s food bowl. This is not any problem, according to the Leader of the Opposition. The number of very hot days—that is, those over 35 degrees C—would increase dramatically. In Adelaide they would double. The Great Barrier Reef—and the billions of dollars of tourism, of course, and all the jobs and the welfare of families that rely on tourism—would be devastated. A rise in global mean temperature would cause irreversible change in the average state of the Earth’s climate.

The government accepts the science and the importance of acting and taking responsibility. An emissions trading scheme, as I pointed out earlier, is well recognised internationally—and there has been enough debate about it—as the most economically efficient mechanism of achieving targeted reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. It works quite simply. An emissions trading scheme such as the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme requires emitters to buy a permit for each tonne of carbon pollution they produce. It is a pretty simple concept: a permit will be required for each tonne of carbon pollution. The government will determine the number of permits that will be available each year and, by setting that level, will set a cap on pollution levels. The cap each year allows a targeted reduction in emissions to be achieved over time.

That is how the government can with confidence put forward the targeted reductions in emissions we have articulated in association with the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, which, of course, we have now submitted to the international community in accordance with the Copenhagen accord. A carbon price is established by the auctioning and trading of permits, and the carbon price creates an incentive for polluters to reduce their emissions in the cheapest, most efficient way. What an emissions trading scheme will achieve is to price the cost of pollution into the cost of production. It establishes a carbon price. Importantly, as the Prime Minister alluded to earlier, under the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme the revenue raised from the auctioning of permits will support households and jobs. The overall cost of living for households has been indicated by the Prime Minister in this House repeatedly today, and the government has well taken account of it.

Emissions trading scheme arrangements are clearly the most economically efficient method to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to achieve targeted levels. It is a market based concept. What has been put forward today by the opposition is about the most inefficient, ineffective option that could have been considered. I was sitting in my office watching the press conference that the Leader of the Opposition held, and I have to admit that I could not believe it when he got to the word ‘finally’, because there was nothing of substance put forward—nothing to achieve the sorts of reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that we need to commit to if we are to play our part internationally to address climate change.

The policy announced today by the Leader of the Opposition is a con job—nothing more, nothing less. It will not achieve the changes that we need in our economy. It will not establish a carbon price. It is not a market-efficient mechanism for achieving reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. It will not link internationally to efforts by other nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is economically inefficient. It is more costly. It will involve picking winners. It is just about the worst way to go. We could have no confidence about setting caps on emissions and achieving targeted reductions. That policy, only two or three hours old, is already a complete failure. Already it is seen as a con job. (Time expired)

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Action, Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Let me begin with words from the Minerals Council of Australia not one hour ago:

The Coalition’s climate change policy strikes at the real intent of pricing carbon—providing an incentive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without negatively impacting on jobs, investment, exports and growth.

The Minerals Council of Australia welcomes the shift to a policy designed to use incentives as a driver to reduce emissions rather than an approach that is pre-occupied with penalising business to raise revenue.

The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme places a $120 billion impost on the Australian economy—returning about $75 billion to households and motorists in partial compensation for price rises in electricity and consumer goods—with not a single cent to be invested in the research and development of low emissions technology.

It is not just them; the NGF, ACCI and others have already spoken out today. This is the moment and this is the day Australia looks to an alternative to a $114 billion tax on the Australian economy that does not achieve real emissions reductions.

Let us run through how the government’s scheme operates. Firstly, between now and 2020 there will be $114 billion raised. That money is not coming from business, as is presented by the government. That money is coming from mums and dads, from pensioners, from small businesses and from farmers, because the costs of the government’s scheme will be passed through. Have no doubt about that. So by 2020 $114 billion will be raised. Over the next four years we will see $40 billion raised, as opposed to the coalition’s $3.2 billion scheme. That is a lot of money but it is not $40 billion, and that is the difference. In the single year 2012-13 there will be $11½ billion raised. It will be $16 billion a year by 2020. That $16 billion is designed to make savings of 140 million tonnes of CO2 and is, in reality, a carbon price of $110 per tonne. That is the problem. As one of Australia’s leading business groups today said, the real intention of carbon pricing must be to provide an incentive. We provide an incentive; they provide a penalty.

The costs of the ETS in Australia are $114 billion. Let us deal with what this means for Australian families. The government is in denial of its own figure of $1,100, which it fed to the Daily Telegraph, but that figure has been confirmed through a number of ways. Let us do the basic maths. In 2012 and 2013 the government’s own figures show that there will be $11½ billion ripped out of the pockets of Australian households. There are 8.7 million households in Australia. If you allow $1,100 each, that is $9.6 billion, and we will assume that business will wear the gap. There is no question that, with 8.7 million households at $1,100 a household, that is $9.6 billion before we even get to the real target of $11½ billion. So that is the problem for the government.

They must make it clear that they are charging Australian families a minimum of $1,100 for power and water. How do we know this? New South Wales IPART predicted price rises of electricity in the order of 60 per cent over the coming three years. The ETS is the major component of that. What we see all up is that the price of electricity—the price of heating and cooling—will go up. If you are a dry cleaner or a baker, all of these prices will go up.

The government are making a claim about the big polluters. They say that the big polluters will be punished under them. In fact the big polluters will get $40 billion for no action. The biggest emitting companies in Australia will get money taken out, they will claw that money back from the community and then they will get $40 billion for no further action. The Prime Minister’s claim today is that in some way they are hurting the companies, but they are giving $40 billion for not one iota of emissions reduction. Our system gives no money to anybody who does not make an emissions reduction. Compared with the government’s system costing $114 billion over the next nine years, which is about $1,100 to families and impacts on bread, milk and butter—things which the Prime Minister could not even cope with today—and is a system which offers $40 billion simply for business as usual as well as being a traders’ paradise and a derivatives market, what we have is a simple system of direct action which Australians want.

Again, it is not just our view. By the end of the day, I say to the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, there will be many others who will have made it clear. What we are promising is to achieve 140 million tonnes of reduction, the same target in the same time frame beginning at the same time, but instead of $40 billion over the next four years we are talking about $3.2 billion. Instead of $114 billion over the next nine years, it will be $10.5 billion. We are up front. There are no free rides here but there are dramatically easier options.

What is at the heart of the flaw in the system that the government has? It relies on penalising normal operations for every unit of emissions. What it means is that, if there is a business that is producing 10 tonnes of CO2, it will be taxed on each of those tonnes even though we only want to get them down to nine tonnes. The government is going to make sure that electricity and gas price rises flow through to households. There is a better, simpler way: the European system has four per cent of business activity that is going to be dealt with, and our system is going to deal with incentives as opposed to punishing people by trying to drive the price of electricity as high as possible. The heart of the government’s system is to drive the price of electricity as high as possible. The problem is that it takes a lot of pain before people reduce their electricity consumption and for businesses that rely on electricity it also takes a lot of pain. On the other hand, we will provide incentives to power companies to reduce their emissions.

When the government say that we would be leaving power companies alone, there are two great fanciful statements in that. Firstly, they will be rewarding business with $40 billion for doing nothing. We will only be dealing with emissions reductions. Secondly, there are real incentives. What we have is letters from business which say, ‘We will reduce emissions, we will take up this opportunity and we can do it at a dramatically lower cost than that which is offered by the government.’ There is a big difference here. We are making the guarantee that our system will not change prices because it is going to incentives that businesses adopt voluntarily for which there is an incentive payment. The difference here is that on 16 November 2009 the Treasurer was asked whether he would give a guarantee that no low-income family would be worse off and his statement was very simple. He said, ‘We cannot guarantee that no-one will be worse off.’

Let us look at what the government have said about our system. They have said it is not a market and the Prime Minister brandished around my thesis from 20 years ago. I know a little bit about markets in this space. What we have created is the lowest cost abatement market. There is no question. If they understood how their own water purchasing scheme works, they would understand that the same principles are in place here. The government buy back the entitlement to water by seeking bids for the lowest cost water. We will be buying back entitlements to emissions by seeking the lowest cost bids. They may have messed it up royally, but let us be clear: they do not even understand that they have a water market. We are adopting the same principles in the same format. That is also what is done under the New South Wales GGAS system; it is also what is done in other jurisdictions around the world. So we have a very different approach. It is a system which we have seen support for from ACCI today. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry has said:

Given the uncertainty now existing after Copenhagen over what other nations will do, a domestic policy approach that provides more carrot than stick tends to reflect the temper of the times.

We have a market that complains about the big polluters. There will not be one dollar from us for people who do not take action. There is $40 billion from the government for people who do business as usual. Picking winners—again, false. We will use lowest cost abatement, so picking winners is just a sheer, absolute falsity. We will use lowest cost abatement in the same way that the water market operates. No caps—again, false. There are penalties for businesses that breach their caps. Let us be absolutely honest here: you can challenge our system but you cannot fabricate elements of it.

What are we bringing to make this happen? We are bringing an emissions reduction fund. It is a fund of $2.5 billion—$2.55 billion to be exact—over four years and approximately $10.5 billion over the nine years. It will be complemented by an additional $700 million of other activities. What does that give us? A once-in-a-century replenishment of our soil carbon; a chance to clean up the oldest and most inefficient power stations in a way that protects the jobs of workers and the price of electricity for consumers; and one million solar homes by 2020, one million solar roofs—whether it be from solar hot water, from solar panels or from the emerging technologies such as ceramic cells—capped, accounted for and costed. We have 20 million trees to be planted by 2020 to be involved in the great challenge of regreening our urban areas. We also have the extremely interesting proposition of looking to see whether we can use the new technology, the high-voltage DC underground cables of the future, to replace the transmission lines which cut through the heart of many of our cities. That will free up dead land right in the heart of our cities. It will give us a chance to use that land for parks and housing and to use what we can reclaim from the dead land in the heart of our cities. If we can free that up, that will make a difference to the policy of people’s lives.

What else do we have? We have a solar towns program and a solar schools program on top of that, which is in place. We have renewable energy changes, which provide opportunity for emerging technologies and larger renewables projects, which have been frozen under the mess-up that this government has made of the renewable energy target. We are offering 6,000 gigawatt-hours—two out of the 20 per cent of the renewable energy targets—to give certainty and a future to the great solar mirror fields, to geothermal, to tidal and wave and to other emerging technologies, to give Australia a real solar sunrise in the renewable energy future. The last thing that we have is the idea of green corridors through our cities, of working to return the greenery to our cities as opposed to what we see in Ku-ring-gai, as the new member for Bradfield will give testimony to: the ripping apart of many of these things under a state Labor planning system which has been a disaster.

Ultimately we have a choice that is facing Australia. As the business groups are already beginning to say, what we see here is that this is a system of incentives. This is a system of carrots, not sticks. This is a system of incentives, not penalties. We compare the $114 billion tax, which will come from mums and dads and from pensioners, with a system that will cost $10.5 billion over the next nine years, and we look at what that will mean for ordinary families—$1,100 per family. In the first full year alone this system will cost $11.5 billion—for 8.7 million Australian families, $1,100 each. That is $9.6 billion and still leaves $2 billion to be made up from businesses. There is no doubt that, if anything, our figures are low. The government’s system will hurt mums and dads in a much greater way. At the end of the day there is a better way than a great big tax: it is direct action to reduce our emissions—one million solar homes, one million solar roofs, 20 million trees and a vision of an Australia which is productive, which is clean and which is built on a clean energy and green energy future. (Time expired)

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I note that immediately I am on my feet those on the other side of the chamber, who have consistently and vociferously opposed any action on climate change, are already shouting abuse across the dispatch box. I wonder, if the opposition leader is serious about having a real debate on climate change, whether he will silence the ignorant loudmouths on the other side of the chamber and allow this debate to continue.

Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Roads and Transport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Randall interjecting

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order, the member for Canning! The minister has the call.

Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Today the coalition had an opportunity to move forwards or backwards, and they moved backwards. They came down on the wrong side of the national interest and they will be seen, in time, to have come down on the wrong side of history. The fact is that the Leader of the Opposition, who does not believe that climate change is real and who thinks that climate change is, to use his own words, ‘crap’, has confirmed that again today in his first day in the parliament as opposition leader and in this debate. I listened very carefully to what the opposition leader said in the debate and I noticed that after about 10 minutes he simply ran out of puff. What he is doing is pretending to the Australian people that he understands this issue and has a solution to it, and he is producing an issue which he thinks is going to serve him politically and is going to be palatable in the short term. But when you actually look at it closely he does not, firstly, understand the real consequences of failure to act on climate change, because many on his side do not believe it, including himself. Secondly, it ignores the most necessary and fundamental measure if you are going to reform the market in a market economy, and that is a price for carbon.

I cannot believe that the opposition parties, after having delivered the climate change LITE policy of this morning, are in the House this afternoon and have absolutely ignored and walked away from the market. The Leader of the Opposition said that he was a great supporter of the market. But this is where the opposition are most exposed: lack of belief and lack of intellectual rigour in bringing forward a policy because they are not providing any signal in the market whatsoever for carbon emissions to reduce over time. There are many economists and there is much modelling. There are schemes already underway in a number of countries which are designed to do just that.

As I was listening to the debate, I was thinking about their fraternal colleagues in New Zealand, a conservative party that wants to have and is due to introduce an emissions trading scheme to have a price in the market so that investment decisions can be made rationally on the basis of knowing that it will cost more if you pollute more and that it is going to be a slow gradual evolving process over time. But that is how you transform the economy. That is the big challenge for any government around the globe at the moment. The biggest challenge is that we have to transform our economies so they reduce carbon emissions over time.

What the Leader of the Opposition has delivered does not do that at all. The member for Flinders only weeks ago, until he was given the new job of coming up with the con job policy that we are debating today, was firmly arguing for an emissions trading scheme, supporting the former Leader of the Opposition, the member for Wentworth, who argued eloquently for an emissions trading scheme. So people listening to this debate and reading the Hansard should not be under any illusions that many of those coalition members opposite believe in the market. They talk about it all the time in here, except on this one issue. They have decided to go absent; they have decided to vacate the economic credibility field. That is what you have done today. You have vacated the field of economic credibility and I look forward to the response from economic writers and researchers on how we actually reduce emissions in the long term when we do not have a price in the market for carbon.

How has it come to this? It has come to this in one simple way, and that is that ultimately the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Abbott, lacks conviction on this issue. He flags himself as a conviction politician but he has no conviction about climate change. In fact, so weak is his conviction on climate change that he has decided to reduce the one significant economic lever that those who are responsible for a national economy can bring to use, which is the price in the marketplace, and he has let it drift absolutely out the window with him downplaying the likely impacts of a four-degree temperature increase in our country, Australia, one of the first to be hit by climate change and one of the hardest affected by increasing temperatures.

Let us reflect in this House on the impact of increases in temperatures which have been identified by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. In their climate statement, they said Australia is clearly getting hotter. It is not going to go away. The Leader of the Opposition cannot wish it away because of some conspiracy on the part of those opposite to want us to do something about climate change. He cannot pretend that sea levels will not rise. Yes, there will be arguments about the degree of rise and the significant scale of impact in one region or another. I say to the Leader of the Opposition: go to the people of the Pacific and have this debate and see how they feel about quibbling about whether we should take real action on climate change and go to the farmers of the Murray-Darling Basin and be fair dinkum with them when you say to them that we are not going to do anything about a price in the market and, in fact, we are going to let those people who are polluting into our atmosphere and producing those carbon emissions not be dealt with at all.

That is the position that the Leader of the Opposition brings into this House. What a travesty! He is on the wrong side of history on this issue and on the wrong side of history with this con job those opposite have dished up to us today. I think that the Australian public will see through it. I am confident that they will. I listened to the contribution of the member for Sturt and the chiding and the snide remarks about the greatest moral challenge of our time. Is it a moral challenge or isn’t it to consider the future of every single Australian in a world that is going to be warmer and likely to suffer significant impacts as a consequence of climate change? On this side of the House, we say it is a fair dinkum challenge and we are willing to do something about it. You just squibble over there, snidely making remarks in the House, playing the petty politics. I am afraid this issue is far too important for the approach that the new coalition, going back to the old coalition under the new Leader of the Opposition, has actually brought forward.

I had a chance to look briefly, on the way into the House, at the policy that the coalition have brought forward. I want to make a number of observations about that policy. I am sure we will have the opportunity to subject it to some high levels of scrutiny over the coming days. You can expect this debate to continue in this parliament where the debate should be undertaken. We will put this particular policy that has been brought forward under the high level of scrutiny that it demands. Other than the fact there is no price in the market for carbon and there is no cap on emissions, I think everybody listening understands that in order to reduce emissions you need to cap them. But the coalition have decided they do not want to cap emissions at all. What are they going to do? They are going to play winners and losers in the sequestration arena in order to get around the issue of not having a price in the market on carbon.

What else don’t the coalition have in this particular policy? They have no mention of energy efficiency in any significant way. Energy efficiency is often remarked upon as being the low hanging fruit in this debate. The sorts of programs that the government has out there that encourage people to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, and at the same time their energy costs, are all about energy efficiency. None of the kind of information we have on websites—the kind of work we are doing with communities and businesses about reducing our overall use of energy, doing it in a smarter, cleaner and greener way and generating employment at the same time—is mentioned in this policy at all. There is no green employment, there is no employment strategy for sustainability; and there is no consideration, incidentally, of what additional energy efficiency measures might be worthwhile having a debate about. The member for Flinders said almost to the day a year ago—I will not be exact on the day—that the coalition were going to bring forward an energy efficiency policy. Now we have a content-light, con job climate policy with no substantial energy efficiency measures in it at all.

While I am referring to the member for Flinders, I want to make two additional observations. The first is about the continuing misrepresentation by the Leader of the Opposition and the member for Flinders of the figure of $1,100 that is alleged to be a cost to the Australian public. I acted for Minister Wong in the first two weeks of January and I had a debate with the Leader of the Opposition on this issue, and it turned out that the opposition leader’s source for this particular number were reports that he had googled. He could not actually provide any specific evidence as to where that figure had arisen from. The member for Flinders continues that kind of misrepresentation by repeating the lie of this $1,100. The fact is that Treasury modelling shows that under the government’s scheme low-income households are, on average, better off under a CPRS. The price impact is around $420, but the assistance to low-income earners is over $600. So the figure not only is completely wrong but also ignores the fact that this government has done what any thoughtful, sensitive to the needs of the Australian community and policy intentional government would do—that is, it is providing for working families and for other people who are affected by any price increase that comes about as we deal with a difficult and serious problem like this. It is providing them with compensation to adjust to those price increases. That is what this particular scheme does.

Before I conclude my remarks in this debate, I want to briefly amplify the other issue that is absolutely critical in this debate and that the Minister Assisting the Minister for Climate Change touched on. The world is on the cusp of a significant transformation of economies, whether it is happening in farm techniques and management, in agriculture, in manufacturing, in industry, in building, in automotive areas, or in the provision of energy. You can see it when you see wind power and wind turbines starting to pop up in the landscape in places where it is appropriate for them to be. That is what the future is all about: producing cleaner, greener energy and having cleaner, greener jobs to go with it. In order to have the investment from the banks and from businesses to actually build that economy and to transform the Australian economy from a big polluting, emissions-intensive economy to a sustainable economy that can build the jobs for the future and build industries for the future, you need to have a policy that gets you there.

The fact is that today in the parliament the Leader of the Opposition has conclusively proven that he does not have a policy to get Australia into a low-carbon future; and the Rudd government does. That deficiency speaks to future jobs right around this country. It speaks to all young Australians who are coming out of schools, colleges and universities. Many young people want to work in the area of climate change. They believe that they can use their brains, their intelligence and their enthusiasm for solving the problem of climate change by coming up with the solutions to enable us to do that. That is what this debate is also about: delivering solutions and opportunities to Australia so that it can transform itself, just as we have in the past. That is why we are such a great nation. But the opposition leader wants to make us into a nation that looks backward and that is fearful of those changes, challenges and opportunities. He wants us to be a nation that does not recognise the kind of impact—and, in fact, does not believe the kind of impact—that not addressing dangerous climate change will have on the coastline, on the Great Barrier Reef, on the farming lands and on our children and their children as well. His policy is devoid of consideration of the national interest and the international interest. We are very, very happy to debate his policy in this parliament and to point out its shortcomings, but we would also say that, with the absence of a solid policy that has been brought forward on this issue by Mr Abbott, you cannot take him seriously on the question of climate change. He does not believe in it, and the policy that he brought forward today does nothing sensible or serious to address it for the future. (Time expired)

Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

For more than two years now, the Labor Party has been telling the Australian people that there is only one way to save the polar bears, there is only one way to save the Great Barrier Reef, and there is only one way to fill the Murray River, and that is Labor’s great big new tax—a CPRS. I have never in my life seen a tax that can actually lower the temperature. I have never seen a tax that can save the Barrier Reef or the polar bears. I have never seen a tax that can perform that kind of miraculous turnabout. Labor’s CPRS has become friendless. Only Labor members and one Independent voted for it in this parliament. No other political party is prepared to support Labor’s CPRS. Increasingly, industry is deserting Labor’s CPRS. Increasingly the Australian public are deserting Labor’s CPRS because it will not work. It will not achieve its objectives. It will do nothing for the environment.

Barry Haase (Kalgoorlie, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It’s a con!

Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a con, as the honourable member interjected. It is a big new tax that will raise money to fill Labor coffers in government but will do nothing to make our climate different or to make our environment better. If the CPRS wanted one final humiliation, one final rejection, it was rejected by the world at the Copenhagen conference. Despite the Prime Minister spending tens of millions of dollars lobbying the world, despite sending a delegation of 120 or 140—or whatever it was—across to Copenhagen for the big talkfest, despite all the propaganda, nobody at Copenhagen was interested in the CPRS. I did not hear anybody talking about a CPRS. The final communique said nothing about a need to have a big new tax to reduce the temperature.

16:37:04 Indeed, there was quite a bit of talk about how they could fund some kind of new world governing body to manage the climate into the future. There was talk about a global tax on financial transactions and the Prime Minister himself was party to discussions about a new tax on aviation and shipping. No-one was interested in the CPRS, but our Prime Minister was so desperate to have new taxes that he was even prepared to talk about a new tax on aviation and shipping.

Last week, we had the Minister for Trade going to London to complain about the British Labour government having introduced a new tax on people travelling to and from the UK. The Minister for Trade, Mr Crean, rightly said that this was a penalty on Australians, a penalty on trade and a penalty on international movements in and out of the UK. Yet our own Prime Minister, only weeks earlier, was advocating a tax on all international movements, which would have been devastating for Australian trade and for Australian business. But no-one was interested in the CPRS. No-one in Copenhagen was the least bit interested in the tax that Labor say we in Australia have to have and if we do not have it then we do not believe in climate change. Labor believe that if we do not have their CPRS in exactly the form they want, we are somehow or other a climate change denier.

I thought it was rather interesting that when President Obama wanted a handful of world leaders to draft a communique coming out of Copenhagen, he did not even invite the ‘friend of the chair’, Kevin Rudd, to participate in the drafting of the communique. In spite of the 100-plus people we had at the conference, President Obama did not think anyone from Australia had any role to play in drafting the Copenhagen communique. The thing was such a fiasco. Labor was so locked into a CPRS that they were not even relevant in the international debates in Copenhagen because the world knows that a big new tax will not deliver for the environment.

How is a higher price for milk going to lower the temperature? How is putting up the cost of a bus ticket going to save the polar bears? How is making everything we do in life, including the education of our children, more expensive through a big new tax going to lower the sea level? Labor have never attempted, and they are not today attempting, to explain how their giant new tax is actually going to alter the climate.

No-one has ever attempted to explain to me how having bankers and traders on the top of a multistorey building in Sydney, Copenhagen or New York selling one another pieces of paper is actually going to make the sea level go down. How are you actually going to reduce the sea level by selling paper to one another? That is simply a nonsense and that is the basis of Labor’s whole giant CPRS taxation scheme. If you actually want to reduce CO2 emissions and if you want to have less carbon in the environment, you have to take direct action. You have to do things. You do not sell paper to one another. You do not set up a massive new bureaucracy.

If you had any doubt about what the real intent of the scheme was, you only have to look at a conference recently held in London that was publicised as being ‘aimed squarely at investment banks, investors and major compliance buyers and focused on how they can profit today from an increasingly diverse range of carbon-related investment opportunities’. The conference was entitled Cashing in on Carbon. So there are winners from a CPRS—the bankers and the traders and, through taxation, the Australian government’s treasury.

It has been suggested that to support the $120 billion CPRS there might be $3 trillion worth of paper traded. So this is a scheme about selling paper. It is not about delivering anything by way of practical action. That is why the coalition have been able to announce today a scheme that will deliver at least as much in carbon reductions as Labor’s CPRS—I think we can do a lot better than the five per cent target—for just a small fraction of the cost, about one-twelfth of the cost.

How can the coalition deliver the same CO2 reductions and meet exactly the same reduction targets on exactly the same timetable for one-twelfth of the cost? The reason is that we will get into it and do it. We use direct action. We do not just trade pieces of paper. We actually do things. The community can be involved in the lowest cost options. The market will decide what the lowest cost options are. We will actually deliver significant reductions and we will do it from the beginning. Our scheme will deliver practical environmental benefits by direct action—by actually doing things rather than putting in place a giant new tax. We will achieve the five per cent target at a lower cost. We will achieve the 140 million tonnes reduction that Labor is aiming to achieve by 2020, but we will do it at a fraction of the cost. There will be direct incentives.

We will impose no additional costs on householders. We do not have to have a compensation scheme because the cost of electricity and the cost of food will not go up. Labor need such a gigantic taxation scheme because they are putting up the cost of everything we do. The cost of milk and bread will go up, so people will have to be compensated for that extra cost of living. The power stations will become nonviable, so they will have to prop them up in order that we have enough electricity to keep going. But, if you do not put up their costs in the first place and you actually reduce their emissions through direct action, you do not need that great big new tax—that increased cost on all Australian consumers. If you are not going to impose those costs, then you can keep the jobs in Australia rather than having manufacturing move to other parts of the world.

I was appalled in question time today to yet again hear the Prime Minister vilifying Australian industry and Australian manufacturers, accusing them of being dirty and a blot on the environment, and criticising power producers, even though they are amongst the most efficient and environmentally friendly in the world. He criticised and vilified those people—the demons that have to be taxed. They have to be persecuted in order to protect Labor’s emissions trading scheme.

But these manufacturers, these power stations, will respond to this new tax in one of two ways. If they can afford to, if they are able to, they will pass on those costs to consumers, so Australian consumers will pay. In some instances, though, they will not be able to do that; they will simply close. So the manufacturers will move to China or India, where there will never be a CPRS, where there will never be an emissions trading scheme. So we lose the jobs, we lose the Australian industry and we import the product from another country. So global emissions will actually go up. The savings we make by closing a power station or cement works in Australia will be more than offset by producing the same commodities in a country where there are no such rules or requirements, where they can export the product back to Australia at a lower cost.

This government need to be honest with the Australian people. They cannot explain how the CPRS is actually going to lower the temperature. They cannot explain how it is going to do things for the environment. They do not even try. The moment anyone makes any criticism of the CPRS, they are immediately dismissed as a climate change denier, somebody who does not want to do anything to make our environment better. That is a very low standard of debate—name-calling rather than dealing with the facts or explaining them to the Australian people. Is it any wonder that they are deserting this scheme? They no longer believe that it can work for them; they just see it for what it really is: a great big tax. They want direct action. They want a program of measures that will deliver results, and that is what they have today—an agenda for real action.

The second thing Labor need to do is explain it to the people who are going to lose their jobs. They need to explain it not just to those people who are going to have to pay higher costs for almost everything that they do but also to those people who will lose their jobs because an Australian industry has closed and will instead operate out of China or another country where there is no new tax scheme of this nature. We have already had the case of the cement works in Rockhampton—and I notice the member for Capricornia has chosen this moment to walk out of the parliament. Here is a case of an Australian factory closing. This factory closes and they say they are doing it because of Labor’s CPRS, that it is cheaper to import the cement from China. Then, on the other side, China’s emissions from producing cement are substantially higher than what that factory in Rockhampton would have produced. Those circumstances are an illustration of what is going to happen around the world—Australian companies will be taxed out of existence and other products will be imported from other parts of the world.

We are delivering a scheme that will not increase electricity prices and will not increase grocery prices. It will protect Australian business from sudden and massive rising costs. It will actually deliver a more productive country. The work and the incentives we will provide—the work with carbon sequestration in our farms, the better use of biochar and a range of other soil technologies—will actually make our country more productive. Labor want to put farmers out of business. They want to make food processing uneconomic in this country. They want to withdraw water and other resources from Australian farms. We want to make them more productive. We want to be able to produce more food even though we are in a situation where the environment may be more trying than it has been in the past. And it can be done. There are many people around the country who have told the minister that it can be done, but he will not defend them. He will not stand up for them. He is not prepared to have these new technologies encouraged and implemented in Australia as part of a worthwhile direct action plan to deliver CO2 reductions in our country.

We need to also provide direct incentives to reduce emissions through better use of solar technology and some of the other exciting new technologies that are around. In Labor’s CPRS there is not one dollar for extra research, not one new dollar for developing any kind of new technology. There is no hope offered in that scheme; it is just a taxation system. It is a way for the government to raise hundreds of millions of dollars which will be spent in buying permits from Russia and China and others, while our scheme will create Australian jobs and spend Australian money on abatement measures in Australia. The government would prefer to have people buying pieces of paper from the Russians or the Chinese or anybody else who will sell them and be involved in this trading scheme, which will simply put up the cost of everything we do in Australia. There is a way to address climate change issues without a great big tax. We have heard something of it today—a scheme that will deliver direct action and direct results and will do it better and faster. (Time expired)

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When I was studying, there used to be people from one of the mad, Trotskyite, socialist-style groups—they were always very lonely people, about 40 years older than any other student—selling a newspaper called Direct Action around the university. I do not think anyone ever bought it, but Direct Action was being made available for sale. But, as we find today with Tony Abbott’s policy, no-one bought it. Today we have a debate initiated by the Leader of the Opposition in a brand new way. It is not uncommon for a Leader of the Opposition to demand a debate; it is very uncommon for a Leader of the Opposition to be given one and then look at the Speaker and say: ‘You mean I have to make a speech?’ That is exactly how it began today. The Leader of the Opposition was shocked that demanding a debate would lead to him beginning it with a speech. That is something you do not see.

We just had a strange allegation from the Leader of the National Party. He made a whole lot of claims against any emissions trading scheme—ignoring the fact that he was in a cabinet that endorsed one and ignoring the fact that he was in the cabinet that agreed that this was the correct method to use. Now, the concept that the Leader of the National Party was asleep during cabinet is probably not a difficult conclusion for people to get to, but his willingness to front this parliament and run arguments diametrically opposed to everything he was arguing three years ago and everything that that side of politics was arguing not that many months ago is crazy.

16:52:00 But there is a bigger problem with what has been announced today: it fails its own most basic test. The document that was released today by the Leader of the Opposition was meant to be his way of showing that you could still reach a five per cent reduction in emissions by 2020 under the international carbon accounting rules without the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. It is agreed across the board, and it is in the Leader of the Opposition’s document, that to get to five per cent you have to have a 140-million tonne reduction in CO2. Of the 140 million tonnes of CO2 reduction in this document, 85 million tonnes are in soils which are not counted under the international accounting rules. This document, by its own reckoning, only gets to a less than two per cent reduction. They have presented this as their argument, under international carbon accounting rules, to have a reduction of five per cent. Under the international carbon accounting rules, three-fifths of that relies on something which is not counted at all under those rules. In this document, 85 million tonnes of CO2 do not get counted towards the five per cent target they are taking on. Under their own benchmark that they have set today, where they said they would be able to provide a method of reduction in emissions that would give you a five per cent reduction under the international carbon accounting rules, what have they come up with? Less than two per cent is actually able to be counted under the carbon accounting rules.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Just plain wrong.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The only way we get the member for Mackellar saying ‘No, but it will end up being counted’ is if you have complete faith that everything that we want in our negotiating strategy will become part of a binding international agreement. If you believe that is going to happen, then at that stage the opposition have committed to moving from five per cent to 15 or 25. So under the premises that they set—

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You’re wrong.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I love the refutation from the member for Mackellar, ‘Oh, you’re wrong.’ There is a great level of intellect going on there. The cogency of the argument really shows that we have got someone who understands and is on the cutting edge of climate change. We are so glad you are back on the frontbench. You have no idea how happy we are about that.

Of their 140 million tonnes, 85 million tonnes does not get counted under the international carbon accounting rules. They said they could get to a five per cent reduction by 2020 without a carbon pollution reduction scheme. At best, they have got two per cent of the way, but under the document they have released today they have no chance of making it even halfway.

It is not the only problem with the proposals that the opposition have released today. There is no money for agricultural R&D. There is no cap. There is no penalty for continuing with business as usual if you are a big polluter. There is an increased cost for families but not one dollar of assistance for families. There is no surprise as to why they have landed in this sort of territory. The Leader of the Opposition has said previously that he reckons climate change is crap and he has confirmed that again today with this policy. His climate change plan is nothing more than a climate con job. It took about three hours from the time they released it to work out they have not even made it halfway to the benchmark they themselves said they would set today.

No money for agricultural R&D is a big failing. Let us not forget that when we came to office we promised an extra $15 million for research and development into agriculture, fisheries and forestry. We then changed that $15 million to $46.2 million because of the importance of research and development in this area. Then, when we had the agreement across the chamber for the amendments, we added a further $50 million in agricultural R&D. Today, the opposition come back and turn that figure into zero—not one dollar for agricultural research and development.

The R&D part of it is so important because, if you get this right, you can actually get an alignment between a lower emissions path and improvements in productivity. You can do that. You start to look at emissions as another form of farm waste. Anything that is being produced on a farm that you are not getting a return from is therefore a form of farm waste. If you reduce that, you improve your productivity and you improve your profit. That is why we have been engaging in research into methods of better feed efficiency in livestock. That is why we have been looking at methods of lowering nitrous oxide emissions in the use of fertiliser. With fertiliser prices going up again, as they have started to do in only recent weeks, if you can lower your nitrous oxide emissions farmers can also benefit by having production methods where they have to buy less fertiliser. These are real productivity gains and they are made possible through cutting-edge research and development and with our having some of the best agricultural scientists in the world. The government says, ‘We promised $15 million, we turned that into $46.2 million and then we added a further $50 million in this area’. The opposition’s response: zero—not one dollar for agricultural R&D.

The next problem with the proposal that has come out today is that there is no cap. The coalition kept going on with the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and talking about the trading of carbon permits, but at no point did they acknowledge that the starting point and first principle in any cap-and-trade scheme is not the trade. The first principle of cap-and-trade is the cap. That is the bit they forgot about because it is quite possible, under the proposal they have given us today, for emissions to go up. Under the proposals that have been put forward by the opposition today, there is nothing that prevents emissions from going up because there is no cap on carbon pollution. Of all the different ideas about how you deal with climate change, this is the first time I think we have seen a proposal that allows for more CO2 to be put into the atmosphere. That is what the opposition have given us. In terms of creative policy thinking, it gets a tick for the creative part, but that is about all.

It is madness to think that they would come back with a proposal that allows emissions to go up. But then they say, ‘If the big polluters go any further than business as usual, at that point there will be a penalty.’ Might I remind the House: do the opposition think the big polluters will just absorb that penalty or do they think it will be passed on to consumers? The moment it gets passed on to consumers, that will mean increased costs for families being offered by those opposite but not one dollar of assistance for those families.

They have managed to come up with a system where prices can go up but there is nothing to help working families—no assistance at all, unless they presume that no business will grow under their proposal. Maybe that is the presumption—it is consistent with how they approached the stimulus package. Maybe that is the way they want to work their economic theory. They have proposed a situation where the moment you go beyond business as usual there will be increased costs for families, unless the big polluters show an extraordinary level of goodwill and they just say: ‘Forget the executive salaries. Forget the share price. We’re just going to absorb the cost. We’re not going to pass it on to the consumers.’ Unless their level of fantasy has become that bizarre, the opposition have proposed a situation where there is no doubt that increased prices will get passed straight back to the consumer, straight back to households, without one dollar of assistance.

A lot has been said in the parliament today about dairy, because dairy uses a tremendous amount of electricity. Let us not forget what was in the agreement about food processing that the government put to the parliament last year. We promised a five-year, $150 million stream of assistance for the food processing sector to be established within the Climate Change Action Fund. Where were we giving priority for that stream of assistance? Dairy processing, meat processing and malt production facilities. In those three areas, we had a $150 million stream of assistance. Under the proposal from those opposite, for any dairy operation that is business as usual, from whatever baseline they choose, there will be no penalty. But their message to every dairy producer is: ‘Don’t you dare expand because the moment you expand your business there will be penalties. There will be no assistance for you in moving to a low-emissions pathway. When you pass those prices on to the consumer, there will be no household assistance for all those consumers at all.’

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is not right.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Oh! We have moved from ‘wrong’ to ‘It is not right.’ At least now the member for Mackellar has discovered the sentence. I welcome her to the world of the sentence. We will move on to the paragraph maybe by the end of this year.

Then there is the important issue of soil carbon, an area that we must do something about. In the agreement at the end of last year, the government put forward the national carbon offset standard. We never pretended the national carbon offset standard would count towards our international obligations. We were quite explicit about the fact that this was for sources not counted towards Australia’s international commitments—for example, for agricultural soils, enhanced forest management, non-forest revegetation and vegetation management. That was agreed at the end of last year. Under the national carbon offset standard, additional to our international commitments, we were creating an opportunity for farmers to be able to participate in soil carbon work, to enhance their productivity directly and to be able to do good work, not yet counted for internationally, in sequestering carbon into the soil.

The opposition have taken that concept and are pretending it can be counted internationally. At the moment, it cannot. You cannot even get to two per cent under the opposition’s document before you get to a total reliance on agricultural soils. The document released today, from the beginning to the end, is a climate con job. It was meant to present reductions in emissions of five per cent. It does not even get you to two. It does not work. It does not require anything of polluters. There is no cap on pollution. It slugs taxpayers instead of big polluters. Unfunded, it can only lead to higher taxes. The climate con job does less, costs more and will mean higher taxes.

Ms Julie Bishop (Curtin, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thedifferent approach to environmental and climate change challenges, so evident in the House today, is emblematic of the stark contrast between Labor’s policies and beliefs and the coalition’s policies and beliefs. It is the difference between the two parties. Labor stand for bigger and bigger government and higher taxes. Labor’s answer to any problem is to throw more money at it. If they have to borrow, they borrow more and keep handing it out. In the case of climate change, the government are talking about $114 billion over nine years to 2020—a tax on the Australian people. That is Labor’s answer to the challenges of the environment and climate change. Labor believe in megabureaucracies. Labor are addicted to debt—massive public debt to fund their vote-buying sprees. Their emissions trading tax represents bigger government, massive taxes, huge bureaucracies and vote buying in an election year, and every year thereafter. In contrast, the coalition believe and have always believed in smaller government, less government interference, innovation and enterprise, the creativity of the Australian people and lower taxes and fiscal responsibility.

Labor invariably and inevitably leaves behind a mountain of debt and invariably and inevitably the coalition has to pay it off to ensure that future generations of Australians, those whom the Prime Minister professes to be so concerned about, are not burdened by profligate Labor debt. Remember what we did in 1996 when we had to pay off Labor’s $96 billion debt and had to find the $10 billion each year that was needed to meet the interest payments on that massive debt. That was the response of the coalition to the first Intergenerational report on the ageing of the population in 2002. That is what our response was: pay off Labor’s massive debt, the crippling debt that we inherited, so that future generations were not punished by having to pay off Labor’s debt. And the Labor government has done it again, except this time it will be a $120 billion debt, and rising.

On climate change and the government’s approach to it, the government’s great big new tax is not about saving the environment. It has never been about saving the environment. The Prime Minister has never had an environmental agenda. It has only ever been a political agenda. The Prime Minister knows that a great big tax on everything in Australia will not reduce global emissions—he knows that—yet that is what he is seeking to foist on Australian families. This great big new tax is all about the Prime Minister’s desire to hand out bribes in an election year and every year thereafter. That is Labor’s claim to economic responsibility—borrow to the hilt and then hand it out. True to Labor tradition, the government has blown the budget and now needs to raise taxes, and the Prime Minister is cynically using the fig leaf of emissions trading. This is all about raising a massive tax on the Australian people for the government’s coffers.

Members will remember that, before the Copenhagen conference, the Prime Minister described climate change as the ‘greatest moral, economic and environmental challenge of our generation’. ‘The bigger the cuts to emissions the better’, he claimed. He tried to scare the living daylights out of Australians with story after story of an environmental Armageddon that would come to Australia unless deep cuts were made to emissions in this country and that could only be done by a tax. That was what the Prime Minister said. And remember the government’s countdown to Copenhagen—‘50 days until the end of the Earth unless we pass the emissions trading scheme legislation’; ‘25 days to Copenhagen’. The coalition urged caution and repeatedly said that no legislation should be passed before Copenhagen. We pointed out that it was prudent to see what commitments were made by the rest of the world prior to locking Australia into a position. But, no, the Prime Minister insisted that Australia had to lead the world by being the only nation on Earth prepared to send jobs offshore and emissions offshore by a great big tax imposed on the Australian people. Australia is responsible for 1.4 per cent of global emissions. We could cut our emissions deeply and devastate our economy yet have no impact whatsoever on global emissions if the major emitters did not reduce their emissions.

The nations of the world gathered at Copenhagen last December, and what happened? Well, the conference started very badly when a draft document was leaked—a document which had Prime Minister Rudd’s paw prints all over it—which infuriated developing countries and things went from bad to worse as the conference descended into a farce. There were reports of heavy-handed tactics, including by the Prime Minister of Australia, against smaller nations in the Pacific and others. India labelled Prime Minister Rudd as an ayatollah, such was his behaviour at Copenhagen. News back home broke of the Prime Minister’s entourage at Copenhagen—114 people at last count; a bigger contingent than far larger economies, far larger populations, far larger emitters. The Prime Minister’s entourage knocked up a carbon footprint you could not jump over—something like 1,800 tonnes of carbon emitted just flying his entourage to Copenhagen. But most distressing for the Prime Minister was the fact that the man who was so keen to lead the world on climate change, was so keen to be the friend of the chair and centre stage at Copenhagen, was locked out of the final discussions that led to the watered down accord—incidentally, basically requiring no country to do anything.

After the failure of Copenhagen—the conference upon which this Prime Minister staked his leadership and his credibility; a conference universally seen as a failure by all but the Prime Minister of Australia—instead of admitting that he got it wrong, the Prime Minister hid in Kirribilli for a couple of weeks, no doubt licking his wounds, pouting and probably swearing at the staff and kicking his cat or dog or whoever features in his kiddies’ book, and then emerged to announce that, in the face of the failure of Copenhagen, he was still ideologically committed to a great big new tax on the Australian people which will do nothing to reduce global emissions.

The government proposes to reintroduce its great big tax legislation today—legislation that has no friends. The Minerals Council of Australia, which represents a major sector of the Australian economy, said today in a media release:

The failure of the Copenhagen climate change talks underscored the need to promote and adopt economically conservative climate change policies aligned with the rate of development of policies and actions across the rest of the world.

It went on to say:

There is no point trying to lead the world with aggressive climate change schemes if the major economies are not interested in following—or worse still, regard Australia’s initiatives as an example of what not to do.

The Copenhagen fiasco amply demonstrated that the major economies and Australia’s export competitors have no appetite for radical CPRS-style economic re-engineering in response to climate change.

The proposed CPRS—

the government’s emissions trading scheme legislation—

remains the most costly emissions trading scheme in the world—while failing to deliver material reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions.

This government scheme is damned by all yet this Prime Minister insists on foisting this tax on the Australian people.

So while the Prime Minister’s political strategy is evident, it also reveals his contempt for the Australian public by trying to lock Australia into a flawed emissions trading scheme. The Prime Minister is more than willing to sacrifice jobs. He has ignored all warnings to date about job losses. He is more than willing to cause serious and long-term damage to the Australian economy—and he is on track to do just that with his scheme—while having no impact on reducing global emissions. As the National Generators Forum said today in a media release:

The NGF does not support the federal government’s CPRS in its current form. The CPRS badly damages the asset values of generating businesses, which creates serious risks for energy security and investment.

That is a statement by the National Generators Forum.

As we have noted, the Prime Minister has on numerous occasions described climate change as the ‘greatest moral challenge of our generation’. One would have thought that the ‘greatest moral challenge of our generation’ would have required one of the greatest debates of our nation. But the Prime Minister is still insisting that it is his way or the highway and refuses to explain to the Australian people how his emissions trading tax will work.

We know that the emissions trading scheme will fundamentally restructure our economy over time. It will have a fundamental impact on the Australian economy. But, according to a recent poll, while a majority of Australians want action on climate change, only about five per cent said they knew what an emissions trading scheme was. The Prime Minister of this country is cynically trading on that lack of understanding of the complexity of his scheme. There has been no public education program from the government. There has been no information to the Australian public on what an emissions trading scheme is or what a carbon pollution reduction scheme is. There has been very little detailed analysis of Labor’s scheme. The Prime Minister refuses to answer questions in question time in the people’s house about what it will cost families. There has been virtually no information provided by the government on what it will cost Australians in terms of increased energy costs or increased electricity costs in particular—the increased overall costs of living for Australians. This is a deliberate Labor strategy to keep people in the dark—literally—and to suppress information that would reveal the failings of Labor’s scheme and the cynical politics behind the introduction again of an emissions trading scheme that has been rejected by all the political parties in this House.

According to a recent international report, Australia is the country most likely to be disadvantaged by the transition to a low-carbon economy. That is because our economy has been built on cheap and plentiful energy, in the main from burning coal. So wouldn’t you expect the government to explain to the Australian people how this transition to a low-carbon economy will take place through the imposition of a massive tax? It is this lack of appropriate scrutiny, public discussion and debate on the government’s great big tax that is causing so much concern amongst the Australian people. If anyone questions the Prime Minister or challenges him on any of his assumptions to do with climate change, they are immediately denounced as a climate change denier or a climate change sceptic. It is this vicious, nasty suppression of debate that so concerns the Australian public.

The coalition today has released a sensible, pragmatic environmental policy based on direct action. It is affordable, it is understandable and it is environmentally and economically responsible. It takes advantage of some of Australia’s greatest natural assets, the soil and the sun—and Australia has plenty of both. While it stands on its own as a responsible environmental policy, it shows unquestionably that there is another way, there is a better way, than the Prime Minister’s great big tax on the Australian people. It shows that the Prime Minister was trying to con the Australian people that there was only one way to tackle global emissions, and that was to slug Australians with a great big tax. Australians will welcome the debate that has been caused as a result of the release of the coalition’s sensible policy. As the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry said in its statement today:

It is in the public interest for there to be a strong contest of policy ideas about climate change responses before we impose major or unilateral adjustment costs on our economy, and the Coalition statement—

that is, the policy released by the coalition—according to the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, does just that. It contributes to that strong contest of policy ideas. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry went on to say:

ACCI has consistently pointed to the fact that internationally there are a range of proposals which have been put forward to deal with this environmental and economic challenge.

Business welcomes a debate on these and other ideas proceeding in Australia in the interests of finding the most effective and economically sustainable approach.

Since the Copenhagen conference in December 2009 the global dynamic has shifted and it is clear the likelihood of international agreement with clear and binding targets will not be achievable at least in the medium term.

Given the uncertainty now existing after Copenhagen over what other nations will do, a domestic policy approach that provides more carrot than stick tends to reflect the temper of the times.

This Prime Minister is ignoring the temper of the times. He has got his head in the sand over the failure of Copenhagen, which so destroyed his credibility on the whole economical issue. He is ignoring the impost on the Australian people. He is contemptuously disregarding their concerns about how they can afford a great big new tax on top of having to pay back the great big massive debt that Labor has racked up in just two years in government.

The coalition’s policy has been endorsed by a range of people, from the National Association of Forest Industries to the National Farmers Federation, because they understand that Australia cannot afford the great big new tax to be imposed on the Australian people by the Rudd government. The coalition stands for a sensible environmental economic policy that will reduce emissions but not slug Australians with a tax. (Time expired)

Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today we are witnessing the logical outcome of the complete implosion of the Liberal Party that we saw in early December last year, with the replacement of the former leader, the member for Wentworth, by the member for Warringah as Leader of the Liberal Party. What we are seeing now is a direct return to John Howard by the self-confessed love child of John Howard, but unfortunately it is John Howard prior to his embracement of an emissions trading scheme. So it is John Howard in the original version of denial of the reality of climate change and seeking to put forward a smokescreen to pretend to the Australian people that he would do something about it were he elected to office. Like Louis XVI, the member for Warringah, the Leader of the Opposition, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. We are witnessing today a direct return to the pre-2007 John Howard of pretending to do something about climate change, and the policy that has been put forward by the Liberal Party today is simply a cobbled together con job.

What has been presented to the Australian people today is simply a list of feelgood spending programs with no clear link to reductions in emissions, no attempt to change behaviour, no strategy to do more if a stronger global agreement does emerge and, in particular, no source of funding. That, of course, in my role, is a matter of some interest to me. You might recall that the government, in the wake of the global financial crisis and the great damage that that crisis wreaked upon the budget, adopted a set of budget rules with respect to government spending. We are complying with those rules.

I would remind the House what those rules consist of: first, that, when growth returns to trend average, which is a fraction above three per cent, we will keep spending growth to two per cent real per annum until such time as the budget returns to surplus; and, second, that new spending proposals over that period will be offset by savings. Members may wish to look at the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook which was published towards the end of last year. We did actually put forward savings in those papers which more than offset the new spending that inevitably occurred in the period from the budget to the publication of MYEFO. Now, in an election year, we have an opposition that is again repeating its claim that, if it is elected to government, it will have a lower deficit and a lower debt figure than is currently projected under the Rudd government. If this means anything at all, it means that they have to abide, at the very least, by the same rule that the government has put in place: namely, when they put forward spending proposals, they have to offset them with savings—they have to demonstrate where that money is coming from. If they are to have any credibility whatsoever on fiscal management, if their claims to produce a lower deficit and lower debt are to have any credibility at all, then, when they come forward with major spending proposals, they have to offset them—they have to indicate how they are going to pay for them.

The state of play when the Leader of the Opposition took office only a couple of months ago was this: we had a number of unfunded big promises from the opposition hanging out there in the ether, like a commitment to reduce petrol excise by 5c per litre, a commitment to give capital gains tax rollover relief to small business and a commitment to reinstitute the Investing In Our Schools Program—all of which would cost, in total, billions of dollars, with not a single offset in savings initiative attached. On top of that we have the vandalism by the opposition in the Senate, knocking over government legislation designed to legislate savings in respective budgets. The most outrageous vandalism has been the defence of private health insurance subsidies for millionaires, which would cost the budget around $9 billion over the forthcoming 10 years, but there have been others. They are still blocking our attempt to reform the provision of Commonwealth dental services. They blocked the government’s attempt to reform the Medicare rebate for cataract surgery. There have been numerous instances of blocking government initiatives in the Senate, all of which have created or are creating costs to the budget.

So far, none of these things have changed under the new Leader of the Opposition. None of the previous big-spending, unfunded promises have been repudiated; none of the vandalism against the government’s budget in the Senate has changed. Instead, we have had further unfunded commitments. Only a week or so ago the Leader of the Opposition was out there pronouncing a new strategy to save the Murray-Darling, saying that he would employ large numbers of people to go out there and do various things—‘Yes, this could cost up to $750 million per year, but, hey, it’s a really important objective so what’s a bit of money between friends?’

Now, of course, we have exactly the same approach being taken with respect to climate change. The announcement today envisages that the cost of the opposition’s proposals over a period of four years would be a little more than $3.2 billion. That, I remind the House, is more than the overall, net cost over 10 years of the original emissions trading scheme, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, the government put to this parliament. The net cost to the budget of that scheme when originally proposed to the parliament was about $2.5 billion. The proposal that the opposition has put forward today actually costs more than that in its first four years. The net cost of the government’s proposal over 10 years was $2.5 billion, and the bulk of that was up-front. Beyond 10 years it would have had no additional cost.

There is a notable, very interesting section in the document that was circulated by the Leader of the Opposition today which I think says it all about the credibility of the opposition with respect to both climate change and also fiscal management. I would like to quote the document:

Funding for these initiatives will be provided through normal budget processes as part of the coalition’s fiscal strategy. The coalition will release details of its overall fiscal strategy based on the budgetary updates to be provided by Treasury prior to the election.

To me, this sounds awfully like, ‘We’ll tell you after the election.’ There are a couple of key giveaway phrases in those sentences. The first one is ‘normal budget processes’. Who is in charge of normal budget processes? I think that would be governments, not oppositions. So, in other words: ‘We will provide for these things somehow’—unspecified under normal budget processes—that is, ‘after you’ve elected us to government.’ The other giveaway phrase is ‘overall fiscal strategy’. In the second sentence that I quoted it says that the coalition will release details of its ‘overall fiscal strategy,’ not the clear details line by line, item by item, specific spending cut by specific spending cut, but an ‘overall fiscal strategy’. That will probably end up being half-a-dozen dot points of motherhood statements about how they are committed to reining in waste and all of those usual stand-by phrases that ultimately mean very little.

In case honourable members do not think that we speak with credibility on this point, in opposition I as shadow finance minister announced, in an election year, about three billion dollars worth of specific opposition savings initiatives. That was in early March of 2007, only about a month further into the year than we are now. Some of those announcements were painful. Some of them attracted some flak and some controversy. But we wore that. Those commitments have been implemented, and of course we have subsequently implemented a much larger array of savings initiatives. So I would challenge the Leader of the Opposition to give an unequivocal commitment that, prior to the election, the funding that he has committed his party to today will be matched by specific savings. I challenge him to give an unequivocal commitment that prior to the election he will advise the Australian people of the detail of where that money is coming from.

It would be interesting to speculate about what the rest of his party thinks about what has been announced today. How, for example, do the members for Tangney and the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate respond to the commitment of $3.2 billion of taxpayers’ money to do something that they think is a communist conspiracy, to do something that is directly at odds with their view about what is happening? A big proportion of the Liberal Party actually thinks that climate change is a giant fraud or a communist conspiracy, yet they are now standing here supporting the commitment of the Leader of the Opposition to spend $3.2 billion of taxpayers’ money on it. Of course, the opposition leader himself described in a meeting in Beaufort only late last year the whole concept of climate change as ‘crap’. Perhaps on the other side of the spectrum there is the member for Wentworth, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, who has just spoken, the member for Sturt, the member for Flinders and the member for North Sydney—all leading figures in the Liberal Party—who supported an emissions trading scheme and who supported the ultimate compromise worked out between the government and the then opposition in their party room. What do they think about these proposals that have been announced today?

It would also be interesting to know what the member for Goldstein thinks about them, given that not so long ago he was, if I remember correctly, the shadow minister for emissions trading. I do not recall him being the shadow minister against emissions trading, but it seems that that is his current position. We do know, though, that there is one group on the opposition benches that is absolutely cheering, whooping and hollering about what has been announced today. They are of course our old mates, the National Party. When you look at the detail of what has been announced by the opposition leader today, out of that $3.2 billion commitment, $2.5 billion—the vast bulk of it—is committed to something that is called the emissions reduction fund. When you actually look at the document that has been put forward by the Leader of the Opposition and seek an explanation about what this is, all you can find is a very vague, general outline and claims, for example, that this fund would involve ‘less complexity, less bureaucracy’—that is a heading—and, ‘It will not require a lengthy and complex development process.’

That is all code for giant National party slush fund. That is all that means. This is Regional Partnerships on steroids. This is yet again a return to the big spending, phoney, pretend-you-are-doing-something-while-you-are-stuffing-money-down-the-throats-of-your-mates Howard government political strategy. That is at the very heart of the announcement of the Leader of the Opposition today. This is pure John Howard: pretend you are tackling a problem, pretend you are dealing with the issue, but in the meantime waste lots of taxpayers’ money and hand it over to your mates. The giveaway is in this emissions reduction fund.

The interesting thing that shows you what a fraud this all is is that in the emissions reduction fund section it says, ‘We are not going to be rewarding people or penalising people for doing things outside “business as usual.”‘ The message is clear: business as usual is okay. This misses the whole point. Business as usual is the problem. Business as usual is what is driving the increase in emissions both in this country and around the world. If we stick with business as usual, then we end up with all of the potentially extreme consequences of climate change both in this country and elsewhere. It is about changing business as usual that the whole exercise is dedicated to. This is the real giveaway. What a fraud, what a failure, this whole exercise is. It shows what a great con job it is.

The Leader of the Opposition today has demonstrated why he is a giant risk and why Australians should be very concerned about the prospect of him becoming Prime Minister. He is a risk to the economy, he is a risk to the budget and he is a risk to addressing climate change. On 19 March 2008, in a statement as the member for Warringah while pursuing an issue in his electorate, he said in this place:

We are all Australians. We all deserve a share of government largesse.

Just like his big-spending, phoney mentor, Mr Howard, the Leader of the Opposition does not change his spots. The policy he has announced today is a giant con job and the Australian people will reject it as the fraud it is.

Andrew Robb (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Coalition Policy Development Committee) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

About 16 months ago when I assumed responsibilities for climate change within the coalition to examine the merit of a deeply flawed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme put up by the government, the first call I got the next morning at 20 to seven was from a friend of mine who runs a cattle station in the Northern Territory. He has 10,000 to 12,000 head of cattle. He said to me, ‘Andrew, I see you have some new responsibilities and I just want to let you know what I have been up and I want to make a request.’ He said that for the last four years he had been funding his own research at an institute in Alice Springs into the capture of CO2 in mulga. He said to me, ‘Andrew, whatever you do in the next 16 months, make sure you develop a scheme which will provide the incentive and the opportunity for me to develop the mulga on my place’—his hundreds of square miles where he can improve what has been a quite degraded arid region because of overstocking in the early development of the Northern Territory. He said, ‘There are huge productivity gains, but I cannot afford to do it unless there is some incentive. Whatever you do in the next 16 months, provide some opportunity because there is so much that can be done out here.’

When Professor Garnaut released his report, my attention was drawn to his comments about the opportunities for enhancing the very degraded areas of our arid region by encouraging the owners, the cattlemen. In this case, my friend, who is 68 years of age, had been funding it long before anyone had started really talking in Australia about the design of schemes. I saw in the Garnaut report that Professor Garnaut estimated that the restoration of mulga in the arid regions would contribute up to 250 million tonnes of CO2 per year for many, many decades. That is nearly twice our target for 2020. The Garnaut report also of course looked at other agricultural areas, such as crop land and high-volume grazing land, and the opportunity to apply good agricultural practice further than it had been to capture CO2 and rehabilitate or enhance the productive capacity of crop land and high-volume grazing land. His estimate was that there was another 354 million tonnes of CO2 for many decades in that part of the agricultural sector. This government has never mentioned the arid region. There is no focus on the arid region. That partly, I think, reflects the city based attitudes of those opposite. In the design of most of their policy they ignore the bush. They have ignored the opportunity out there in terms of carbon reduction. They have ignored the arid region and they have ignored other agricultural regions.

We are talking about a total of 600 million tonnes—which is about equivalent to the emissions we produce across the nation now—just in agriculture. If we captured that opportunity, we could meet all of our requirements, I suspect, for decades. What it does confirm is that there is every common sense in having a focus on incentives and not a punitive tax. My friend who owns a cattle station has lived in the Northern Territory all his life. If he was taxed then he would have less ability to work with the mulga, to replant, to increase the productive capacity and at the same time to store many tonnes of carbon. What the Garnaut report and what my friend have crystallised is that there is every sense in having a focus on agriculture in the arid region and in other areas.

The member for Watson has just sought in this House to suggest that it is not possible to do this. Well, of course it is possible. You could give incentives today. This government could be working today to give incentives in these areas without waiting many years to implement a scheme. It is certainly possible. He talked about the international carbon accounting rules. Of course, very disingenuously and selectively, he did not acknowledge what was said in the paper released today by the coalition. That paper quite explicitly states:

… soil carbons are not recognised under existing Kyoto Treaty arrangements, any new global CO2 emissions reduction agreement is expected to include soil carbons.

Our paper went on to say in particular:

… draft US emissions reduction legislation specifically includes soil carbons, and without their inclusion it is unlikely that a global agreement will be reached.

I went to Washington in the fortnight after the Waxman-Markey bill was passed by the lower house there. I went to see what was in the bill and what the attitudes were of people on both sides of the house and of industry. I met with nine industry groups. I met with senators from both sides of the house. What was very clear in what was said to me was that that US draft bill includes agriculture and provides an opportunity for agriculture to be very much part of the international carbon accounting rules. I was told in no uncertain terms that no global agreement would be agreed to by the United States unless agriculture was included.

The member for Watson stood up here and sought to mislead the public in terms of what our paper said, what is likely to happen and the opportunities. If we ignore what is going on in the United States, in China and in other areas where big competitors exist then we will perpetuate the core problem with much of the government’s scheme in front of us—that is, it is too far ahead of the rest of the world. It does not accept what is taking place in the design of schemes or the progress in other parts of the world.

Now the Australian people have a choice before them on the question of dealing with emissions abatement and emissions reduction. They have a choice between a practical, direct action approach to reducing emissions or a great big new tax which carries huge risks for jobs, for the cost of living and living standards, and for many industries. It carries huge risks. Not only that, the Australian people have a choice between a practical, direct action scheme which is understandable. This will be very clear to people. You give an incentive to a 68-year-old cattleman in the Northern Territory, he undertakes then to plant a certain quantity of new mulga across hundreds of square miles on his property, and that captures CO2. Try and explain to me how the ETS works. I bet the frontbench on the other side could not explain how it works. Certainly the backbench cannot. Certainly the Minister for Climate Change and Water in two years has not been able to, and nor has the Prime Minister. There were discussions at Christmas barbeques all over Australia where people scratched their heads and tried to work out what the hell the ETS was. How did it work? How does paying billions of dollars of taxes—and miraculously increasing the price of electricity by 25 per cent, increasing the cost of grocery bills each week by many dollars and increasing the price of everything in this country—reduce carbon emissions? They have not explained it. They have not stood up here in the House and explained it on any occasion. It is incomprehensible and should not be supported.

People now have a choice between an incentive based scheme or a highly punitive penalty based game. What do you think will be the psychology of people in that regard? I think people will cooperate. If a 68-year-old cattleman who has been there all his life took an initiative at his own expense to do something about it nearly eight years ago, it does show where people’s heads are at. If you give them an incentive and give them some assistance to do what they can do, things will happen. People have a choice now between an affordable $10 billion scheme or an economically crushing $115 billion scheme. Our scheme is much, much cheaper while meeting the same targets in 2020.

In the scheme that is being proposed by the government, they will auction 70 per cent of all of the permits in the second year. They will issue permits for all of the CO2 production in the country. They will auction 70 per cent and take that money. In the first year it is about $11 billion or $12 billion. The first year in taxes is the cost of our scheme over the whole period through until 2020. They will tax that money. It is 70 per cent of all permits being auctioned. Let’s look at what is happening elsewhere in the world, at what the EU put up as the beacon of emissions trading schemes. They auction four per cent of permits. They get a tax revenue of four per cent of all permits. The Prime Minister and the Labor government will get 70 per cent of all permits. This is massively ahead of the rest of the world.

In the US scheme, which is in a draft form and still to be debated—and it could take two years before it ever gets through the House, if it does at all—15 per cent are being auctioned, not the Australian 70 per cent. We are so far ahead of the world that if we pass this ETS we will be absorbing enormous risks. That is why, if we do pass this scheme with those big risks, we will expose ourselves to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, because industry here will be trying to absorb that tax and pass it on to consumers, where their competitors in other countries have none of that tax. We will export jobs and export emissions if we go along with the government’s scheme. People now have a choice: they can get the same target without that loss of jobs, without industries being put under threat and potentially investing overseas, without any of the fear, uncertainty and confusion that exists in regard to this emissions trading scheme—and, what is more, without a massive big tax of $112 billion or $115 billion coming off the balance sheets of Australian companies which have been the strongest in the world on resources and energy. We are good at it. We have had 150 years of resources and energy. Their balance sheets will be intact so that they can invest in low-emission technology, which we can export.

We can lead the world with the technology. That is possible with our scheme, with a direct action scheme. It is impossible with the government’s ETS which is currently on the table. They are looking to choke the potential for industries to develop low-emissions technologies. We saw that today with the Minerals Council’s media release, where they said:

The failure of the Copenhagen climate change talks underscored the need to promote and adopt economically conservative climate change policies aligned with the rate of development of policies and actions across the rest of the world.

There is no point trying to lead the world with aggressive climate change schemes if the major economies are not interested in following—or worse still, regard Australia’s initiatives as an example of what not to do.

The Copenhagen fiasco amply demonstrated that the major economies and Australia’s export competitors have no appetite for radical CPRS-style economic re-engineering in response to climate change.

The proposed CPRS remains the most costly emissions trading scheme in the world—while failing to deliver material reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions.

That says it all. This is a dog of a scheme that the government has put up. People now have a choice: they can either incur that massive tax, the risk, the uncertainty, the decrease in living standards, the increased cost of everyday living and the job insecurity that will come with that scheme, or they can have the choice of a direct action scheme which is affordable and understandable and which will provide an incentive for industry in Australia to reduce CO2 emissions. (Time expired)

Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The scheme that has been announced today by the new Leader of the Opposition is simply a continuation of the delay and denial that we have become accustomed to in this area from the opposition. To those elements of delay and denial the opposition has now added the element of deception. We had delay for 12 years. There was delay on the part of the former government to even truly engage with the fact that there is dangerous climate change occurring, delay on the part of the former government to ratify the Kyoto protocol, delay on the part of the former government to engage with the serious attempt that is being made worldwide to deal with what is accepted to be a grave problem that faces the entire planet.

Throughout that period of delay during the term of the former government, we had denial always bubbling along in the background, denial by a good part of those in the opposition room, those on the other side of the House—denial of the climate change science, denial of the seriousness of the problem. Finally, right before the last election, the delay and denial seemed to lessen just a little as, desperate to shore up some position for the last election, the former Howard government accepted the need for an emissions trading scheme and announced as its policy in the middle of 2007 that it too—like some 32 countries around the world that as of now have either adopted an emissions trading scheme or are in the process of adopting one—would introduce an emissions trading scheme if it were returned to office.

Yet, when the Labor government came to office, committed as we were and as we remain to an emissions trading scheme, the opposition returned to their calls for delay. We had: ‘Let’s wait for Garnaut to report.’ We had: ‘Let’s wait for the United States of America to legislate.’ We had: ‘Let’s wait for Copenhagen.’ We had: ‘Let’s wait for the rest of the world to take some more action. Let’s wait for China.’ Anything seems good enough for the opposition, rather than taking the action that they know they should take. Because of the knowledge that it is unsupportable for any responsible political party in Australia to go to the people without accepting that there is a need to take some action, we have now had the new Leader of the Opposition put forward his supposed grand scheme which, it is said, is going to do what all of these schemes need to do—that is, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by our country and, in doing so, persuade the rest of the world that Australia is putting its shoulder to the wheel in the task of reducing global emissions.

What have the opposition come up with? What has the new Leader of the Opposition come up with in his first major policy announcement, because that is what this is? What the new Leader of the Opposition has come forward with, in his first major policy announcement, is a piece of deception. We have had delay, we have had denial—both of them continuing for 12 years—and to that we have had added deception. We have a climate con job, one that does not achieve the emissions cuts that are said to be the purpose of such a scheme and one that does not in any sense grapple with the problem that the world is facing.

Australians should be in no doubt that the denial camp is running very, very strong on the other side of this House—running strong in the National Party, running strong in the Liberal Party. You can start with the new Leader of the Opposition’s statement at Beaufort in Victoria last year where he said that the argument about climate change was ‘absolute crap’. Those were his words. I am sorry to have to use those words in the House, but those were the words of the Leader of the Opposition, and that shows what he thinks of the serious work that has been done around the world now for some several decades—and that is even before I go to other senior representatives on the opposition front bench. One could start with the words of Senator Minchin, who told the Four Corners program in November last year:

If the question is, do people believe or not believe that human beings are causing, are the main cause of the planet warming, then I’d say a majority—

and he was talking about the Liberal Party—

don’t accept that position.

And has that ever been made clear since the change of leadership of the opposition! Senator Minchin is also, of course, a conspiracy theorist, and had this to say on the same program:

For the extreme left it provides the opportunity to do what they’ve always wanted to do, to sort of de-industrialise the western world. You know the collapse of communism was a disaster for the left, … and really they embraced environmentalism as their new religion.

That was Senator Minchin. Senator Joyce, the Leader of the Nationals in the Senate and the shadow spokesman on finance, a very senior position, said:

If you believe what they say about global warming, chapter and verse, then you are way off the mark.

Those persisting in serious denial are lurking on the opposition benches both here and in the Senate. That shows why nothing that is produced by the opposition can in any sense be believed in this area.

The climate con job that has been produced today is a failure. It is a failure because it will not achieve its stated purpose, which is to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of our country by the stated five per cent target. It will not even come close and, of course, it is a fraud because what is said in the plan that has been produced by the new Leader of the Opposition includes a large number of misstatements. It is as good evidence as one could want of why the new Leader of the Opposition and those he leads can in no sense be trusted by the people of Australia in this area or indeed in any other.

The previous speaker, the member for Goldstein, said, wrongly, ‘We are so far ahead of the world.’ That is nonsense; Australia lags far behind the rest of the world. All of the European Union countries adopted a cap-and-trade emissions trading scheme back in 2004. The scheme has been operating for more than five years, and nobody could suggest—let alone the member for Goldstein in his comment—that Australia is in any way ahead of the world. It is simply nonsense.

What we see in the plan produced by the Liberal Party are, first of all, false figures. We see again the recycling of the figure that the Leader of the Opposition has used so frequently over the last couple of months, his assertion of an increase of some $1,100 in Australian families’ bills each year. He was asked where this figure came from and admitted, back in December, that it was based on nothing more than a Google news search. The recycling of that figure here today in the Liberal material, the great Liberal plan that they announced today, demonstrates that they are not seriously engaging in the problem—they are not seriously engaging in the detail or in whether or not an emissions trading scheme is appropriate.

Instead they are intent on a dishonest scare campaign. They must know that that figure is almost double the actual impact. They must know that there has been comprehensive and detailed Treasury modelling of the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and that that modelling demonstrates that the price rise that is anticipated from the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in 2013 is some 1.1 per cent, on average costing households $624 a year. That cost is to be compensated, and the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme contains that compensation, showing that more than 90 per cent of all households will receive assistance and, on average, they will receive assistance of some $660 in 2013.

If the opposition were serious and the opposition were not simply peddling a climate con job, if they were serious about engaging with the problem, they would not be peddling this kind of dishonest and misleading scare campaign, particularly as to the potential costs. They know that it is not possible to reduce emissions without some cost. Every country in the world that is serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions has understood that some cost is involved. What is also understood is that, whatever the cost now, the cost of not acting will be far greater, in two senses. The cost will be greater because the cost to our community of reducing emissions if we make a start only in 2015 or in 2020 will be greater because the need to reduce emissions will be greater and we will need to bring down emissions faster, so the cost will be greater in that sense. And leaving aside the cost of simply reducing emissions, the cost to our community will be greater if we do not act now. What we see in this scheme, this document that has been produced by the Liberal Party today, is no real acknowledgement of what the cost to Australia will be of not taking action on climate change.

The simple facts of this matter are that if we fail to act there will be more severe climate events. There will be a decline in agricultural production across Australia. There will be, just to take the Great Barrier Reef as an example, a dramatic destruction of employment—the jobs of working families who live in North Queensland and who depend on the tourist industry for their livelihoods. That will be the effect on jobs in that part of Australia of failing to act on climate change; and of course it requires world action. There will be a massive destruction of employment and jobs in the agricultural industry if we fail to take action on climate change. There will be a threat to every low-lying coastal property throughout Australia if we fail to take action on climate change. The Australian people understand the need for action on climate change, and that is one of the reasons why they supported and elected the Rudd government to govern this country. We have a very clear mandate to introduce a carbon pollution reduction scheme and we are not going to give up, because it is essential that there be both a cap on carbon emissions and a price on carbon in order to get any of the actions that are hoped for by the opposition in their plan.

What we see from the opposition is the same old approach that has been pointed out by the Minister assisting the Minister for Climate Change, who pointed out that this was picking winners by the opposition, where they are simply proposing to pour money towards their cronies, to pour money into selected companies, to pour money into perhaps selected industries and to pretend that that is going to achieve the kind of emission cuts that are in fact required. What they have not said in this plan that has been produced today is that the Liberal plan lets the biggest polluters off scot-free. What they have not said in this plan is that their plan has no hope of achieving meaningful cuts. It is not even costed as to the five per cent cuts they say are going to be achieved by the very limited range of measures that they have identified. They say nothing whatsoever about increasing the Australian target to the 15 or 25 per cent targets which the government has left open as a possibility in order to match action across the rest of the world. They do not say in any sense what compensation there will be. They fail entirely to grapple with climate change. Good intentions will not get us there. Directors of companies are bound by fiduciary duty to achieve profits for their shareholders. Their job is to maximise profits—and most Australians know this—not to look after Australians, not to look after people other than their shareholders. The victims of James Hardie know this very well, but those opposite have failed entirely to understand that good intentions are not enough, good intentions will not get us there. Young people say to me constantly that those who are denying the science of climate change—(Time expired)

Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business, Deregulation, Competition Policy and Sustainable Cities) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My contribution tonight tries to put a spotlight on what actually is going on. Speaker after speaker from the Rudd Labor government side have tried to create a false argument that there is some contest over the need for action. That is nonsense. There is no lack of will or want to take action from the coalition parties. What is at debate here is whether the action is wise, whether it is thoughtful, whether it is effective and whether it will bring about the outcomes we are seeking to achieve. My parliamentary colleague the member for Isaacs has been recorded as saying, ‘Support the CPRS and sea levels will drop.’ I give him the benefit of the doubt that there was a little dose of hyperbole at the doorstop, but we need to look at the statements that are being made by my parliamentary colleague the member for Isaacs and Labor members in this place just to see what substance sits behind them. There has been no effort whatsoever to engage on the specific policy details about the excellent plan that Tony Abbott and our team announced today. There has been no willingness to consider the endorsements and the encouragement from industry group after industry group that have been resulting from this excellent, constructive and costed plan. There has been no acknowledgement from the Rudd Labor government and their ministers and those that parrot the pre-prepared lines that nobody actually thinks their CPRS is much good. It is the most friendless and flawed policy proposal that I have seen dismissed so roundly by the Australian people in decades. What we have got instead is now an attempt to attack the opposition for a costed, considered and practical strategy to bring about actual outcomes.

If you want to see any clear evidence about how disconnected, arrogant and out of touch the Rudd Labor government is, just reflect on the comments the finance minister made. The finance minister stood in here and talked about the cost of the CPRS. He did not talk about the cost to the Australian economy—no, because that is over $100 billion. He did not talk about the cost of Labor’s flawed and friendless ETS on consumers and small businesses. He did not talk about any of that. All he talked about was what the net impact would be on government revenue. That was what the Minister for Finance and Deregulation characterised as the cost of the Rudd government’s flawed and friendless ETS.

This is clearly an example of just how narrow and limited the Rudd Labor government’s analysis is and how its concerns about the cost of its great big tax on everyone and everything, every bit of activity that goes on in our nation, are constrained to what the impact is on the coffers in Canberra. I did not come here just to worry about what the numbers may be in budgetary documents that are of great and gripping consequence for us and for those who are involved in public policy development. That is not the limit of my analysis. I am here to represent the people of my community, and for them the net cost in government expenditure terms is not a true reflection of the actual costs they will be forced to pay as a consequence of the Rudd government’s flawed and friendless ETS. These are households already feeling cost-of-living pressures at every turn. These are families that are struggling to make sure that their budgets balance and that they can provide for their families and prepare for the future. These are people running so close to their own household budgetary limits that they are anxious about job security and the risk that a loss of income for any period of time might be for their household budgets, for their lives, not about the net cost for the government in general revenue terms. These are real people in houses right across our continent, and they want to know what the cost is.

We saw in the parliament today during question time an attempt to have Prime Minister Rudd turn his mind to the actual costs, the impacts of his flawed and friendless ETS, and he could not give an answer. We saw him on television this morning talking about a basket of goods and services but unable to answer very basic and specific questions about the cost impact on bread, milk and other essentials of life. When we talk about the cost of the Rudd government’s flawed and friendless ETS, the coalition parties, the Liberal and National parties, are focused on the cost impacts for Australian families, for small businesses, for enterprises in our country and what it might mean for their future, not on the narrow cost argument that the Rudd Labor government presents, where it is only the net impact on general revenue. What that line from the finance minister tries to hide is the enormous churn of over $100 billion of new tax revenue coming to the Commonwealth up until 2020, some of which gets redistributed as compensation for people who are feeling those cost penalties most starkly.

But then you look at what sits behind this. I am flabbergasted, as the small business community across Australia is comprehensively flabbergasted, about just how blind, indifferent and uninterested the Rudd Labor government is to the impact of its flawed and friendless ETS tax on everything. The small business community has been crying out for a hearing from the Rudd Labor government. It has been urging government ministers to take action and understand that the impacts on small business are punishing. These are small businesses that do not have the benefit of a busload of lobbyists running around the halls of power here negotiating sweetheart deals with the Rudd Labor government. These are small business men and women, operators and employees in those enterprises right across our continent, who just want to get on with running their small business, and when they looked for support, interest and engagement from the Rudd Labor government they got nothing. Even this morning on Sky Agenda, when Senator Brandis was debating the Minister for Small Business, Independent Contractors and the Service Economy, Dr Emerson, about the CPRS, do you think Dr Emerson, supposedly the minister for small business, could actually mention small business in his defence of the system? He could not. He could not even utter the words ‘small business’ this morning when he was being debated by Senator Brandis on the impact of this flawed and friendless great big tax on everything, the ETS of the Rudd Labor government.

There is probably a reason why he did not mention small businesses. Small businesses are absolutely done over by this measure. They are done over comprehensively by these supposed compensation measures that do not apply to the vast majority of small businesses. In fact, for a small business to qualify for a little bit of largesse from the Rudd Labor government as it soaks up all of the tax revenue under its system you need to consume twice the amount of electricity that an average small business consumes. You have to be a big energy consumer in terms of the average small business to qualify for any of that compensation—that transient, uncertain and insecure compensation that is being waved around as the antidote to the financial pain of this great big tax on everything for small businesses right across our country.

It is not as if the Rudd Labor government does not know this. They have been pleaded with by the small business community to take account of the impact on small businesses. There is example after example of COSBOA saying, ‘We have been having a look at this great big tax on everything. You seem to have forgotten small business. Your compensatory measures do not even kick in unless businesses consume twice the amount of electricity that the average small business in Australia consumes.’ And even if businesses are eligible for this transient and uncertain ‘compensation’, as the Rudd Labor government describes it, compensation that reflects pain imposed on those small enterprises, it is about their electricity. Anybody who knows anything about businesses and how they operate knows that they have input costs, items that go into what they might be preparing and producing—the costs of operating their enterprises, of fitting out their premises, of having their team move around and offer goods and services to the marketplace. The activity of being engaged in business is not limited simply to electricity costs. All of those inputs to small business activity will have this great big tax on everything carried through with it, pushing up the costs of those small businesses, every one of them. So not only are the input costs, the punishing financial penalty of the Rudd government’s great big tax on everything for every small business, not factored into the calculations for this so-called compensation that is going to make everything sweet, you then need to consume twice the average electricity consumption of an Australian small business to even get a look in. No wonder the minister for small business could not talk about the interests of small business in his defence of this flawed and friendless scheme.

What we have before us are two starkly contrasting propositions. We could create a new bureaucracy and a new trading instrument or system where people will buy and sell permits. We are not quite sure what the outcome will be because the Rudd Labor government, which proposes it, is not certain either. We know that is going to cost an enormous amount of money that will be paid for by families and small businesses across Australia. Contrast that with the Abbott coalition plan. We are not offering funding for people having a go; we are not putting resources into creating some shimmy and shammy of a trading system in the hope that bits of those goings-on will produce an emissions reduction. No, we are not doing anything as indirect and obtuse as that. It is pretty simple: we are offering to purchase actual emissions reductions. We are buying outcomes to achieve our agreed national goals for emissions reductions.

The goals are not up for dispute here; the targets are agreed. The need to act—that is agreed. The fact that we have opportunities to achieve abatement—that is agreed. The question here is whether you create a great big tax on everything and hope that the punishing impact of that great big tax on everything under the Rudd government’s flawed and friendless ETS will actually make people do different things. That is the idea: punish them into doing different things. That is the Rudd Labor model: at the heart is the government, huge and rolling in cash that it pulls off regular Australians through increased charges on everything to then make some money available to share the love as only the Labor Party can. That is the option. Or you back the Abbott coalition proposal, where we purchase abatement outcomes. The small business community will be largely excluded from the need to have any additional responsibilities on them other than to—as they all do—consider how to make their business operations as efficient and as effective as they can. The NGER scheme, the national greenhouse and energy reporting scheme, does not involve small businesses, so they are not faced with any new regulatory burden. But, if small businesses want to come together and opt into the scheme and can deliver verifiable, secure emissions reductions, they will be able to be rewarded for that. How practical and straightforward is that? The government will enter the market and purchase emissions reduction outcomes at the cheapest price.

In the built environment, something Minister Garrett talks a lot about—he talks a good game, but does so little about it—an opportunity is here in the coalition’s scheme. Anyone with even a passing interest in international research would know that an ETS based or carbon tax based charge on energy needs to be extraordinarily high to bring about changes in the built environment, to see people bring about a change in their technologies in the building fabric and in the systems that they use. Yet we know—and anyone with an interest in the property industry knows through work that McKinsey, the Green Building Council of Australia, the Energy Efficiency Council of Australia and any number of professional groups have done—that there are very affordable, low-cost opportunities to reduce emissions in the built environment. But the Rudd government’s tax on everything—its flawed and friendless ETS—will not bring out those gains and opportunities because of demand inelasticity and the need for those price signals to be so high to bring about the change. Instead, in our proposal the built environment participants can engage. They can bundle up their abatement gains and enter the process where the government would purchase those delivered and secure gains. This is a good thing for the built environment.

So we have got supporting claim after supporting claim and industry after industry coming out and talking about just how positive this is and a government that will not turn its mind to and address the fundamental issues of the punishing impact of its flawed and friendless scheme on the small business community. In the recent COSBOA and Telstra business survey, the single most significant concern was:

While respondents were concerned about all of these issues, when asked which one issue was of the highest concern, the ETS /carbon tax and higher interest rates lead the pack by a significant margin.

The opposition has understood the impact of this flawed and friendless ETS tax on everything and has acted. Our scheme provides relief and comfort for the small business community. We understand they are the engine room—(Time expired)

Jim Turnour (Leichhardt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to debate this issue. The opposition called for a debate on climate change, and the government is ready and enjoying the ability that we now have to respond to what has been a very poor attempt to respond to what is a critically important issue for this nation: climate change. Climate change is not something nebulous. It is real and it is happening. That is what the science says and that is what communities in my electorate recognise. They want a government that can take action and they want an opposition that is going to work with the government, as they did last year, to develop a carbon pollution reduction scheme, an ETS that can actually take real action and put in place a real policy response to climate change.

Last weekend we had king tides in the Torres Strait, and there has been some coverage around the nation on that. Climate change is real in local communities like mine. Because of rising sea levels, communities on low-lying islands—Saibai, Boigu and others in the Torres Strait—are facing the real risk that their communities do not have a future if we do not do something about climate change. It is real in Leichhardt and it is real in tropical North Queensland. We have Aboriginal communities living in coastal areas along Cape York Peninsula that also face the real risk of rising sea levels and the impacts that will have on their local communities and their way of life.

In the northern beach suburbs of Cairns, such as Clifton Beach and Machans Beach, people have built right up to the water’s edge. We did not know 10, 20 and years ago, when those houses were being planned and constructed, that climate change would be such a great risk to coastal communities. I see Jennie George in the chamber today. She worked on a report last year that highlighted that tens of thousands of houses across the country are at risk. Many of them are in my electorate of Leichhardt. We are facing a real threat to local communities, such as those in my electorate, and people want action on climate change. They want real action on climate change, and they do not want the con that the Liberal Party are bringing forward today in their attempt to deal with the problems they have in terms of climate deniers in their own party and in the National Party. They are trying to mash a policy together that deals with the divisions in their own party. That is what the Leader of the Opposition has brought forward today. It is not a policy that is about tackling climate change; it is about tackling the divisions in his own party, and that is the reality of the situation.

The Rudd government are serious about this issue. We are bringing forward an emissions trading scheme, our Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. It is a scheme that we sat down and worked with the opposition on late last year, and we all came to an agreement. Those on the other side actually went to caucus and agreed that the deal that had been negotiated between Minister Wong and the opposition spokesperson was a good deal and that it would take action in the context of the international community response. We need an emissions trading scheme. There is no emissions trading scheme in the policy of the opposition. Why do we need an emissions trading scheme? We need it because it puts a real cap on carbon pollution. If we are serious about taking action on climate change then we need to put a cap on carbon emissions. The opposition’s policy has no cap on carbon emissions and no emissions trading scheme. Are there are any other developed countries that are going forward with this singular approach? No. Even conservative leaders overseas are not adopting policies such as the opposition are bringing forward, because regulations, picking winners and using taxpayers’ money in this way are recognised as no way to effectively respond to climate change.

We need an emissions trading scheme; we need a mandatory renewable energy target. That is what we committed to and what we worked with the opposition on late last year. We have a target of 20 per cent by 2020. They are good outcomes, and that is what the Australian people want: for the opposition to work with the government to bring about real action on climate change. That is what the people in my community, and in communities all across the country, want. There has been a lot of talk about direct action by the Leader of the Opposition and by others on the other side. The Leader of the Opposition has been getting around in his budgie smugglers and looking the part. The next thing I will see is him putting his cape on for direct action and he will be like some superhero, flying around the country, trying to fix climate change. You do not fix climate change by wearing budgie smugglers and putting a cape on your back; you fix climate change by introducing an emissions trading scheme and a mandatory renewable energy target and by taking real direct action, which is what we have already done.

If you look at last year’s budget papers, there is a whole series of direct action responses that we have put in place, as well as a series of actions that we have put in place through our economic stimulus strategy. One example is the Green Car Innovation Fund. I see that the Parliamentary Secretary for Innovation and Industry, the member for Corio, is here. I know that he is working actively with the car industry in his local community on direct action and innovation to develop green cars in this country so that in the future we can drive cars that are more climate friendly. As part of our Nation Building and Jobs Plan we have developed efficiency measures which include our ceiling insulation program. That has been very popular in my electorate, and I know it has been very popular in other members’ electorates around the country. I see that Mr Bradbury, who is in the chamber, is nodding in support for that. We have our green loans, which are another example of direct action supporting householders to make a difference in their local communities.

These are examples of the direct action that the government have already taken. In my own electorate of Leichhardt I have a fantastic natural resource management organisation called Terrain, who are working in partnership with a group called Degrees Celsius. I have facilitated meetings between them, Minister Wong and members of her department to look at how we can work with local farmers and local community groups to sequester carbon and give soil carbon a real future in terms of action on climate change. That is not a slogan; that is the hard work that a natural resource management organisation in tropical North Queensland is doing. They are working with the government to develop a framework that will enable carbon to be properly accounted for and audited within an international framework.

The opposition’s policy does not sit within any international framework. As I said, 35 countries, including the United States of America, have either adopted an ETS or have plans to adopt an ETS. We are working on and developing a framework that works with the international community. Businesses across the country want certainty, and they want a framework that will fit within those international obligations. If we go back and look at the risks in my community of Leichhardt in tropical North Queensland, the Marine and Tropical Sciences Research Facility, the MTSRF, and the Reef and Rainforest Research Centre have done a significant amount of work, pulling together the real threats of climate change to my local community. Their climate change projections predict that by 2030 the regional average annual temperature will increase by between 0.6 degrees Celsius and 1.2 degrees Celsius and that after 2030 the rate of increase will be highly dependent on the emissions levels. That is why we need to take action now.

What we do now will take time to impact on carbon emissions, and we need to make sure that we do not have temperature rises like that because they will impact on the Great Barrier Reef and on the wet tropical rainforests. They will impact on communities all across my electorate and all across the country. The region’s average annual rainfall will be similar, but traditionally dry seasons will become drier and wet seasons will become slightly wetter. Cyclones will be stronger, more frequent and longer lasting, and the region of cyclone activity will shift southwards, affecting areas 300 kilometres further south than today by 2070. Local sea levels will be 13 to 20 centimetres above 1990 levels and 49 to 89 centimetres above 1990 levels by 2070. They are predicting sea levels and temperature rises in my local community, and these are very serious issues. Climate change is not nebulous. It is not—as Tony Abbott has described it—‘crap’. It is real, and we need to take action to tackle it.

We need an emissions trading scheme, we need a mandatory renewable energy target to support renewable energy and we need the direct action measures that I have already spoken about. Some of the likely impacts of these projected changes that the Reef and Rainforest Research Centre has come up with include: increased vulnerability of fragmented forests to storm damage, which in turn limits the potential for animal and plant communities to recover via connective corridors; increased erosion, particularly when riparian vegetation is damaged or removed; decreased capacity of the coastal zone to act as a storm buffer; and reduced pollination rates of forest plants, caused by altered flowering regimes that no longer coincide with the presence of insects that are essential for pollination. The list goes on.

The centre says that in the Great Barrier Reef there will be increased frequency and severity of coral-bleaching events, particularly in the central and southern parts of the GBR, which is predicted to suffer catastrophic bleaching events; coral mortality greater than 20 per cent once every five years by 2050; and greater sensitivity to coral bleaching caused by increased exposure to terrestrial runoff. Coastal and intracostal coral reefs are two to four times more sensitive to bleaching due to temperature stress and being subject to runoff. So climate change is real. It has real risks. This is the data of the Reef and Rainforest Research Centre. They are talking about the likely increases in temperature and ocean levels and the impacts they are going to have on the Wet Tropics rainforest and on the Great Barrier Reef. It is a real threat and it is no wonder communities like mine want action.

And what do we have from the opposition? We do not have a policy. We have a grab bag of ideas that have been strung together to try to make sure that the divisions in the opposition are, effectively, papered over. That is what this is about. The approach that the Leader of the Opposition has taken to this issue highlights that this really is a political response rather than a serious response to climate change. As the former Leader of the Opposition, Mr Turnbull, wrote in his blog, the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Abbott, has been a bit of a weathervane on this issue. The reality is that last year he basically said that we needed to take action on climate change. Then he said, effectively, that we needed to do a deal. Then he flipped and said we did not need to do a deal. Then he said that he was going to be opposed to an emissions trading scheme. He has flipped and flopped on this issue, and today we have seen him come into this House, ask a series of questions and demand a debate with the Prime Minister after releasing a grab bag of policies.

The hypocrisy of it is that the Leader of the Opposition has described climate change as ‘crap’ and yet is coming in and delivering what he said is ‘an important response to climate change through direct action’. How can he last year describe it as ‘crap’ and this year want to come in and argue that he is serious about the issue? I think the Australian people see that this is not a serious response to climate change.

We need to recognise that Senator Minchin, Senator Joyce and others who supported Mr Abbott becoming Leader of the Opposition are in the background there. We all know that they are on the record as believing that climate change is not influenced by human beings and that it is not a real result of human activity on this planet. As I have said, according to the Tropical Forest Research Centre, the RRRC in my electorate and the intergovernmental panel, the science on this is settled. There is a real risk of climate change impacting local communities as a result of human activity if we do not take action. I go to a quote showing Mr Abbott’s real lack of understanding, considering the issues that I have already raised in my electorate. In a recent speech on 30 January 2010, he said:

… even if dire predictions are right and average temperatures around the globe rise by four degrees over the century, it’s still not the “great moral challenge” of our time …

So a couple of days ago he basically said that temperatures can go up four degrees and it really will not be a major issue. Tell that to the people of the Torres Strait. Tell that to tourism operators in my electorate who are taking action in their own businesses. Big Cat Green Island Reef Cruises are looking to reduce their carbon emissions. Quicksilver are looking to reduce their carbon emissions. Tell that to tourism operators who are taking tourists every day to the Wet Tropics rainforest. We have seen the RRRC say that the Wet Tropics rainforest and Great Barrier Reef are under real threat if we see just a small rise in temperatures in our region, yet Mr Abbott is saying a four-degree rise is not an issue. I think that climate change is not crap. The response of the opposition is, effectively, as Mr Abbott has described, crap, and we need to make sure that we act in the national interest. We need to work with the opposition. I call on them to work with us so we take real action to ensure that communities in my electorate have a long-term future, whether in tourism or in Indigenous communities in the cape and the Torres Strait. They want action. We are going to continue to act in the national interest. I support strongly the actions of the Prime Minister and others who are looking to develop and further advance our policies.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have listened with interest to the bleating of the Labor Party members this afternoon, and basically they just do not get it. There is not going to be an ETS tax. Perhaps I will borrow the words of Peter Hartcher, who commented in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning. He said:

As today will noisily demonstrate, one of the big, futuristic ideas Rudd championed, the plan to tackle climate change with an emissions trading system, is no longer in the national future.

… it’s now a lost prospect, rapidly receding in the rear-vision mirror.

So Rudd needs a new future.

He then goes on to comment that he has discovered the 10-year-old analysis that showed that Australia has an ageing population, that there is a demographic change. He said that perhaps Mr Rudd can latch onto this and that can be his big, new, future-championing issue.

Terry McCrann, on the other hand, is very analytical and points out that the aim of Mr Rudd to have an ETS, which is a massive tax on everything and will do nothing to assist the growth in productivity, is deliberately at odds with the policy that Mr Rudd now wishes to champion, which is to have an increase in productivity. He points out very ably that the one thing that will allow us to have an increase in productivity is cheap energy, yet that is exactly what this government wants to tax, having that tax cascade right down through the community as a whole so that the impact is felt by ordinary mums and dads—ordinary families—to the tune of $1,100 a year. That is every year. The tax is forever—or it would have been forever. The so-called churned compensation payments are temporary—they are for three years—but the impost, the $1,100 per family, is forever and escalating.

If you look at the response that has been received by the coalition to the announcement of its policy this morning, you will see that it is totally different from what is being said by Labor Party members in the chamber. I think it is useful to quote from a few of the releases that are being put out by responsible organisations who want people to know that they are supportive of the coalition’s approach. The Australian Retailers Association, the peak national industry body, has come out in support of Tony Abbott’s proposed climate change policy, acknowledging the key features being no impact on jobs and no new taxes. It says:

Tony Abbott has today shown that there are options to support responsible environmental considerations without instituting a massive new tax and putting thousands of Australian jobs at risk.

It further says:

Australian small businesses, Australian jobs and Australian working families all want responsible and positive environmental solutions at a national level. What they don’t want and can’t afford is the Rudd ETS tax that will send us backwards as a nation.

That is Mr Driscoll, who was making that comment on behalf of the Retailers Association. The Australian Food and Grocery Council says:

The Australian Food and Grocery Council has welcomed the coalition’s approach to a carbon reduction scheme that provides incentives for business to reduce emissions while minimising the cost to industry and the Australian economy.

What we have been saying from the beginning is that it is vital that any approach to climate change does not hurt the competitiveness of Australian businesses and industry. In the aftermath of Copenhagen, it is clear that a tax on business will result in jobs, investment and emissions being sent offshore to China, India and Indonesia. Any scheme that adds new cost to Australian manufactured goods and does not affect imports from countries like China and Indonesia will simply raise prices for families and increase unemployment in rural and regional Australia, jobs which are already scarce.

The National Farmers Federation says that it:

… welcomes the general principles outlined today in the Coalition’s climate change mitigation policy as it relates to the farm sector.

It says that it is:

… buoyed by the recognition of the positive role that farmers can play in reducing greenhouse gas concentrations and storing carbon.

That, incidentally, was responded to by, I think, the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, who said it was just going to be a ‘mighty slush fund’. The National Farmers Federation has a much higher opinion of farmers.

The NFF is encouraged that the Coalition has committed to an incentive based scheme for farmers to drive abatement from their sector … In addition, we are comforted by the Coalition’s commitment to no additional indirect costs to energy and energy related farm inputs, which can have a major impact on the profitability of our businesses and regional communities.

       …         …         …

The Coalition is … right to acknowledge the need to consider potential impacts on agriculture …

The Minerals Council of Australia, quoted earlier, said:

The Coalition’s climate change policy strikes at the real intent of pricing carbon—providing an incentive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without negatively impacting on jobs, investment, exports and growth.

The Minerals Council of Australia welcomes the shift to a policy designed to use incentives as a driver to reduce emissions rather than an approach that is pre-occupied with penalising business to raise revenue.

The Coalition’s proposal establishes an incentive for companies to invest billions of dollars in breakthrough technologies critical to reducing emissions. Without the commercial development and deployment of low emissions technology—such as clean coal—emissions reductions targets are merely a wing and a prayer.

There is no point trying to lead the world with aggressive climate change schemes if the major economies are not interested in following—or worse still, regard Australia’s initiatives as an example of what not to do.

The National Association of Forest Industries:

… welcomes the inclusion of direct forestry measures as part of the climate change policy package announced by the Federal Opposition today.

It says:

These measures reflect the important role forestry can play in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as well as the green energy that can be produced from wood wastes that are a byproduct of tree growing and processing activities …

The National Generators Forum said it does not support the federal government’s CPRS in its current form. It says:

The CPRS badly damages the asset values of generating business, which creates serious risk for energy security and investment.

Finally, ACCI, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, says:

Given the uncertainty now existing after Copenhagen over what other nations will do, a domestic policy approach that provides more carrot than stick tends to reflect the temper of the times.

What are we proposing? A direct, straightforward policy which is careful, cautious, considered and valuable. There are no regulations. There is no new tax. There is an outcome which is positive right from the beginning, with the aim to improve soils and land. It is a simple and direct action program. It is quite contrary to the plan that the Labor Party has to remain dependent on the pain of increased electricity prices to force down the use of electricity and force reduction in emissions, thereby shrinking the economy as well.

In our proposal, put forward by the Leader of the Opposition this morning, business will be able to carry on business as usual. There is a cap. I heard speaker after speaker from the government side say that there is no cap—there is and it is accepted as necessary. The cap is the average of the emission level that particular business is emitting at the time. If that business wishes to expand, it will be able to expand at that same level; the cap will remain the same. If it wants to open up a new business, again it will have the same measurement for the cap. If that business decides that it can reduce its emissions and establish a new lower cap for itself, that will be the one that is accepted and binding but there will be compensation paid and they can sell those savings in emissions to the new emissions reduction fund. That is the $2.5 billion fund that has been established to see the lowering of emissions. But there is no fetter on business, there is no penalty for ordinary people and there is no harshness that says that you may not live in the 21st century in the way that you have come to believe is right for you and your family.

It will mean that, with research being done, there will be the ability to utilise our coal, particularly the very clean coal in New South Wales, which is sulfur free, and black coal. There is a $2 million fund which has been allocated to investigate the burying of high-voltage overhead power lines underground, which would free up those corridors of land which are currently dead land and not used. They could be used for growing trees, and the land could be sold off or used for a different nature. The urban green corridors that are proposed mean that there is a positive way of seeing new trees growing which will again assist with abatement but without additional costs.

The whole of the plan that has been put forward, which is one of incentives instead of punishment, is based on the fact that we can find the savings in the budget to pay for this scheme. I heard ministers across the table, particularly the Minister for Finance and Deregulation, demand calculations and costings and yet I found it quite extraordinary that he is a finance minister in a government where the Prime Minister could not answer a question in this chamber as to what would be the impact of the ETS on the cost of milk. He could not answer a similar question on television about bread and he could not answer a question, again in this chamber, as to what impact his additional tax on everything would have on a small business like a drycleaner. In every instance he ducks, weaves and avoids the question.

Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Defence Science and Personnel) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Cassius Clay.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes. I must say I found it very interesting that the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, the member for Watson, began his contribution to this debate by once again making sneering remarks about older Australians which he thought were pretty amusing. But he too got it wrong, as I pointed out often through his address. He had not read the papers that had been produced this morning and simply came in here with his old rhetoric. I want to compare the 30 pages of information that we put out today with the so-called policy details that the Labor Party went to the last election on. It said:

Labor’s plan for climate change and primary industries—‘Australia’s Farming Future’—is a key component of Labor’s overall strategy on climate change. A Rudd Labor Government will—

ratify Kyoto and reduce emissions. But then it said it will:

• implement an emissions trading scheme in 2010 to provide the right market signals for industry and ensure our trade exposed sectors are not disadvantaged …

That is it; that was the policy—no costings, no details on how this grand tax on everything would affect the Australian economy, no details of how it would impact on small business, no details of how it would impact on grocery prices, which are already going through the roof, no details still.

We have had this debate which the Leader of the Opposition asked for, one on one with the Prime Minister, half an hour each, and we have been debating it ever since. The Prime Minister ran away, but we still have no more information from him about how the legislation that he is reintroducing into the parliament would impact on the people. We heard the finance minister talking about an attack on his budget but there was no mention about whether or not there was a bad impact on people. I might be old-fashioned, but I have a good old-fashioned view—that is, I think governments should be poor and the people should be rich, not the other way around, which is what the Labor Party always wants to happen. It believes it will always spend people’s money better than individuals will spend it on themselves. I thoroughly disagree. (Time expired)

Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was listening to the honourable member for Mackellar give her contribution in which she talked about the coalition’s plan. Even a cursory glance shows that it is not so much a plan but something that is cobbled together and a continuation of the con job on climate change. It is the continuation of the fear campaign that they are running in the community on this issue. Just to highlight some of the inconsistencies in the all-over-the-shop approach that they have to their climate change policy, if you could call it a policy, I would like to start with a few quotes. On 27 November last year the member for Warringah, Tony Abbott, said that if there is to be a carbon priced awareness of coal fired electricity and oil driven cars an ETS may be the most market oriented way to do so. He said:

That’s why I think there is a strong case for an ETS but it’s got to be the right ETS. It’s got to be an ETS that protects Australian jobs and protects Australian industries …

That is precisely what the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, which contains the emissions trading scheme of the government’s policy, is. It is about protecting the economy. It is about protecting the environment. It is a major economic reform and that is what is required to tackle climate change. There are a whole range of things that need to be done to tackle climate change and the Rudd government is doing them. It is not just one measure, but an emissions trading scheme as part of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is one of the key ways to do that. There has to be a cap on emissions. In whatever way you look at it there is no magic pudding answer that the coalition seem to keep coming up with. There has to be a cap and that is what the government’s policy to climate change is. There is a cap and it has to be costed. The biggest polluters under our scheme will pay. The coalition are saying that nobody will pay. They are in fairyland and fantasy land if they think that there can be no cost. Under our plan low- and middle-income householders will not have to pay and they will be compensated.

I heard some of the opposition members at the doors this morning talking about the finances of the government’s scheme and they were saying that they were ‘crap’ too. We are talking about Treasury modelling. We are not talking about something that we cobbled together one weekend and said, ‘This is how much it is going to cost and this is how much people will get back.’ It was Treasury modelling done independently. That is what we are acting on and we have taken advice on some of those issues. I am not sure where the coalition are getting their advice from.

I have some more quotes, and some of them are priceless and are absolute gems. The member for Warringah on 11 November 2009 in the Australian said:

… if the government substantially accepts our amendments—

to the CPRS—

there is no reason why this legislation can’t be passed.

In June 2009 the member for Warringah said:

The point I made about an emissions trading scheme is that I don’t like it one bit. I think it is economically suspect and I think the science behind the policy is contentious to say the least.

This flip-flopping that has been going on since last year, and in 2010 we are back in parliament with the same scenario.

The member for Warringah said that our policy was absolute crap. He also said that he was like a weathervane on climate change. I made the comment that he may have said he was like a weathervane, and we know what that is, but he is more like the weathercock in my yard that spins around and changes daily, depending on which way the breeze is blowing and depending on how things are going. One day it is this and the next day it is that. I have read about so many different positions coming from the coalition on climate change that it would be hard for anyone in the public to make sense of them. It is also like having two bob each way: ‘One day I will say this and the next day I will say that. Then there is another audience so I will say this and with the other audience I will say that.’

It reminded me of a movie that I saw a long time ago. It was a Red Skelton movie so that dates it a little bit. I am sure, Mr Deputy Speaker Sidebottom, you might be familiar with it, given your interests. I have only ever heard one other person talk about it, Senator Robert Ray, which was when I decided that I would like him because he talked about that particular movie. It was about Red Skelton trying to play to both sides of the fence, to the Confederates and the Yankees. He had a uniform and a flag and was walking between them and playing to both sides. A gust of wind came, like the weathervane and the weathercock, which spun him around and he ended up with the wrong side of the flag facing the opposing parties. They all then started shooting at him.

That is how I see the member for Warringah, the Leader of the Opposition, on his policy of climate change. He is playing to all sides, and I am talking about all sides within his own coalition to start with, because they are all over the shop on it and are divided. If they are divided on this, despite what they say they have come up with today, how can the public trust them on this issue? I think that they are going to get caught in the firing line, like Red Skelton did, with all sides firing at them eventually.

They cannot continue to run a scare campaign without some facts. In absolute disregard of Treasury modelling, I heard the member for Warringah saying it would cost families $1,100 per year. That comment has absolutely no basis in fact whatsoever. He continued to peddle it in the face of the facts of the situation. The facts are that for an average family the Treasury modelling says costs will be around $624 a year, compensation will be $660 and the big polluters are paying. The big polluters paying means that money will go into a fund which is hypothecated. It is not going back into the coffers of consolidated revenue. It is hypothecated back to deal with the issue of climate change.

You hear other comments from the coalition such as, ‘Copenhagen, nothing came out of that.’ One big thing did come out of that which was that major advanced economies agreed they would keep the temperature rises in their countries to under two per cent. I noticed that the small island countries asked for something lower and other countries asked for different things. But they agreed to one key thing and all countries have a variety of mechanisms to do it. Yes, we have laws, we have policies and we have lots of other actions that we can do, but it is always better if it can be in a legal framework.

Another comment that the coalition has peddled about an emissions trading scheme, as part of the con job, is that ‘nobody is doing it’. That is not true. Thirty-five nations have either already introduced or are introducing emissions trading schemes. Why is that? It is because an emissions trading scheme has been proven to be the cheapest and most cost-effective way to limit emissions, and that is what we have to do. The nations and the leaders who say that they will have an emissions trading scheme are not limited to one side of politics; they are from all sides. We see the Prime Minister of New Zealand, who is from the conservative side of politics, adopting it; David Cameron, the Leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, is also adopting it. So it is not just one side.

One of the most reckless and irresponsible comments I have heard the member for Warringah make was recently when he said that if the temperature rises by four degrees it does not really matter and it is not a moral challenge for us. It is a challenge on any front. We have agreed to keep it below two degrees and he is saying, ‘If it goes four degrees or beyond, that is not a problem.’ If there were a temperature increase of four degrees we would face serious threats. The number of very hot days, over 35 degrees, would increase dramatically. The Great Barrier Reef and the billions of dollars from the tourism industry that rely on it would be devastated. A lot of this is documented in the report that Professor Garnaut produced. The Murray-Darling Basin would also be beyond salvation. Eastern Australia would have 40 per cent more droughts and there would be a 90 per cent decrease in irrigated agriculture in the nation’s food bowl.

All of this can be avoided, and that is what the Australian community and the people in my electorate of Page want to happen. They want us to get on with the business of tackling climate change, and that is what the government is doing; it is taking decisive action. The delay is coming from the coalition. We need to get on and do it. It is not beyond us; we can do it. The costs of inaction, though, start to be a real problem, and they can be sheeted home directly to the coalition with their delaying tactics, which are purely to seek some sort of electoral gain.

There have been some priceless quotes from the coalition, and one of them comes from Senator Joyce from the National Party, who said on Lateline in December 2009:

… man did not go to develop the wheel because they taxed walking and they didn’t tax horses to develop the automobile—

I can see the member for Cowper at the table, laughing—

So this idea that emissions trading scheme brings you carbon nirvana is ludicrous.

How could you even comprehend what he is talking about when he makes statements like that? It is a bit beyond my comprehension—

Barry Haase (Kalgoorlie, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You’ve got to be a lateral thinker!

Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am totally lateral thinking; I think that is totally myopic thinking! There are other gems like this. Maybe we should have them published in a little book called ‘gems of wit and wisdom of the National Party on climate change’ or ‘the thoughts of Chairman Barnaby Joyce on how to tackle climate change and how to help farmers’.

This brings me to the issue of farmers. A lot of farmers see the daily impacts of climate change. They talk about it. They do want action on this. The government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, which now includes the amendments that were put forward by the coalition, incorporates a whole range of measures that farmers particularly wanted and were happy with. I was happy with it. I live in an electorate that has a strong agriculture industry, and I have talked with many farmers about it. They want some certainty about this and they certainly have not got it.

I noticed a statement by ACCI commenting on the plan put out by the coalition today, and it says that they need to see the budget impact. That is a critical issue, because you cannot put something to the Australian public that is about a major economic reform without having it properly costed and budgeted. With those comments, I can say that it really is time for the coalition to be true to their word, to support the amendments that they put forward and that the government accepted, and to get behind the Australian public and seriously tackle climate change.

Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Defence Science and Personnel) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

With all the rhetoric being delivered by the Prime Minister and his spin doctors on the issue of climate change and the need for an ETS, you would almost believe that he is in fact the oracle or that he is the font of all wisdom when it comes to the issues of climate change and an emissions trading scheme. There are two very different proposals being put forward with identical outcomes. The coalition’s proposal seeks to reduce carbon emissions by five per cent. Labor’s emissions trading scheme—or ‘emissions taxing scheme’—or CPRS, seeks to reduce carbon emissions by five per cent. That is where the similarity ends. The coalition’s proposal, over the four years of forward estimates, will cost $3.2 billion. By stark comparison, the Labor government’s emissions trading scheme, the tax that they wish to impose on industry and everyday Australians, will cost $40.6 billion. That is $3.2 billion versus $40.6 billion.

I need to explain, as you do in a debate, the analysis of each of the systems. Under the Prime Minister’s emission taxing scheme, you have a system in which everyone and everything will be taxed. Industries will be taxed, major emitters will be taxed, businesses will be taxed, farmers will be taxed, motorists will be taxed and plumbers and builders will be taxed. Everyone in the community will suffer at the hands of an emission taxing scheme—not forgetting the pensioners.

The Prime Minister has asked: how can you have a system that does not penalise the major emitters? Yet, when I look through the government’s emissions trading scheme proposal, there is a whole raft of free permits for major emitters. So he is not directly affecting them from day one—there is a phase-in period. They get free permits to start with.

But there is one thing which needs to be understood—and it is probably problematic for people in the Labor Party to understand. In business, when costs are put upon you, you work out the costs of your production—the cost of producing whatever it is you sell or trade in—and, if there are more costs, they go onto the bottom line and then you divide by the number of products, add in a margin for profit and that is what you sell your product for. The Prime Minister has been trying to hoodwink the community that, if businesses have these costs, this tax, imposed upon them, they will absorb it. That just does not happen. The costs are passed on.

Whilst the energy industry might get hit with a tax, with all these costs, it is not going to sit back and absorb the costs. It will simply pass them on. And, if the coal industry in the Hunter Valley gets hit with all these taxes, it will just pass the cost on. All industries will simply pass the cost on. The aluminium industry, a major employer, will simply pass the cost on. In fact, everything and everybody affected by this tax will not absorb it; they will pass it on—unless, of course, you happen to be a consumer. At the end of this whole arrangement being put forward by the Labor government, the only people that will be paying for the ETS will be consumers, because industry will pass the costs on. That means every man, woman and child in this nation will be paying for the cost of an ETS.

When you compare the $40.6 billion cost over four years of the ETS plan of the Labor government against the $3.2 billion plan over the four years—both with the same outcome of a reduction of five per cent—where are the stark differences? The stark differences are that you lead by incentive, you create the opportunities through incentive and you do not penalise. If somebody is already at world-leading practice, with emissions as low as can be achieved, why should they be penalised? Why should they have taxes placed upon them which, in addition, make them less internationally competitive?

The policies that have been released today have a lot of detail. It is the comments of the industry people out there that I find most encouraging. A statement today from the National Farmers Federation said:

“The NFF is encouraged that that the Coalition has committed to an incentive based scheme for farmers to drive abatement from their sector,” NFF president David Crombie said.

“In addition, we are comforted by the Coalition’s commitment to no additional indirect costs to energy and energy related farm inputs, which can have a major impact on the profitability of our businesses and regional communities.”

ACCI said today, in a statement by Peter Anderson:

It is in the public interest for there to be a strong contest of policy ideas about climate change responses before we impose major or unilateral adjustment costs on our economy, and the Coalition statement contributes to that.

An industry that affects my region dramatically is the mining industry. A statement today from Mitch Hooke, Chief Executive Officer of the Minerals Council of Australia, said:

The Coalition’s climate change policy strikes at the real intent of pricing carbon – providing an incentive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without negatively impacting on jobs, investment, exports and growth.

The statement goes on to say:

The Coalition’s proposal establishes an incentive for companies to invest billions of dollars in breakthrough technologies critical to reducing emissions.

I draw the House’s attention to the front page of the Newcastle Herald from June 11 last year. The front page said, ‘Carbon plan: 17,000 jobs at risk in Hunter’. It was an article by Ian Kirkwood, the industrial reporter, and it said:

THE Federal Government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme would severely affect the Hunter economy, a new report commissioned for the NSW Government reveals.

The Access Economics report into the scheme’s impact on disadvantaged regions says that by 2025, it could cost the Hunter 17,000 jobs and cut its commercial output by more than $1 billion a year.

Coal, predictably, would be hardest-hit with at least one in three Hunter coalminers likely to lose their jobs as industry output fell by 37 per cent “relative to the [no carbon scheme] baseline”.

It would also be felt at Tomago Aluminium and Hydro’s Kurri Kurri smelter, with national aluminium output predicted to be at least 50 per cent less than without the scheme.

The Hunter’s coal-fired electricity industry is also expected to suffer.

Overall, Access Economics says the proposed carbon scheme will cut the Hunter’s output by 3.7 per cent and take 2 per cent from employment.

Things become dramatically worse if Australia’s carbon permits are not part of an international trade.

In this case, employment is hit by 7.8 per cent and output by 10.2 per cent.

That is perhaps one of the most damning articles I have ever read about the impact of an emissions trading scheme on a region—an impact that would be hard for many to recover from. Compounding that, of course, is the rise in power bills. In October last year, IPART put out a report saying that the price of electricity would rise, and rise dramatically. In fact, the IPART report said:

By 2013, the impact of the Federal Government’s emissions trading scheme would increase the average bill of EnergyAustralia customers by 23 per cent, Integral Energy customers by 25 per cent and Country Energy customers by 21 per cent.

So we have two very different proposals to achieve the same outcome—an outcome of five per cent. You have the proposal by the Labor government that taxes everybody and everything, which, according to a report by Access Economics commissioned by the New South Wales Labor government, will see some 17,000 jobs go in the Hunter region. Contrast that with the proposal put forward by the coalition which will see no jobs go—no jobs go, no tax.

One proposal is: 17,000 jobs go, a tax on everything and the average household electricity price will go up nearly $730 a year. Against this is: no increase in electricity, no increase in unemployment, no increase in tax and, therefore, no increase in grocery prices and no additional cost to households but still achieving that five per cent goal. So, for the life of me, I cannot understand why the government is not prepared to sit down and look at this. I cannot understand why the Prime Minister, with all his rhetoric, was determined to drive Australia into a position which the rest of the world was never going to pick up—Copenhagen displayed that—and which is going to financially disadvantage our industries that are internationally competitive. The people in this country, the industries in this country, have worked hard, invested a lot of money and been determined to be internationally competitive. And they have achieved that. They have done it well. They have done it very successfully. Off the backs of their efforts, this country rode through the global financial crisis without too much of a deep impact. So now this Labor government’s intent is to tax them out of existence.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I put this proposal to you: if the Labor government’s ETS had been imposed on Australia prior to the global financial crisis, what position would we have come through the global financial crisis in? Let me tell you, the word ‘recession’ would have imprinted over the quarterly results for many, many terms. I say to this government: you are not the oracle. You are not the font of all knowledge. You do not have the only plan. And the problem is that you have trapped yourself into a corner where you have failed to accept any other ideas. I remember well when you first released your emissions trading scheme, your CPRS, and it was non-negotiable. You were not prepared to sit down at the table and talk to the coalition; it was your way or the highway.

Luke Hartsuyker (Cowper, National Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It had to be passed before Copenhagen! It was going to be the end of the world!

Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Defence Science and Personnel) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It had to be passed before Copenhagen. And then, when you realised that you could not get your bill through the Senate, you decided to sit down and have some chats. But all the time there was this determination to have it through before Copenhagen. I am proud that we voted against it. I am proud that we did not arm the Prime Minister—with this penalty on Australia heading off into the international marketplace, saying, ‘Look what I’m going to do to my nation’—when his proposals and other proposals like that were resoundingly rejected in Copenhagen. So wisdom has finally come through.

Now that people are starting to understand that ETS is a tax and nothing more than a tax, they have decided to start to reject it. As politicians, when the polls are going our way or not going our way, we say, ‘Oh, we don’t look at the polls,’ but let me tell you, I have been listening to the people. Since the vote on the ETS went through the House, it has been very clear through the contact to my office that people have finally woken up that this is a tax on everything and a tax on everybody.

I say to the Prime Minister: suffer a little humility. Listen to the people. Look at the opportunities. Look at those 17,000 jobs that will disappear in the Hunter. Look at the fact that under your proposal electricity prices will increase. Look at the bureaucracy you will have to create as you process these permits, as you collect the taxes, as you then have to provide the compensation packages. With compensation packages and taxes being collected, who is going to end up paying for all of this expenditure? As I said, just over the next four years and the cost will be $40.6 billion. Who will pay? Let me tell you: it will not just be paid in money; it will be paid in lost opportunities, it will be paid in fewer jobs.

So I say to the Prime Minister during this debate: listen to the people. Look at other opportunities. You have had two years in office now. You could have started a campaign of action over two years ago. You do not have to rely on a tax to provide that action. (Time expired)

Kerry Rea (Bonner, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In contributing to this debate, I would like to say to the opposition: unfortunately, most of the world, including the broader Australian community, already understand that there is no climate change policy that will not bear some cost to our community. We have heard speaker after speaker from the opposition talk about the fact that they are going to reduce emissions and produce this fantastic policy which will achieve all these wonderful environmental outcomes without costing anybody anything. I say to them quite clearly: that is not the case. There is a cost to dealing with climate change. There is a cost to acting on climate change. I also say to them that the cost of acting on climate change is nowhere near the cost of doing nothing. That is what we are faced with as a parliament, as a government, as a community and, indeed, as a global community.

19:21:59 Today we saw the coalition release its policy on climate change. The coalition is commonly and most often referred to as a coalition between the Liberal Party and the Nationals. Today we saw a coalition of climate change sceptics and political opportunists quickly cobble together a policy that acknowledged that they had to have some public response to what is the most significant debate in our community at the moment. It was a knee-jerk political response that was not really serious about dealing with the very difficult challenges that we must face if we are going to do something about reducing emissions.

This challenge, as I have already said, is being discussed and debated in parliaments, in communities and in households across the globe. The fact that world leaders have not necessarily come to an agreement at this point in time does not mean that it is not something that every government and community in the world is still discussing and trying to deal with. It simply demonstrates the complexity of the problem and the difficulty of the decisions that we must make. Nevertheless, I believe that we will get decisions and, as a result, we will get outcomes.

What does the opposition give us? As the Prime Minister has already said, it gives us a magic pudding of a policy. It is not going to cost us anything. It is not going to cause any damage but it is going to solve some of these most difficult problems. It is a policy that talks about some fairly important but nevertheless piecemeal issues in addressing the issue of climate change. We all know that putting solar panels on houses is obviously going to reduce energy consumption and cost. We all know that carbon sequestration—the storage of carbon in soil—is one way of looking at reducing our CO2 emissions. We all know that planting more trees is also another solution. But none of these things can possibly address the amount of pollution that is being put into the air at this point in time and none of those initiatives will reduce emissions to the point where we will see our community become more environmentally and, therefore, more economically and socially sustainable.

I was interested to see that one of the proposals is for underground power cables. The coalition’s policy talks about a $4 billion cost, roughly, over four years. In my previous job as a councillor on the Brisbane City Council, I was part of making decisions about underground power cables and I know how much that costs. In the particular area of Brisbane that I represented, it cost several million dollars to put power cables underground in one small shopping centre in one suburb in one city. They are talking about doing this across the whole country.

First of all, in addressing the concerns that I have about this particular policy, I think the costs are unrealistic and probably not achievable. I think that they will be borne by the taxpayer. I say, ‘I think’ because I actually do not know. With the level of detail that has been released by the Leader of the Opposition, we actually do not know, as yet, where that money is coming from and how much that will cost. Because they have said that they will not support a cap-and-trade scheme. we can assume that it will not be borne by the big polluters. We can only assume, therefore, that it will be borne by the very people who we are trying to protect: those who are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and who will bear the greatest social and economic costs if we do nothing. Fundamentally, they are large majority of working families in this country who contribute through taxes in trying to deal with this very issue. It is important that we acknowledge the effort that is already being made by those very people: individuals and domestic households across the country who are putting in water tanks, installing solar panels, turning off their lights and doing everything they can to reduce their personal carbon footprint.

We all know that this problem is not going to be resolved until we start to deal with the very difficult issues around the major contributors to carbon emissions—that, of course, is industry. We all know that countries across the world, new and old economies, have been successful because of industrialisation and that over a century or more we have continued to acknowledge that industry has to bear some cost if it is going to succeed. They now pay decent wages and they acknowledge that they have to provide good workplace health and safety programs. They know that they have to provide hygienic and healthy workplaces, and make sure that their place in the community in which they operate does not have too much of an impact. There have been hard-fought battles but it has been accepted over the years that business must bear some cost in order to continue to do its business. This is yet another acceptance. We cannot just stop at the chimney or when we talk about our waterways or when we talk about environmental impacts. We have to accept that industry needs to bear some cost and acknowledge the cost of producing pollution.

That is why the Rudd Labor government has introduced a cap-and-trade scheme. It has said to those people who are polluting that they must accept that there is a cost to that pollution. The government has said that it will put a price on that pollution, but it will enable those businesses and those industries through market forces to work out how best they can address those issues, reduce their emissions and continue to grow a successful business.

What is also important about the coalition’s policy is what is not in there. It is not what is in there; it is what is not in there. The glaring omission, as I have already said, is an acknowledgement that the big polluters need to play their part in reducing emissions. A glaring omission is how we can get industry to address that problem and deal with it through a price on carbon.

What is also not there is a cap. We have a policy here that costs billions of dollars, according to them. Who knows what the real cost is. It could be much more. But there is no guarantee, no commitment and no dedication in this policy to reducing emissions. They could do everything in this policy and emissions could still increase. Another glaring omission is the fact that they have not made a commitment to capping emissions—a significant and fundamental basis on which to develop a climate change policy.

It is also important to note that there is no point in them committing these billions of dollars, taxpayers’ money, if they are not going to take it seriously and introduce important and significant changes that everybody in this community can contribute to. The only way that we can actually redress the wrongs of the past and the only way that we can ensure a reduction in pollution is to have everybody playing their part and contributing in a way that is fair and that genuinely shares the cost.

I would like to emphasise once more how important it is that industry is involved in the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and that the major polluters take their fair share of the responsibility. There is nothing in the coalition’s policy that does that. It is piecemeal. It is a knee-jerk political response and it puts the onus unfairly onto taxpayers who are already taking individual action in their communities to try and do the right thing. They are being asked by the coalition to not only do the right thing themselves but also contribute their hard earned taxes to support some form of government funded program that gives no guarantees.

I have some real concerns about this policy. I do not think that it is workable. I do not think that it is realistic. I do not think it focuses on the need to ensure that the cost is borne fairly, because there will be a cost. As I said at the beginning, what is most concerning about the opposition’s comments is that they seem to think that this policy will develop out of thin air, that $4 billion will magically appear and never reduce, but will not actually be borne by anybody within the community. It is hard to take it seriously.

It is also important to note that since the coalition believe they have come up with such a great response to the government’s proposal, you would think they must have consulted with those people they usually require for support—for example, ACCI, whom many opposition members have quoted today. You would think ACCI might have been a little more supportive and complimentary of the coalition’s policy. All ACCI have said in their press release is that they welcome a debate, that they welcome alternative options. They have certainly not said that this is the way to go. They have certainly not said that the coalition’s policy is the best way to reduce emissions. They have not said any of that. They have once again reinforced their need for some certainty about how to move forward. All they have said is that they welcome a debate—hardly a ringing endorsement.

In conclusion, this policy talks a little around the edges about piecemeal changes. It does not go as far as some of the things that the Rudd government have already done when it comes to energy efficiency, promoting green jobs, promoting carbon storage and supporting agriculture, and a range of programs. In fact, $15 billion has already been committed by the government to programs that will see far-reaching results when it comes to agriculture, energy efficiency and support for domestic households. We cannot walk away from the fact that we have to move on and deal with industry in a way that is fair, that gives them some certainty but reduces the impact on taxpayers. The coalition’s policy is merely a con job. They have cobbled together a political response. The coalition have no real direction on or commitment to this issue. They have not made a considered, fair or genuine commitment to reducing emissions that would see all of the community take a fair share of the responsibility.

Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We have heard some discussion that the only effective action that can be taken is through the introduction of an ETS tax. Let us look at ETS taxes. They certainly have not been a sterling success in Europe, where they have been in operation for a while. I do not see too many of the European nations that have had an ETS on their books for quite a while achieving anywhere near their Kyoto goals, for the most part. In fact, even the originator of the ETS—and remember that the ETS was originally for sulphur dioxide emissions—says that an ETS is not viable for reductions in carbon dioxide on a global scale. You are certainly seeing that in the European context, where $126 billion was traded on the carbon market last year. To what end? There were no reductions in carbon dioxide emissions and they certainly did not reach Kyoto goals.

The member for Isaacs talks about denial of climate change. The reality is that this is typical scaremongering and resorting to holocaust type comparisons. The fact is that the member for Isaacs and the majority of people in this House would know that there is no such thing as settled science on this issue. So it is just typical nay-saying—‘We will call them climate science deniers,’ in an attempt at fearmongering. As I have said, there is no settled science and particularly in climate change science, but here we have the unquestioning acceptance of one side of an argument by a barrister. You would think he would have some idea about examination of evidence, but, no, it is: ‘That side are deniers and this side are purer than the driven snow.’

Let us have a look at the science that is ‘purer than the driven snow’. Let us have a look at the Climategate emails, for example, and Phil Jones, head of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, one of the senior members on the IPCC and head of one of the major repositories of global climate data. There were a couple of papers that he did not like in the peer-reviewed literature and he wrote in an email:

I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

Boy, he was not kidding! The IPCC excludes genuine peer review—for instance, those papers—but now accepts, for example, with Glaciergate, a report in New Scientist based on a couple of telephone calls between a journalist and an obscure scientist working on glaciers. That New Scientist article was then regurgitated by the WWF in a propaganda piece, and that suddenly became peer-reviewed science that was accepted by the IPCC. Subsequent to this all blowing up, coordinating lead author Professor Lal—a seriously senior person in the IPCC—now admits he does not know much about glaciers. The head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, has a pecuniary vested interest and lied about the period he became aware of this glacier problem. In fact, this glacier problem was known at the time of the fourth assessment report but was included as the IPCC wanted to pressure governments in the subcontinent into action. This is IPCC scientists as activists. Scientists are supposed to be independent in examining the evidence, and all they are doing is acting as activists in this case.

Then we have Africagate. Apparently, reduced rainfall will reduce African crop yields by 40 per cent by 2020—more peer-reviewed science, you would have thought. No; it was based on an article by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, an advocacy group, and it was based on a report on three countries. It was written in an article that was not peer reviewed, an article that was written by people who were not scientists.

Then there was Amazongate. An advocacy group associated with the WWF, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, predicted ecological catastrophe in the Amazon. In the fourth assessment report of the IPCC, they stated:

Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state, not necessarily producing gradual changes between the current and the future situation.

And they refer to ‘Rowell and Moore, 2000’. Who are Rowell and Moore? One of them is an ‘expert’ on government legislation—not a scientist—and the other is a journalist associated with Greenpeace and the WWF. Interestingly enough, the report does not reference a 40 per cent reduction at all.

Then there was Insurancegate, based on a paper by Muir-Wood which was not accepted in the literature when the IPCC report came out. But guess what? It was accepted anyway, despite the IPCC having ruled that papers be peer reviewed and accepted about six months prior to the closing date of review—and this was not accepted by the time that the full report came out. The full report that was accepted found insufficient evidence for the assertion of increased insurance imposts due to climate change. Roger Pielke Jr, one of the expert reviewers, questioned the assertion by the IPCC of increased insurance imposts, but this was basically ignored by the IPCC.

Then you have Mountaingate, with reduced snow cover on mountains, according to the IPCC, already demonstrating climate change effects. But guess where that came from? It came from a magazine called Climbing, which was for rock climbers and mountaineers—certainly not peer reviewed—and a masters thesis that quoted mountain guides in the Alps and their anecdotal evidence of snow reduction. Then you have Antarcticagate, with the IPCC report saying:

The multiple stresses of climate change and increasing human activity on the Antarctic Peninsula represent a clear vulnerability.

But guess what? It was based on a paper submitted to the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators. It was not peer reviewed and there was no discussion in the article about climate change. These are in the fourth assessment report—supposedly, the most thoroughly checked document in scientific history. It is absolutely unbelievable.

But let us have a look at what has actually been occurring in the time periods and contrast that with IPCC projections. Temperatures have been dropping since 2001. One of the ministers was talking about 14 of the 16 hottest years or whatever, but the reality is that the trend line is down. It has been dropping since 2001. Let us talk about trends. We hear about this upward trend and human beings causing it. The reality is that, yes, there has been an upward trend over 150 years of measurement. Certainly if you go back through paleoclimatological data, it goes back a few hundred years. Basically, it is a bounce off the little ice age.

But the fact is that the IPCC acknowledges that most of that warming is natural. They are basing it on a 23-year period from about 1975 to 1998, when they say, ‘Guess what: our models don’t kind of explain this warming without human activity.’ Well, guess what: their models all projected an increase in global temperatures this century, even for a case where carbon dioxide was held constant at year 2000 levels. We all know that carbon dioxide levels have increased since then. The IPCC said that the urban heat island effect is negligible. This was as a result of a paper by Jones—once again, the guy who said we will change the definition of peer review. This was accepted by the IPCC, despite the fact that evidence was fabricated by co-author Wei-Chyung Wang.

In Northern Australia there was another falsehood: the IPCC report showed significant increases in temperature over the last century. The problem is that you get the raw data and it shows no increase at all. In fact, if anything, it shows a slight decrease.

Lyman et al and Loehle et al show cooling of the global oceans, despite the IPCC projections all showing that the oceans should be heating up. In fact, we were given some evidence by Will Steffen and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, referencing a paper by Church, amongst others, who said, ‘You should be referencing this, this is the latest one.’ The problem is that the data ended in 2003, which is when the Argo network was introduced. The Argo network has given us more data about ocean temperatures since 2003 than we have had in the rest of human recorded history combined. We need to have a full audit of the IPCC and include an audit by sceptics of data—including data from Australia. If everything is aboveboard, no-one should have any problem with this.

Given the government’s history of spin and no substance, it is no wonder that they simply take at face value everything that the IPCC says and see it as beyond question despite evidence of significant corruption. The government’s ETS tax has no solutions for how to achieve cuts. Merely have a look at the lack of success of the ETS in Europe to see that the ETS tax in itself does not solve anything.

The coalition policy makes sense, as it has benefits even if—as I have maintained for years—humankind are not having, and will not have, a major effect on global climate. The policy that we have is the responsible thing to do, particularly in light of the fraudulent science, the corruption and the collusion evident in the IPCC process. The IPCC process is supposed to be peer reviewed, but the reality is that the lead author can choose to accept or reject the reviewer’s comment. That is not peer review. I have written peer review papers, and peer review is where you actually have to directly confront the reviewer’s comments, not simply choose to ignore them.

Let us think about another thing. Let us think about what happens if the consensus position on the science changes and they say that there is no longer global warming. Let us just assume that. The question then is: once you have introduced an ETS, how do you unscramble the damn thing? Should it be that many others and I are wrong, our policy has the benefit of reducing CO2 emissions, but if I am right then it has benefits in other areas—environmental areas. There has been scant discussion on environment in this—it has been discussion of carbon dioxide and tax. It does not lock us into a tax forevermore regardless of whether the consensus science is right or wrong.

We had to go to Copenhagen with CPRS passed—an emissions tax imposed—because this was going to show the world. It shows how much authority the Rudd government has as far as the world authority is concerned. Just have a look at the countries that have decided that they do not want to act: India and China. Very shortly they will be the No. 2 and No. 1 emitters in the world. Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out that it is in China’s interest—if the IPCC position is correct as far as warming is concerned—not to have an ETS and to have that warming. It will give them a competitive advantage. Industry bodies used to go along completely with the government’s position, saying, ‘We accept a CPRS, and we need certainty’—but guess what—‘don’t hurt us.’ Now they have been given an alternative and, quite frankly, they prefer our policy.

The member for Bonner was talking about underground power cables. Here we are talking about major high voltage—(Time expired)

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise as the 20th speaker on this debate before the parliament today. I am pleased to take the opportunity to make a contribution on not just a significant issue facing this parliament but a significant issue facing the world and, in particular, one in which I believe we, as policy makers, have obligations not just for this generation but for generations to come.

One thing that makes people disillusioned with politics is the tension between short-term political election cycles and the vision that is required for planning the long-term future. With climate change the problem and the solutions needed to address it extend not only beyond political cycles but beyond lifetimes. It is not just about whether children born today will ever get to see the natural splendour of the Great Barrier Reef. It is not just about ensuring that Kakadu maintains its splendour. It is not just about dealing with the water crisis which has particularly hit Australia now and will do so into the future. It is also about planning for our economic future, knowing that the costs of adjustment to a low-carbon economy will increase in direct proportion to the delay in action—and we know that that is the case. We have been advised as a government. But the previous government was also advised by Treasury and by every other serious economic body, not just in Australia but globally, including through reports such as the Stern report in the United Kingdom, which emphasised the cost of inaction.

What we saw exhibited in this debate today was extremely disappointing. What I am disappointed by is not the view of the member for Tangney, who predictably put forward his views. He has, to be fair, consistently put them forward. Indeed, on 15 February 2007 he proposed in this parliament some sort of shade cloth being put into orbit to deal with climate change. He essentially has been a climate sceptic from day one, as have many of those opposite, including the member for Mackellar and others, who have been consistent in their views in opposition to climate change. What is extraordinarily disappointing is the fact that there are some opposite who know that climate change is real, who know that we need to take action and who believe that market based forces are the appropriate method of achieving that change and that dynamic, yet they have stood up here and contradicted the views that they argued throughout last year—the views that they held whilst being in a minority position in the Howard government. It is a travesty that they do not have the courage of their convictions, because they know that their position is a nonsense. They know this government’s position, which has essentially three prongs to it, and why we need a carbon pollution reduction scheme.

Firstly, you need a cap. We propose one; they do not. Secondly, you need to ensure that the big polluters pay. Our system will do that; theirs will impose a cost on ordinary taxpayers instead. Ours, by using the payments of the big polluters to compensate working families, ensures that that protection is there. They provide no protection economically, let alone for the sustainability of our environment into the future. The market based system has not just come from nowhere. Indeed, what we are seeing now is that the climate sceptics of the Liberal and National parties have become market sceptics as well. They believe in a command economy solution that is not real. What we need to do is ensure that we use the push of the market as well as the pull of new technology to provide solutions to climate change. That is where the model comes from. Kyoto and its adoption followed the emissions trading model adopted in the United States for sulphur dioxide. It was agreed by Australia at the conference in 1997 that that was the way to go. Of course, this model came about through the Clean Air Act of George Bush Senior in the United States in 1990. This was hailed as being extremely successful in stemming the acid rain sweeping across the nation.

Since then, we have seen a number of emissions trading models adopted and in practice—not just in Europe but also in the United States, particularly through the RGGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which is a cap and trade system covering states in the north-east of the United States. The debate has occurred within the global community about the nature of the way that we move forward, but it is important to recognise that Kyoto did not come about overnight. We had the Rio summit in 1992. It then led to the Kyoto protocol being signed, including by Australia in 1997, but it did not come into force until many years later. Indeed, in December 2005 I attended the conference in Montreal as Labor’s environment spokesperson. It took seven years of hard negotiation—and hard negotiation will indeed be needed on a global level. But all those opposite who, during the period of the Howard government, spoke about the need for international action are now walking away from that completely. They are walking away from that argument.

If you look at what has occurred, we know that we do need to have a price set on carbon. It is obvious that failing to price carbon restricts the demand for zero- or low-carbon technologies. If you do not have economic mechanisms, existing and new technologies will simply not be rolled out to the extent that is required. That is why this government introduced its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. That is why we negotiated in good faith with the opposition on amendments to that scheme. Those opposite, including the member for Goldstein, sitting there on the front bench of the opposition, now say that they are opposed to this. Just last year he was the shadow minister assisting the Leader of the Opposition on emissions trading design.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Climate change.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Mackellar tries to rewrite history and say he was the shadow minister for climate change. I table for her benefit the list of the shadow ministry, indicating that indeed the Hon. Andrew Robb MP was the shadow minister for infrastructure and COAG and shadow minister assisting the Leader of the Opposition on emissions trading design.

They are trying to wipe out their own history on this issue because the fact is there are three problems with their position that they have advanced today. Firstly, it does not actually require any action whatsoever by the polluters—no cap. Secondly, it slugs taxpayers instead of the big polluters. Thirdly, it is unfunded; it simply does not add up. They cannot say where the money is coming from. Indeed, it is time for some straight talking on climate change, as others have said. A member of this House said on 7 December 2009:

Now politics is about conviction and a commitment to carry out those convictions. The Liberal Party is currently led by people whose conviction on climate change is that it is “crap” and you don’t need to do anything about it.

Any policy that is announced will simply be a con, an environmental figleaf to cover a determination to do nothing.

That was the member for Wentworth. What we have seen put forward by the Leader of the Opposition today is just that: an environmental fig leaf backed by the climate change sceptics opposite and backed in by what has now become a party not just of climate sceptics but of market sceptics. They do not believe that there should be a market based solution. Now they have gone back to their rhetoric of the Howard era, saying that emissions trading and market based mechanisms are a tax, whereas what we know is that, from their own words today, this unfunded scheme that they have put forward will require extra taxation from ordinary PAYE taxpayers. Those opposite simply do not understand what the business community has demanded, because they need for their interests the certainty that an emissions trading scheme would bring. But the member for Wentworth was absolutely right when he said that the plan would be a con job, because indeed the plan announced by the opposition is a con job that does less, costs more and will eventually mean increased taxes to be paid by Australians.

The fact is we need strong, responsible national leadership. We can seize the economic benefits that are available from the worldwide push to clean, renewable energy. This is not a question of Right or Left; it is a question of right and wrong. That was something that was agreed by those opposite when they said they would have good-faith negotiations, but they walked away from it because they did not have the courage of their convictions and they chose to walk away from good policy outcomes. This is about old ways or new paths. We on this side of the chamber believe that we need to move forward in every way—economically, socially and environmentally—into this century. We have had 20 speakers on this debate. They said they wanted a debate. They then proceeded not to be quite sure whether they wanted a debate. We have given them one and we are happy to continue debates into the future. I move:

That the question be now put.

Question put.

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, I ask that further questions be placed on the Notice Paper.