Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Finance and Deregulation. Why is the financial framework for tackling climate change crucial and why does the government reject the failed approaches of the past?

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

I thank the member for Melbourne Ports for his question. The financial framework underpinning policies to tackle climate change is an extremely important matter, particularly as these are issues that relate to fundamental change in our economy. Such financial frameworks are important with respect to producing the maximum outcomes with minimum cost to taxpayers, minimum impact on the budget and minimum disruption to the Australian economy. Unfortunately, the alternative that has been released this week by the Leader of the Opposition has a very familiar ring about it. There is a grab bag of gimmicks, the giant slush fund for the National Party to hand out to their mates, the lack of teeth—it is all voluntary—all of those things have a very familiar ring to them.

That familiar ring is no coincidence, because, if we look back to the former Howard government and the former Prime Minister, John Howard, before he committed to putting in place an emissions trading scheme, we will see some remarkable similarities between those policies and the policies being advocated by the Leader of the Opposition. I would just like to give a few examples of some of the programs put in place by the Howard government to allegedly address climate change over its time in office. This is by no means an exhaustive list: Local Greenhouse Action, Greenhouse Challenge Plus, Climate Change Science Program, Low Emissions Technology and Abatement program, Renewable Energy Commercialisation Program, Solar Cities program, Remote Renewable Power Generation Program, Photovoltaic Rebate Program, Green Vouchers for Schools, Green Stamp program, Action on Energy Efficiency program, National Climate Change Adaptation Program—and so the list goes on.

Time prevents me from giving you the full list, Mr Speaker, but I would like to draw attention to one remaining John Howard program, and that is the Greenhouse Gas Abatement Program, a grants program that was designed to fund projects and activities that deliver large-scale emissions abatement that would otherwise not occur. Sound familiar? It sounds an awful lot like the $2½ billion crock that is in the proposal put forward by the Leader of the Opposition this week. It is precisely the old John Howard policies. We are going back to the good old days of ‘Honest John’, except now it is his love child, ‘Phoney Tony’. The script is the same, but it is now ‘Phoney Tony’ instead of ‘Honest John’. The script is: pretend you will do something, hand over bucketloads of money to the National Party to dish out to their mates and not have a serious impact on the problem because it is all voluntary. It is all business as usual according to the opposition’s policies.

We have seen from the Department of Climate Change’s analysis that has been released that the impact on emissions of the proposals put forward by the Leader of the Opposition would be roughly a third of that claimed. So, in other words, if he is to seek to achieve his objective that he allegedly shares with the government—the targets he shares with the government—he would have to increase his spending to somewhere close to treble what he is already committed to, which on his own admission, is an additional $10 billion or so over a 10-year period on top of the $9½ billion he is ripping out of the budget to protect the subsidies for private health insurance for millionaires. This all demonstrates that this is nothing but a giant con job on the part of the Leader of the Opposition. It has little impact on climate change, it involves a massive hit to the budget and it recycles the failed strategies of the past from John Howard.