Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank my friend and colleague the member for Blair for his question. I can advise him that there would be every prospect of countries that do proceed with carbon pricing retaliating against Australian exporters if we sought to have a free ride into their markets at the expense of their industries. Any delay would create a new excuse for protectionism to take hold in our export markets, which would be very damaging to our exporters. A recently released Productivity Commission report finds that Australia's top five trading partners—China, Japan, the United States, Korea and India—have implemented carbon pricing in one form or another at the national, state or city level. Far from going it alone, it is clear that Australia is around the middle of the pack in our efforts to put a price on carbon.

I am asked by the member for Blair about support for a carbon price. We have seen in the newspapers today support for pricing carbon from leading Australians including Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, Fiona Stanley and Patrick McGorry—I understand that the coalition accepts that Patrick McGorry is a great Australian, as are Dr Fiona Stanley and Ian Kiernan, amongst others. There is another contributor to this debate about putting a price on carbon, and that other contributor has had this to say, sensibly:

... a new tax would be the intelligent sceptic's way to deal with minimising emissions ...