Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I continue where I started—that is, by saying that there are three simple things about all these bills together: 1) climate change is real; 2) there are things that we can do about it; 3) the things that we can do about it are affordable. Given that we all agree in this place and, of course, much more widely—not only in Australia but also right across the globe—about climate change, it is just a matter of what type of system we should put in place to best achieve our goals. By far the best system is a broad-based carbon price. It is the most environmentally effective and cheapest way to reduce pollution. A carbon price puts a price tag on pollution. Through the carbon price, for the first time, an incentive will be provided for people not to pollute—in particular for our 500 biggest polluters, who will be required to pay for each tonne of carbon they release into the atmosphere in.

This scheme will start on 1 July 2012. Let us be clear that these bills will go through this place—there is agreement here for these bills to pass. There will be a fixed-price period for 2 years, and then we will move to a cap-and-trade emissions trading scheme whereby the market will set the price. A market based mechanism is by far the best way to deal with climate change. During the fixed-price period the starting price will be $23 per tonne, and during the next two years it will rise by 2.5 per cent. So, assuming inflation of 2.5 per cent, the carbon price will be $25.40 per tonne by 2014-15.

The flexible market, set-price period will commence on 1 July in three years time—that is, in 2015. During the flexible price period, the government will set the cap by issuing a fixed number of carbon units each year, and some of those units will be auctioned by government. This is the best way to move forward with the system. It means that the market decides and that business gets to adapt, to adjust, to evolve and to grow.

But we are not going to allow this to happen without accepting the fact that there is some cost and that that cost has to be abated in some way. That is why we have put together an assistance package for industry as well as for households. Over the first three years of the carbon price, the government will devote $9.2 billion to assistance for affected jobs in emissions-intensive trade-exposed industries. That is to provide with them a transition period to adjust, to adopt, to match what is happening in the rest of the world and an opportunity to continue to grow.

There will be $800 million in the Clean Technology Investment Program, which will provide grants to manufacturers to support investment in energy efficient equipment technologies, processes and products. Over six years there will be $150 million for the food processing industry and $50 million for the metal forging and foundry industries. The government will also provide $200 million in grants to support business research and development in areas of renewable energy, low pollution technology and energy efficiency.

The government is also ensuring that households, tradespeople, farmers and small businesses do not face a carbon price on fuel—because the will not be a carbon price on fuel. The government will reduce the fuels tax credits received by many large polluters so that they too pay an effective carbon price. Many businesses will be exempted from the reduction in fuel credits and shielded from the carbon price on fuel. Heavy vehicles such as semitrailers will also be exempt until 2014-15. While the carbon price will be paid directly by the 500 biggest polluters in this country, the government has designed a generous package to help small business grow and invest in energy efficient assets. Farming and other land-based activities will not be covered by the mechanism. However, the Carbon Farming Initiative will give farmers an opportunity to generate income by taking action to reduce their pollution.

I said earlier that these measures can be effective—and they are. The world is already acting on climate change; in every country there is something being done. It might be called something different and look slightly different in other countries, but every country is taking action on climate change. It is clearly in Australia's national interest to continue to work to achieve the international goal of limiting warming to below two degrees. In order to do this, it is imperative that we play a responsible role in the international arena by taking strong action at home. We have to act locally and think globally.

The government's plan will cut carbon pollution and drive investment in clean energy technologies and infrastructure. It will generate new jobs in these fields. The carbon price will see Australia's annual emissions reduced by at least 159 million tonnes by 2020 from where they would have been had we done nothing. By 2050, we will have taken over 17 billion tonnes of carbon pollution out of the atmosphere by saving nine out of every 10 tonnes of pollution we would have emitted had this plan not been in place.

Australia has some of the best renewable energy resources in the world, including hydro, wind, bioenergy, geothermal, wave and tide—not to mention one of our most abundant resources: solar energy. By 2050, according to Treasury modelling, with a carbon price $100 billion will have been invested in renewable energy, and 40 per cent of Australia's electricity generation will come from renewables. Australia's renewable energy sector will have grown 17 times because of the changes that we are putting in place.

But, as I said earlier, all this does come at a cost and we acknowledge that cost—and it must be compensated for. So nine out of 10 households will receive some assistance through tax cuts or payment increases, and two in three households will get tax cuts or increased payments that will cover the expected average price impact on them. We have tried in this area to be a little bit more generous: we will give a little bit extra, because we would rather err on the side of assistance than on the side of not getting it quite right.

Over four million Australian households will get assistance that is at least 20 per cent more than the expected average price impact on them. Over one million additional Australians will no longer need to lodge a tax return. That is right—one million additional Australian taxpayers will never have to lodge a tax return again because of these changes. On average, the scheme will cost households $9.90 per week, but they will get $10.10 per week in assistance. The assistance is permanent and will increase over time in step with any expected increases caused by these changes. The government will review the adequacy of assistance each year and will increase it further if necessary.

We will go further than that—there will also be tax cuts. Everyone earning up to $80,000 will receive a tax cut. For most people, it will be at least $300. The tax-free threshold will triple in size: no one will pay tax on the first $20,000 they earn. This means that half a million people will go from having to pay tax to paying no tax at all. This is a major tax reform that will encourage people who only need part-time work only to join the workforce. It is an incentive to create jobs and an incentive for people to work.

Of course, pensioners and self-funded retirees will not be left out. Pensioners and self-funded retirees holding a Commonwealth Seniors Health Card will get a cash increase of $338 each year if they are single and $510 combined each year if they are couples. That means that, on average, 1.8 million pensioner households will come out at least $210 ahead of the expected carbon price impact on them. Around 150,000 self-funded retirees and part rate pensioners will also receive tax cuts in the order of over $300. We have not forgotten families either. They are an important part of what we are doing. Increases in family tax benefit A for each child will be up $110 per year. Single-income families with children will get up to $69 extra in each family tax benefit B plus up to $300 in additional supplement. Allowance recipients such as people on Newstart and youth allowance will also get up to $218 a year for singles and up to $390 a year for couples. These are good things for the nation across the board.

Specifically, people will want to know what will happen in my electorate of Oxley. Out of the 62,000 taxpayers in Oxley, around 54,000 will receive a tax cut and 45,000 of these will receive a tax cut of at least $300. More than 38,000 people in Oxley will receive household assistance through income support payments or family assistance payments. A typical family in Oxley will have expected cost increases of around $497 per year, but they will receive around $754 in tax cuts and family assistance. They will be about $257 better off per year. There are more than 3,000 single parents in Oxley who will also get an extra $289 per year and 17,100 pensioners in Oxley will receive an extra $338 per year for singles and $510 per couple—that is, extra after all their expenses. Pensioners will be better off, students will be better off and families will be better off but, most importantly, our economy and our economy will be better off. It is always difficult to make the big decisions in government and to take the next steps forward. It is always difficult to be able to see beyond the horizon, to look where the future takes us—not after the next election or the election after that but the next generation in this country. That is what this is about. This is about making fundamental change. This is about structural reform. This is about changing the way our economy operates. This is about ensuring that industries of the future have a future. This is about making sure that we do not get caught in old thinking, old traps or old ways, which mean that you cannot transition economies and then the jobs you are trying protect today disappear tomorrow because no government took the courageous steps it needed to ensure you could have a clean energy future. This is about making sure we are part of the global economy, the global village. It is a small planet. We are connected. We are a trading nation. Not only do we need to do these things but also we need to shield the impacts of some of these things locally, at a domestic level, and that is exactly what we are doing. We are talking about one of the biggest changes in this economy that has been seen, I would say, for well over 100 years. It is well thought out and well considered and it will be well delivered. (Time expired)

Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Primary Healthcare) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the bills which will introduce the carbon tax. I welcome the opportunity to speak on this important issue facing this parliament. It comes to one of the most fundamental issues in our democracy, and that is whether the community should be told what a government is going to do before an election. Six days before the last election the Prime Minister said, 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' It was explicit and in none of the documentation—in none of the policies, in none of the material that was put out by any Labor candidate—did the government say they would be introducing a carbon tax.

Australian political history shows that Australians will exact a very heavy price on governments which mislead. Paul Keating, campaigning against a GST, in effect introduced a GST by stealth in the 1993 budget. He massively increased the then wholesale sales tax on a range of goods. Here we have a carbon tax bill that emerged after the 2010 election, when the Prime Minister clearly said, 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' This shows no respect for democracy in this country. You cannot make specific promises as part of your election platform and then ignore them once elected.

The proposal of the government will cost Australians $9 billion per year. To put this in perspective, the carbon trading scheme in Europe, a much larger economy than Australia's, raises $500 million a year. The impact of the carbon tax will be felt very heavily by people with fixed incomes, such as self-funded retirees and pensioners, and by families. The government has spent a lot of time in this debate focusing on the compensation that people are to receive. If you do not tax someone, you do not need to compensate them. But, if the carbon tax does not hurt, it will not work. What will happen is that the carbon tax will result in a 10 per rise in electricity prices and a nine per cent rise in gas bills in the first year alone. There will be a $4.3 billion hit on the budget bottom line. At the moment we already see enormous pressure on the cost of living for families and all this will do is add to it. At a time when we are seeing retail and small business sectors struggling as never before, this is the worst time to be introducing a carbon tax, which will only increase all of those pressures. Since 2007, when Labor came to office, on average electricity prices have risen 51 per cent, gas prices have risen 30 per cent and water and sewerage prices have risen 46 per cent. Despite what the government says, any tax cuts provided will not keep pace with the increasing cost of the carbon tax, and most Australians know this. While the carbon tax will start at $23 per tonne, it will be a floating price after three years, with the government expecting the price to be $37 a tonne in 2020 and over $350 a tonne in 2050.

What will this do to the cost of living? Australian manufacturing is already under pressure, cost of living for everyday Australians is forever increasing, and a carbon tax will only make this worse. Australian businesses will be put at a major disadvantage. On the government's own figures, more than three million Australian households are going to be worse off under the carbon tax.

But worst of all is that under Labor's carbon tax scheme emissions will actually increase. Australian emissions will increase from 578 million tonnes in 2012 to 621 million tonnes in 2020. The whole point of the government's proposal is to reduce emissions in Australia. At the most basic argument, the carbon tax fails in this purpose. The only way the government is going to reach its emissions reduction targets is to buy offshore carbon credits from foreign carbon traders. Under Labor's proposal, the government itself estimates that Australia will be spending $3½ billion purchasing carbon credits from foreign carbon traders in 2020. By 2050 we as a nation will be spending $57 billion a year, or 1½ per cent of our GDP, on purchasing offshore carbon credits from foreign carbon traders. This means that we will be spending $3½ billion in 2020 to buy up foreign carbon credits from potentially dodgy foreign carbon traders to plant trees in other countries, not in Australia. To put this into perspective, Australian government health funding in the latest financial year, as a percentage of GDP, was only 4.1 per cent.

All the Labor Party's carbon tax will do is shift emissions overseas, at a huge cost to the Australian taxpayer. The only way that a carbon tax can reduce emissions is if people use less coal produced electricity and less oil powered transport. The problem with this is that the use of electricity is inelastic—not entirely, but quite significantly. Electricity consumption does not drop with increased costs. We are dependent on electricity. Labor's carbon tax will not work. It will hurt families and cost jobs.

The government's own paperwork reveals that the scheme will raise $27 billion in revenue in the first three years of the tax. This is not a tax about the environment; this is a wealth redistribution tax. The 750,000 small businesses in Australia will receive no direct compensation for the massive hikes in electricity prices. What it means is that jobs will be lost and product prices will rise.

As I go around my electorate holding my listening posts and doorknocking, the issue of the carbon tax is raised continually. Residents in my electorate have constantly contacted me about the impact that this carbon tax is going to have on their family, their household or their business. People tell me how this tax is going to mean that their small business is going to struggle even more than before when their expenses go up under the carbon tax. Labor members have spent a lot of time talking about compensation which families will receive, but they have not spent any time talking about the impact on small business, who will receive no compensation. Self-funded retirees and other people on fixed incomes tell me how this tax is going to mean they will struggle to make ends meet because grocery bills and electricity bills are going to go up. These bills are going to go up just as our emissions are going to go up under this carbon tax. There is negligible environmental benefit achieved under this new tax.

I recently met with one of the local councils in my electorate. They informed me that their annual power bill is $1.3 million, 70 per cent of which is for street lighting. Based on the government's own figures, the carbon tax will have an instant impact of $130,000 a year on this local council's budget—money that would otherwise have been spent on providing services to the community. The only way they can recover that $130,000 per year is to increase rates on their ratepayers. This is an example of the fact that power is inelastic. The council cannot just turn off its street lights.

I would also like to focus a bit on the impact that the carbon tax will have on health care in this country. We have already heard from the Victorian government that this will have an impact of millions of dollars on the power bills of hospitals in Victoria. The carbon tax will dramatically increase the cost of running Australia's public and private hospitals. Hospitals are huge consumers of electricity, and there is no way that this consumption can be reduced. Hospitals, through services like radiotherapy and diagnostic imaging, use enormous amounts of electricity, and there is no compensation for them in this carbon tax proposal. What a diagnostic imaging practice will see is a 10 per cent increase in their electricity bill. What a public hospital will see is, again, a 10 per cent increase in their electricity bill. A private hospital will see the same. For a clinic delivering radiotherapy and radiation oncology, it will be a 10 per cent increase in that power bill. Electricity prices will increase by 10 per cent in the first year alone, and the government refuses to tell us how much they are expected to rise in future years. When you consider primary care, a general practice, again, will see a 10 per cent increase in their power bill. In allied health, high users of electricity such as physiotherapy practices and dentists will also see a 10 per cent increase in their power bill, with no offset there at all. This is money that could have been spent on providing more front-line health services, and instead it will now be spent on electricity bills due to the government's carbon tax.

I would like now to talk about the coalition's alternative, which is our direct action plan. Despite what those opposite say, the coalition does believe that climate change is real and that mankind is making a contribution. Therefore we do support practical action on climate change. It is right that we protect our environment, and I do not think any Australian would argue with that. During the 2010 election, I made a promise that under a coalition government there would be several Green Corps projects to improve environmental conservation within my electorate. Our direct action policy is aimed at reducing emissions by five per cent by 2020, just like the government's plan. However, we believe that the action we take must be reasonable. We believe that the action we take must not be at the expense of Australian jobs or at the expense of our standards of living. The action we take should not, and must not, drive up the cost of living for people who are already struggling. There is a fundamental difference between the ideology of those opposite and that of the coalition. While those opposite prefer to penalise, punish, and tax, the coalition believes in providing incentive and optimism. This can be seen in many of the government's policies, but it is most clearly seen in their attitude towards climate change.

The coalition's direct action climate policy provides incentives for Australian businesses to reduce their carbon emissions voluntarily. Under a coalition direct action plan, there will be no cost to families, no new taxes and no rise in electricity prices. Our direct action plan is costed, capped and fully funded. By using incentives, our plan allows the market to determine the cheapest way to reduce emissions.

This is a bad tax, based on a lie. We must never forget that the Prime Minister lied to our country before the election—

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

The member for Boothby knows that he cannot use that word.

Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Primary Healthcare) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Madam Deputy Speaker, I withdraw.

The Prime Minister, six days before the election, said, 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' That can only be described as misleading. Residents in the minister's own electorate are well aware of this. I have a very clear vision of a nice photo opportunity held at the Findon bowling club, where the Prime Minister was explaining her carbon tax. She was buttonholed by a constituent who realised instantly what the impact of the carbon tax was going to be and said, very correctly, that India and the major emitters were not taking any action. This is a major breach of faith by the Prime Minister. The coalition will be voting against the carbon tax legislation and, if elected, we will rescind the carbon tax legislation.

Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Health Services and Indigenous Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the residents of Bowman, I rise to make the two most obvious points that have been clear since the debate on emissions trading and the carbon tax began, and that is that we need to get the right mechanism and that we need to do it at the right time. I do not need to go back into the history of the misleading of voters before the last election, but I do need to acknowledge, more importantly, that it has been a long and tortuous debate on both sides of this chamber that has led us to this position.

The point I want to make clear today is that we need to get the right system for Australia because we are lawmakers here in Australia. It does not matter what the rest of the world is doing if we are doing the right thing for this nation. That is my job. It is the job of international agencies and international agreements to work out what is the right thing for the globe. I know if we do not have a global solution on carbon we do not have a solution at all. My speech today is going to focus on where we are globally in that agreement. I will also look at the temporal elements and the history of carbon negotiation—where we have got to and where the pitfalls have been. I do not doubt that a year or two from now we will revisit this debate and ask, 'What did we pass, and why?'

The best comparison for carbon negotiation globally is most likely the trade negotiations that began after World War II and continue today. We still do not have a worldwide trade agreement, 60 years on. More recently we have seen the poverty negotiations around the millennium goals—again, we are halfway to 2020 and we still do not have global agreement on action regarding poverty.

The point about carbon is that a quick and dirty agreement does not get you any closer to a global agreement. We know from international negotiation that it is a slow, trust-building, layer-upon-layer, meeting-upon-meeting approach that takes you towards the solution, or the destination, which is a global agreement. The early GATT negotiations began in 1947, in Annecy, Geneva, Dillon, Torquay and Kennedy. They then rolled right through Tokyo and then, finally, to the Uruguay Round, which began in 2001. Even 10 years after that tortuous process, no-one came out and said, 'I'm dropping all my trade barriers and that's the right thing for the planet.'

That is not the right thing to do in carbon. So the first point I want to address is this notion that we have to set an example for the rest of the world. We do not set examples for the rest of the world when it comes to jobs and livelihoods; we negotiate with the rest of the world. And what has happened since Copenhagen and since Bali? If we are this committed as a nation, why isn't this Prime Minister calling the President of the United States saying, 'Let's do something together'; getting in contact with Russia, Japan, Singapore and South Africa; bringing together the trade economies for meetings; and saying, 'Let's have a carbon arrangement'? It does not matter to this Prime Minister. This is purely a journey of political expediency for a Prime Minister desperate for something that she can look tough on.

Of course, in Australia we know that the impact will be significant. If we as a country wish to lead on climate we must be doing so at every opportunity, not just finding a way to punish our own people. That might be in some masochistic sense impressive to those that are looking for action on climate, but it does nothing to take us closer to global agreement. The fundamental point that has never been made by this government is whether us signing up to something makes other nations more likely or less likely to sign up. If you set up asymmetry in trade and in business where there is an advantage for other countries not to sign up, it is called the first-mover disincentive. It leads to perverse outcomes where you perpetuate the situation. Why would another economy come together and say, 'Australia's harming its trade exposed exports with this carbon tax; let's quickly do the same and remove the advantage we have'? It is pathetic and it is ridiculous. How that occurs is a point that has never been made on this side of the House.

The government would lead us to believe from their Treasury modelling that every other nation in the world will fall into a carbon tax when the ink is barely dry on the agreement—that they are only months or years away from a carbon tax. That is complete folly. No-one on the floor of congress in the US wants a carbon tax. Prime Minister, visit Japan. Go and visit Russia. Talk to Brazil. Show me the mining economies that say that a carbon tax is the right way to go. You will not find an economy that says that. With the greatest of respect to our colleagues in the EU and to New Zealand, our brothers across the Tasman Sea, they are not a mining, trade exposed economy. It is quite easy when you have consumed your natural resources to raise your hand for a carbon tax. It is not that hard to do—particularly when it is at about a dollar per person per year. It is not a hard thing to do. It is a far different thing when you are a commodity-producing economy, where carbon is attributed to the economy where it is mined, not where it is consumed.

I do not forget the words of those who were at the Copenhagen meeting just two years ago. They said that three things brought down Copenhagen. It is good to remember what they were. They said that the first thing was that the nations of this planet did not arrive at Copenhagen universally agreed on the problem. There was not universal agreement. The preparatory work had not been done. They had a ground rush and got there with all different proposals. No less than our own then Prime Minister came with his own shiny apple of an ETS. But nobody was interested. No-one was tempted by Kevin Rudd's proposal at the time because that is not where the world was heading.

The second thing was that the leaders turned up at Copenhagen too early in the negotiation process. So the minute the leaders jetted in everything was paralysed. All the cameras turned to the leaders and we got no agreement. The third thing that was pointed out by those who were at Copenhagen was the obvious point that this is no longer a debate about who has the shiniest apple and the fanciest carbon tax; it is now about what is right for me. It is now, if I am a commodity-producing trade-exposed economy, about how I do it with other like economies. I want to know what they are doing before I do something.

There is a weird notion that if we cut our hand in some sort of pact and hold it out, even though no-one grabs it, that will fix the climate. That is patently ridiculous. Every international agreement is a painstaking, slow process of trust-building. Where is Australia doing that at the moment? We are not. We have retreated to the simple task of having a carbon tax debate here in Australia and we have let the rest of the world back away from it.

My fundamental point today is the temporal notion of whether a carbon tax is the right thing right now. I know that we are incredibly animated by this carbon tax debate but it does deserve pause for thought as to why we are the only nation on the planet having a carbon tax debate in 2011. Is it because we have a finely balanced parliament? Is it because someone tapped the Prime Minister on the shoulder and said, 'Unless you pass a carbon tax we will not support you in government'? No, nobody said that. The reality is that, in wanting to do the right thing, we as a nation have simply chosen a foolish course. We have chosen (a) to go it alone and (b) to have a large and churning carbon tax through which the potential for profit seeking, rent seeking, administrative overload and corruption is simply too great for this chamber to pass it.

This carbon tax is clumsily designed. It is overly bulky. It is unwieldy. It offers none of the protections for the industries that we need to be looking after. I do not care that those industries are not voters for the Australian Labor Party, because at some point you have to separate yourself from your own political myopia and say, 'They may not vote for us but possibly it is the right thing to do for the economy and for jobs.'

I do not see why one job should be lost in the pursuit of a carbon agreement. I want to see the evidence that these clean green jobs are going to occur. Let us look for a comparator nation. There is none better than Spain. They embarked on the green economy just five years ago. They made enormous investments in solar energy. And no-one has pointed out to me yet exactly how paying twice as much for a solar panel as you will five years from now helps the climate. No-one has told me how paying twice as much now for a solar panel as Spain did will not bring down the economy just as it did in Spain—because the green bubble simply vanished at the time of the GFC. That enormous investment in solar energy has collapsed.

As Bjorn Lomborg says in his book Cool It, there is plenty of agreement that there is a problem. There are plenty of solutions. The question is: are we prepared to pay, now, for those solutions? Lomborg himself talks about climate being a $5 trillion economic problem between now and the turn of the century. Do we want to pay $15 trillion now to fix it or do we want to pay $3 trillion later? I cannot tell you when that 'later' will be but I know that the solutions get cheaper every day. I do not want to be in the one nation—the one economy—that has a carbon tax in place in 2011 because that will damage our economy. No-one overseas will thank us. The EU will not—it has a very light, almost imperceptible carbon tax . New Zealand will not, because in the main we do not compete with them as a commodity exporter. Certainly the other major economies of the world will not thank us. I do not want to always mention China but their growth in emissions over a year will be three times the size of Australia's entire economy.

I have used this analogy in the past, for people who do not have the time to read all of these carbon publications. Nobody loved peeing in the pool, did they? But we are all in the pool together here. It is an atmosphere just like a pool and, I tell you what, we are all peeing in that pool. We all agree it is a problem. We differ a little bit on just how bad for your health it is but if there is an elephant and a bullock peeing in the pool I see no point punishing the mouse.

I am sure we are all contributing to this problem but let us get an agreement in which we are all talking. We do not have that; we are not even close to that. Is this Prime Minister stepping out at saying, 'Let's bring together the tier-2 economies—the great exporters on this planet—for this discussion about climate'? No, there is none of that. She is too busy doing other things, like finding out ways to raise billions of dollars a year in carbon tax and then apportion them—distribute them—as only the friendly hand of government can do! Come on! We can continue under this Labor administration to find excuses to tax Australians. We have had 17 of these excuses so far without a tax cut. In the end we have to trust in their benevolence to distribute the funds appropriately.

How much can Australians take in this 'servility' to assume that all knowledge rests in Canberra? 'I don't care much they collect,' we are meant to say, 'as long as I get a little more back than I am going to pay.' This servility—this sense that only a government knows how to distribute these carbon collections—is a complete fallacy.

We may not always have someone with the priorities of the current Prime Minister. I do not see why another $71 billion has to be collected out of the pockets of people like those in the gallery over the next six years, while at the same time the EU has only collected a fraction with their carbon tax. If you look at the eastern US renewable energy arrangements, where they have only collected $825 million from 50 million people, you see that it is about $5 per person per year. These systems overseas are token systems compared to what we are potentially doing to our economy. The points that I have made here have been simple. We are moving too early and we are moving alone. We are nothing like the EU because we are a commodity-producing economy. Our competitors are not Switzerland and Hungary. Our competitors are those that mine the iron ore and coal, those that bring the natural gas and other energy requirements to South-East Asia. They are the ones we need to be looking at—and do they move closer to a carbon tax? No matter how many times you try to airbrush away the reality, they are phasing it back, they are delaying, they are issuing free permits; they are doing anything they can to not harm their own economies.

That is exactly what this lot over here are not seeing. We have the temporal element and then we have the structural components of the carbon tax, which time will not allow me to go through. But let me say this: huge economic impact with very little environmental benefit. Australia's system alone would give a hundredths of a degree of Celsius reduction. We are talking about massive investment, in the billions now, that I cannot spend on hospitals and health care in order to—what—delay global warming by nine hours by the year 2100?

There is no solution without a global solution. I would love to see an administration focused purely on that very hard and adaptive work to bring other commodity exporters with us. I do not have a problem with being a leader in the field, but there is no point leading if no-one goes with you. Reach out the hand. Let us see if there is an agreement on this carbon tax structure. I severely doubt that there is. I ask if there is one economy heading in our direction in 2011. The frank reality is that there is not. I ask if there is one contemplating an economy-wide approach that hits not just 500 or 1,000 but 60,000 businesses having to pay or be compensated, and not the added prices that will be imposed upon their businesses as the result of the removal of fuel credits. In my electorate there are the waterborne taxis alone, the barges that serve our islands. It is okay to exempt one industry but not another, so they are paying more for their water taxis and vehicles are exempted. There is too much picking of winners. There are too many favourites. We have gone down this path alone with no support internationally and this is a bill that has to be opposed. (Time expired)

Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I must say that the contribution by the member for Bowman really says a lot about the level of debate that has been engaged in by the opposition. There are no details, there is just a whole lot of political rhetoric. He even said in his contribution that he would not go into detail. What he said was misleading and did not paint a true picture of what is happening not only in Australia but also around the world. In comparing it with Spain and the collapse of the Spanish economy he might as well have compared it with Greece or any other nation that is having problems. It has absolutely nothing to do with investing in clean energy.

The clean energy bills are revolutionary legislation, legislation that will work with other measures and measures adopted by other countries to ensure the future of not only Australia but also our planet. I listened to the contribution made by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. I learnt more about the opposition's policies from the Prime Minister than from the Leader of the Opposition, who used his 30 minutes to hurl insults at the Prime Minister, create fear and make unsubstantiated one-liners that he thought would make a good grab on the news—just as the member for Bowman did.

The legislation before us today is a market based reform which places a price on carbon pollution on around 500 big polluting companies. This carbon price mechanism is designed to reduce carbon pollution by at least 160 million tonnes a year in 2020, deliver tax cuts and increase pensioner and family payments to Australians. It is about putting a price on pollution whilst ensuring that polluters pay, not Australian workers, families and pensioners. The aim of the legislation is to change behaviour by making polluting costly and rewarding clean initiatives and non-polluting behaviours.

This legislation is a blueprint for a clean energy future, a future with investment in clean energy and clean energy jobs. This legislation is about embracing the future and moving to implement the recommendation of the myriad reports and inquiries that have spanned years. It is about action not inaction, the future not the past. Never has there been legislation that has been more vilified and never has the behaviour of an opposition leader been more irresponsible. For this opposition leader it is about living in the Lodge—not about the future of Australians and the best action to reduce climate pollution and address the pressing issues of climate change.

Not only do I question the motivation of the Leader of the Opposition but also I believe that he and his opposition have failed to substantiate their claim that putting a price on carbon would only lead to job losses, increased prices and failure to reduce carbon emissions. Not true. I also believe the opposition have failed to establish that their direct action plan is an effective measure to address climate change. It will require an increase in taxation of five per cent if they are to reach their target in 2020.

I believe that climate change is caused by CO2 emissions and that humans contribute to those emissions. I accept the science. I have visited the Solomon Islands and seen the impact that climate change has had on those islands, just as you have, Mr Deputy Speaker. I have spoken to people who have been forced to flee the islands on which they live because the increased temperatures have led to sea level rises, which have devoured their homes. I saw photos of orchards that separated the National Referral Hospital in Honiara from the sea, and I saw how today the ocean was just metres from the hospital. Recent news reports have shown that the polar icecaps are at their lowest level in recorded history, and the melting of that ice is leading to sea level rises. It is serious. It is not something that we can ignore.

In Australia, we have seen an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme climatic events. This year, we had the floods and cyclones in Queensland that caused havoc. In 2007, the electorate I represent was subjected to an extreme weather event when it and all areas in the Hunter and the Central Coast were lashed by storms, high winds and flooding, causing enormous devastation. There is no shortage of information that shows that climate change is a reality, and that temperatures are rising. There is no shortage of information that shows that CO2 is contributing to these increases, that humans are contributing to the increase in CO2 emissions and that, consequently, climate change is increasing. The government accepts that climate change is a reality and must be addressed. The opposition plays politics, promoting misinformation, as we heard from the previous speaker, the member for Bowman, and failing to provide a viable, affordable alternative to pricing carbon.

In Australia we hear the mantra that, until China acts, Australia should not act. If that is the case, the time to act is now. I recently visited China with the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Climate Change, Environment and the Arts, to see what, if any, action was taking place in China to address climate change. The overwhelming message that the committee received whilst in China was that the Chinese government and the Chinese people accept the reality of climate change. There is no debate there as to whether or not climate change is a reality. Rather, the debate is about how to cut CO2 pollution, and the Chinese government has committed to doing that. China knows its future depends on action to reduce its emissions; that is why China is making a massive investment in research into renewable energies. We visited an ecologically sustainable city, Tianjin. We also learnt about carbon price mechanisms that have been used in some regions of China; in fact, I believe that six such pricing mechanisms have been implemented within China. So China is acting and is putting a price on carbon.

The member for Wentworth knows that climate change and global warming are a reality and he knows that pricing carbon is the only effective way to change behaviour and reduce pollution—and he is not the only one on the opposition side who knows that carbon must be priced if we are to address the issue of CO2 emissions. Unfortunately, the Leader of the Opposition does not hold the same belief. He has stated in the past that climate change is 'crap', and his close alliance with anti-climate-change groups proves that he is a climate change denier. His direct action plan is really about inaction rather than direct action. I believe if the opposition gained government at the next election and Tony Abbott became Prime Minister, Australia would see inaction, not direct action, as his plan is costly and would place a tax on all Australians. On Thursday, 15 September, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the coalition's direct action plan would cost 'at least double' the cost of the government's clean energy package. Michael Hitchens, Chief Executive of the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network, said:

We understand … that the cost of abatement might double if we try to achieve the full abatement domestically—

as set out in the coalition's direct action plan.

The article goes on to discuss in some detail how the plan that has been put up by the coalition will cost each and every Australian.

The government's clean energy package will cut pollution and drive investment in clean energy technology. The legislation is about taxing polluters: approximately 500 of Australia's biggest polluters will have to pay for every tonne of carbon they emit into the atmosphere. These industries have been identified by the Prime Minister and the minister, and I do not intend to go into details here; it is all already on the parliamentary record. All the money collected will go to jobs, clean energy and households. The tax-free threshold will be increased to $18,000, and increased payments will be provided to those Australians who need them. Nine out of 10 households will get some form of tax cut or increased payment. The legislation provides for increased payments to pensioners, veterans, self-funded retirees, Australian families and other Australians who qualify for assistance. There will be an initial lump-sum advancement for households before the carbon pricing scheme comes into effect, and this is to ensure that nobody receives any initial disadvantage.

The legislation is about taxing polluters, as I said, not about increasing costs for Australians. It is legislation designed to change behaviour and to ensure our future and that of our children and their children. Over four million households will be better off in terms of the average price impact. On average, households will see a cost increase of $9.90, while the average assistance to them will be $10.10 per week. Almost six million households will be assisted to meet the average price impact on them, and this means they will receive assistance that covers at lease the average price impact of carbon on their cost of living. Around eight million households will get some assistance. They will receive some assistance through payment increases and tax cuts, as I have already outlined. Those households that improve their energy efficiency—and, remember, this is about changing behaviour—will help the environment and at the same time they will save money.

Pensions will increase by $338 per year for seniors and $510 per year for pensioner couples. Concession card holders who rely on essential medical equipment will also be eligible to receive a $140 essential medical equipment payment. Self-funded retirees who have a Commonwealth seniors card will get the same amount of cash assistance as is provided through the pension. Age pensioners, disability pensioners and carers will all be taken care of.

This government is about ensuring that the people of Australia do not bear the brunt of pricing carbon. This is about the polluters paying. Family payments will increase. Families who receive family tax benefit A will receive up to $110 per child per year extra and there will be up to $69 extra for families who receive family tax benefit B. There will up to $218 extra per year for single income support recipients, $234 per year for single parents and up to $390 for couples combined for jobseekers and students per year.

This is important legislation. This is legislation that is about the future. In summary, the government's clean energy legislation will ensure that big polluters pay, that householders receive tax cuts and are compensated for any cost-of-living increases and that there is a clean energy future for Australia, whilst the opposition's direct action plan will cost individual Australians $1,300 a year. The opposition's plan is not deliverable and will become a non-core promise if a coalition government were ever elected; the government's plan is for a clean energy future and will become a reality on 1 July next year.

Warren Entsch (Leichhardt, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Clean Energy Bill 2011 and related bills. I have gone through the plethora of bills to try to see if there is anything really positive that I can speak on but, quite frankly, the more you look into the legislation the greater your concern for your local community and the impacts that this legislation is going to have on it, both socially and economically. For that reason, I certainly support the coalition's position in vehemently opposing the imposition of this very, very unfair, job-destroying and ineffective carbon tax on my community—and, by extension, on the nation. There is no doubt that we live in a global economy, and these bills are certainly going to impose a very, very unfair impost on business, industries and families and they will have a serious negative impact on our trading with competing countries who do not have to endure this particular tax.

I think what makes this particularly difficult is that this whole debate has been predicated on deceit and dishonesty. The Prime Minister stated very clearly on 16 August 2010 on the Ten Network:

There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.

And in an interview in the Australian on 20 August she said quite clearly and categorically:

I rule out a carbon tax.

The Australian public voted on this issue. They accepted the Prime Minister on her word and on the basis that she would not introduce a carbon tax. To now break her word and introduce it without first taking this to an election represents, in my view, a very gross breach of trust with the Australian people. When I speak to people in my electorate you see that that is very much the consensus. They are very, very disappointed and they feel very much betrayed. I am talking here about people who would have voted for the Labor Party at the last election, and they feel very betrayed.

I was a member of this House back in 1998 when we went to an election on the GST. Much has been said about the then Prime Minister, John Howard, changing his view. But at least he had the conviction to take the issue to an election. We lost quite a few of our colleagues at that time but, nevertheless, we won that election based on that commitment, and subsequently a GST was introduced. I notice that a lot of attention is being focused on the Leader of the Opposition and this nonsense about his 'No, no, no' and 'He is not going to support these bills' et cetera. I was here back in the days when we talked about the GST, and it was 'No, no, no, no' from the then Leader of the Opposition and that was the chorus from the opposition at that time—and the member across the chamber from me, the member for Banks, was part of that very, very loud chorus at the time. So I think it is a little bit hypocritical to now come into this place and suggest that, because we have some very serious and real concerns about this legislation and the impact that it is going to have on our community, we do not have the right to express our concerns and say, 'No; we believe there is a better way.'

People always say that we have to keep up with the world. I do not have a problem with that but, at the end of the day, we should not lead so that we are so far out in front that we get absolutely destroyed. They were talking about what has been happening overseas. There is no other country that is planning to impose an economy-wide carbon price. The Productivity Commission clearly stated that not one country on earth is bringing in an economy-wide carbon tax or emissions trading scheme.

In the United States, for example, all moves towards a national cap-and-trade scheme have been abandoned. The government always uses Europe as an example—they say, 'Europe has got an ETS'—of course it has an ETS, but it certainly does not cover the whole economy. It provides many industries with free emissions permits, and the ETS, interestingly enough. only raises about $500 million a year. The tax we are talking about here in Australia, a much smaller economy, would be raising $9 billion to kick off with. That is a hell of a cost in relation to the Australian people. The government also claims that China is acting to reduce its carbon emissions, but the reality is that China is forecast to rise by something like 500 per cent by the year 2020. So that does not seem to me to be much of a significant reduction in costs.

The actual carbon price would start at $23 a tonne, but after three years that price—it will not be fixed—will float in line with market prices. Government will have no control over that. By the government's own forecast, that price will increase to $29 a tonne in 2016, $37 a tonne in 2020, and over $350 a tonne in 2050. What on earth is that going to do for our cost of living? The Centre for International Economics has forecast that the price will rise to $49 a tonne by 2016.

It is interesting to note that those who are really running the government at the moment—Greens senators Bob Brown and Christine Milne—say that the price needs to be at least $40 a tonne and that there needs to be a shift away from coal for electricity generation. Another Greens senator, Senator Hanson-Young, has canvassed a price of up to $100 a tonne. You can only imagine what sort of impact that is going to have not only on our economy but also on the cost of living of so many people. Any compensation is only being factored in for the introduction of this; this is not ongoing. I can assure you that, as the costs continue to escalate, the cost of living will be escalating with that. It will really make for a hell of an impost, particularly for those who can least afford it.

Cairns has a very diverse economy. From a regional perspective, we have mining—we have the Rio Tinto bauxite mine—but we also have agriculture and horticulture and we have a small Navy base. But tourism is the primary lifeblood of our economy, and we should never forget that. We have done it tough over the last few years, and businesses are now just starting to try to come back. Of course the floods and cyclones certainly have not helped; neither has the loss of flights into our international airport. That is just starting to recover now. There was the tsunami in Japan, one of our main feeder markets, and there was the disaster with the earthquakes in New Zealand, another major and important market for our economy.

We were in fact the unemployment capital of Australia; we were up to 13 per cent at one stage, and the value of the Australian dollar makes it very tough. So the last thing we need is a significant cost increase. They talk about whether we are going to compensate households for electricity and other living costs—as I said, very short term.

When you talk to people like Charlie and Pip Woodward—they have the Capita Group in my electorate, one of the major tourism operators there, operating buses, boats and a whole range of other experiences up there—you find that the increase in the cost of electricity and fuel is going to be quite profound. We have many other great companies up there, including Quicksilver, Jim and Jo Wallace, and Great Adventure Boats. Their costs for fuel for the dive boats going out to the Great Barrier Reef is going to be very significant. These are costs that they have to pass on; they cannot carry these costs. Down Under Tours, James and Gordon Dixon, is a bus tour operation that travels quite extensively around our region. They also have these costs that they are going to have to pass on to the consumer, in a market that is already very, very price sensitive. To suggest that they can cover these costs, while they are still trying to recover from the impacts of the last couple of years, is a nonsense. On top of that they have no control over costs such as electricity and other costs. Again, it is something that they have to pass on.

One of the big concerns I have is in relation to the impact on our airlines. As I said, we have just started to attract further services into Cairns, and this means that there is an opportunity for the whole region. The international airport is an area where people arrive and disperse. The fuel costs in relation to this are going to make travelling into this area a lot less competitive.

Those on the other side say that it is only a minimum cost and they are all doing it overseas, but I note that the International Air Cargo Association has recently urged the EU to suspend the implementation of its emissions trading scheme on aviation and instead pursue a global agreement on aviation carbon emissions. They firmly believe that the aviation emissions must be addressed through a global framework; otherwise it will not result in any decrease in emissions but it will certainly impose a massive impost on the aviation sector. Yet here we are looking at putting the same thing on Australian aviation as well. I think that what we need to do is what we have committed to do in opposition, and that is looking for direct action. One of the things we are looking at is the development, through James Cook University, of carbon dioxide-eating algae that is being developed up there. Professor Kirsten Heimann is heading that project and they are going to retrofit it onto the stacks at Tarong Energy in Queensland. Basically, the algae consumes the carbon dioxide, they are able to harvest the algae, which grows at an accelerated rate, and from that they are able to take biodiesel, stock food and fertiliser. To me that is a much more practical way of reducing emissions. Investing in that creates an opportunity to export not our jobs but a technology that we as Australians can get a benefit from and, in the meantime, we can continue to reduce our own emissions.

I note that we are talking about buying foreign carbon credits. We have seen them in the media in recent times, and I have got to say: start selling credits into equatorial Guinea or Nigeria. That is the sort of thing that would happen if it is a repeat of a lot of the other initiatives that this government has been involved in. I think it is absolutely appalling that we are continuing down this track. I think there are far better ways in which we could do this. We have got to look at alternatives. I think it is right that we should be absolutely opposing this. I think that the compensation will never cover the costs of the losses of the things that we are going to see for families.

Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When you are listening to some of this debate it is easy to forget why we are here. Ice caps are melting and the seas are rising. Hurricanes, storms and floods are becoming more intense and dangerous, and extreme fires are becoming more powerful and are happening more often. This is just the beginning of our pathway to a more dangerous and harsher world.

The existing and growing threat of climate change is the reason that we are here today. We are all—every person and every species on this planet—threatened by catastrophic climate change and the potential of it, and we are running out of time to prevent this catastrophe. The catastrophe is not going to be just social but also economic. The hit to the Australian economy if we are not able to prevent runaway climate change is going to be enormous. We have just heard about the tourism sector in Queensland. The Great Barrier Reef has bleached up to nine times since the 1970s, which is completely unusual when you look at the period before it. Sixty-seven thousand jobs are directly dependent on tourism and the Barrier Reef. There will be no compensation that will be able to fully address the situation of those people who are going to be turfed out of a job and a livelihood when the Great Barrier Reef becomes nothing more than a perpetually bleaching feature.

We can look at the Murray-Darling Basin and see Professor Ross Garnaut's predictions of, by the end of the century, a potential loss of about 92 per cent of productivity if we do not get climate change under control. The Australian Climate Commission released a report this year which makes it clear that, to prevent disaster, countries like Australia need to be effectively zero pollution economies by the middle of the century. Indeed, for countries like Australia, it should happen sooner, by somewhere closer to 2040. As the report points out, we are in a critical decade. This decade must be the one in which our pollution in this country is the highest it is ever going to be and it needs to reduce. That means we need to begin the big steps to transform our economy to one which runs on clean energy. I believe it is vitally important in this debate that we do not lose sight of those basic facts. Climate change requires us to act, and today we are acting with this legislation.

If you follow the current debate in the media with its almost obsessive focus on the narrow political implications of this package, it is easy to lose sight of the great significance of this moment in Australia's history. For the first time, after decades of discussion about the need for action, we now have a comprehensive package of national measures to make a start in tackling climate change. For the first time we have a pollution reduction target of 80 per cent by 2050, and that is close to what the science says is needed. For the first time we have a climate change authority that will make recommendations every year on a carbon budget that will get us to that target. And for the first time we have a price on pollution to drive up the relative cost of fossil fuels and to drive down the price of cleaner and renewable energy. And, for the first time we have a well-funded agency whose sole focus is the promotion of renewable energy. And for the first time we have a publicly-funded green bank that can invest in clean energy and leverage billions of dollars in private sector investment as well. We will also have in legislation a commitment to keep global warming below the guardrail of two degrees—one of the few changes that the Greens proposed to the draft legislation.

So I think it is a very significant step towards Australia making its fair share of a global contribution to cutting pollution as well as participating in the global fight against climate change. I am particularly proud to be speaking on these bills today because, of course, we would not be having this debate at this point in time if the electorate of Melbourne had not shown the leadership that it did at the last election. By switching to the Greens, Melbourne was able to empower me and my fellow party members to make a price on pollution one of our conditions for supporting a minority government. We did this because, whilst we agree that a price on pollution alone will not be enough to fix climate change, we know we will not be able to fix climate change without one. A price on pollution, it is worth remembering, comes from a very simple premise. Until now we have presumed as a human race that we can put as much pollution into the atmosphere as we like without any cost. This has not happened because some evil cabal has sat around saying, 'How can we put as much pollution into the atmosphere as possible?' It is just the way our society has been organised for the last couple of hundred years, and we have all benefited from it. We now know it comes at a cost. We now know you cannot continue to put pollution into the atmosphere for free, and this package will begin to say for the first time that polluters who put that pollution into the atmosphere are going to have to pay something approximating the real cost of that pollution.

A price is an essential part of driving both investment decisions and generating revenue that can be directed to cutting pollution and invested in renewables like wind and solar. It is a crucial platform on which further action can be built in the energy efficiency of buildings, transport and other areas of the economy. The negotiations with the government and the Independents, in which I participated and which led to these bills, set out a process for addressing some of these areas, and the Greens have a plan for more measures that will build on the carbon price.

I find very strange this current debate, within this parliament in particular, about false dichotomies between direct action and a price on pollution. That false debate has been created by the Leader of the Opposition for political purposes rather than a reflection of a real disagreement over the best way to act to cut pollution. How do we know that? Because we know the Leader of the Opposition has supported a price on pollution in the past, but we also know that conservative governments in Europe and the UK support the same. The conservative Prime Minister in the United Kingdom has just agreed to cut that country's greenhouse gas pollutions in half by 2025-27. We even have Silvio Berlusconi saying recently, 'You've got to put aside this national interest. It's going to affect us all.' There are not many things that I would agree with Silvio Berlusconi on, but he hits the nail on the head with that. It shows that elsewhere, when you step out of the narrow confines, you will find this is not a partisan political issue.

I think in different political circumstances the Leader of the Opposition would be backing a price on pollution. So I make the prediction that if the Leader of the Opposition ever becomes Prime Minister we will see a change of heart. We will see him join the ranks of the other conservative leaders around the world and back a price on pollution. The words of the shadow Treasurer today that the coalition will unwind the clean energy package and scrap the compensation that goes with it ring hollow.

This package will triple the tax-free threshold, and I cannot believe that a shadow Treasurer, if you were ever in the position, would go to the million Australians who will now not have to file a tax return and say, 'We want you to pay tax' and go to those hundreds of thousands of pensioners and recipients of welfare who are going to get hundreds of extra dollars, if not thousands, to help them deal with this and say, 'We want to take it back.'

The other reason that this debate between direct action and price on pollution is a false dichotomy is that if you think about other areas where we tackle problems in society we do not apply this kind of dichotomy. We know that smoking causes enormous damage and is a major risk to health. We know that, despite the misinformation and fear campaign pedalled by big tobacco, successive governments have sort to reduce, significantly curb and eventually get smoking rates down to zero.

When we discuss how to deal with smoking, we do not ask, 'Are you a direct actionist or a price supporter?' We do not suggest that putting a price on cigarettes is somehow in conflict with education and health sector intervention. We do everything. We jack up the price. We send doctors on the warpath. We put ads on TV and pictures of cancer on packets of cigarettes. Does anyone seriously believe that investments in public health alone would work to cut smoking if you could buy a pack of cigarettes for $2? Would education programs alone cut through if buying cigarettes was cheaper than a cup of coffee? It is the same argument here: if we allow polluting energy to continue to be unreasonably and wrongly priced as a cheap commodity, we are going to continue to see people flock to it no matter what kind of direct action we take.

It is not just the decisions of consumers that this package is going to change. If you happen to be lucky enough to have a spare few billion lying around and you want to invest in a power station here in Australia, this price sends a signal to you as well: you can either invest in a dirty power station where you are going to have to pay a price on pollution for every tonne of CO2 you emit or you can invest in a clean power station—wind, solar, solar-thermal—and not have to pay a cent. As investment changes we are going to set Australia on the path to being the renewable economy that it should be.

It has been my privilege since I have been elected to meet a number of remarkable people, one of whom is the adviser on climate change to the conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel and the G8. He said, 'I cannot understand why you Australians are not leading the world in renewable energy technology. Look at your intellectual resources. Look at your human resources. Look at how much sun, wind and wave power you have. Why aren't you leading the world?' It is a very good question. We need to be willing to put in place a range of policies that will take us on the path towards a zero carbon economy. Believing it can occur without a carbon price is a dangerous false hope.

I want to outline briefly some important aspects of this package of bills that I think highlight the success of the Greens in negotiating the cross-party agreement that led to these bills. The package means $13 billion investment for clean and renewable energy. There will be a $10 billion publicly owned Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which will leverage tens of billions more in private sector investment in clean renewable energy. There will be a new $3.2 billion Australian Renewable Energy Agency, which will for the first time create a systemic, whole-of-government approach to renewable energy from R&D to rollout and planning. The Australian energy planner, AEMO, will prepare plans for the electricity grid to move forward with 100 per cent renewable energy. There is generous compensation for households, especially low-income earners. Nine out of 10 households will receive assistance through tax cuts, increased payments or both. A supplement will increase pensions, allowances and family payments by 1.7 per cent and a big increase to the tax-free threshold will mean over one million Australians will no longer need to lodge a tax return.

The bills also mean we will start replacing dirty power stations. Two thousand megawatts of dirty coal fired power such as Hazelwood, Australia's dirtiest power station, will be closed. The price on pollution importantly means no new conventional commercial coal fired power stations will be built.

I want to take this moment to congratulate the Prime Minister on seeing this package through. Although Labor's platform was to do this in many years' time rather than now, the circumstances of this parliament, where the coalition did not win a majority, have meant that there has to be give and take. We have asked, and the Australian people want, the parliament to take action on climate change and for it to happen soon. I commend the Prime Minister and the government on sticking to that. I hope they use this opportunity not to have their foot on the accelerator and the brake at the same time. If they are looking to save $100 million in the next budget, they could easily do it by not giving it for the construction of a new coal fired power plant in Victoria, the HRL.

The reality is that the real opposition to a price on pollution in most cases is not based on a genuine desire to cut pollution. It usually comes from those who are opposed to any action on climate change. That is because, usually, carbon change deniers are those who want to protect polluters or have accepted the arguments of climate deniers. There are those who say that climate change is uncertain or not real, but really that is a question about risk. We may say, 'I cannot tell you the day when Australia will be invaded or where the ships will land or who will be invading us and I cannot tell you whether our submarines will be parked in the right place at the right time,' but that is not an argument for having no Defence Force. You do not get to the end of the year and say, 'My house did not burn down: that is more money I have just wasted on fire insurance;' you say, 'Thank goodness I am safe.' So it is that we should be adopting the question of risk when it comes to climate change. We should be saying, 'If the scientists are right in their over 90 per cent certainty that this is happening, let's address it commensurate with the full consequences of the risk of the most extraordinary extreme events occurring. What can we do to prevent them? How can we make sure that our children and our grandchildren in future generations inherit a world in a better state than it is in at the moment.'

There is also an argument that what Australia does is inconsequential because our pollution is too small. We are the world's largest per capita emitter and we cannot with any seriousness say to countries like China and India, 'We want you to cut your emissions,' if we do not do the same ourselves. Unless we do this, we will be a drag on any effective global action. Conversely, taking this action makes it much more likely that other countries will get on board.

It was reading the climate change science and a realisation of how quickly we had to act that led me to quit my job and begin running in election campaigns. It is with great pride that I stand here today knowing that we are taking our first ever steps on climate change one year into this government.

Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

While it is tempting to spend my time rebutting the member for Melbourne's speech, I will try to resist. But I will say that in this House I have never heard so much emotional claptrap so removed from reality. The member for Melbourne thanked the people of Melbourne for putting him here for this momentous occasion. I was in Melbourne last week and it seems to me that there are a lot of houses and a lot of buildings in the middle of Melbourne made out of concrete. They have glass windows. They have trams running on steel tracks using electricity to drive them around. While the good folk of Melbourne might have a desire to improve the environment, they do not appear to be doing too much of it themselves.

The member for Melbourne's scare campaign of referring to catastrophic climate change is nothing short of ridiculous. The member for Melbourne is still using the images of the Murray-Darling Basin after suffering 10 years of drought to demonstrate his argument. If the member for Melbourne would like to get out of the capital city and go to look at the Murray-Darling Basin, he will find out that it actually has rained, we are not in drought and the system has not run dry, as he would lead us to believe. The interesting thing is that the good folk of Melbourne, supported by the Greens during that drought, started a pipeline to pipe water from the Murray-Darling Basin for the good people of Melbourne to flush down their toilets. This is gross hypocrisy.

Professor Garnaut, who did the original report on climate change and an emissions trading scheme for the Rudd government, said that regional Australia would have an economic downturn of 20 per cent and the cities would have one of eight per cent. When the member for Melbourne comes in here with a scheme where the people of his electorate undertake the same amount of hardship as the people of my electorate, we might start talking. This is nonsense.

We talk about 100 per cent renewable energy in Australia. How do you make a solar farm or a wind turbine without a steel mill? How do you make a wind turbine without an iron ore mine and a coalmine to make the steel to make the turbine? Do the good climate fairies come in at midnight and put these turbines up to generate the electricity? This is an absolute nonsense.

This is, indeed, a historic occasion, but I suggest that we do not want to get too far ahead of ourselves. This is the third time I have spoken on this subject in this place. On the previous two occasions that I spoke, the members of the government and the more recent Greens member had breathless anticipation of worldwide change, but it did not quite happen—so we have not got there yet. Do not count your chickens until they hatch. As I said in my very first speech on the subject, in 2008, this is going to have a devastating effect on the Australian economy.

This bill has been couched as compensation and it has been couched as tax reform. Pardon me—I thought the idea of this legislation was for it to have some sort of environmental effect. We are talking about global environmental effect; Australia does not live in a bubble. As a result of this tax and of the belief by some that it will come about, we are starting to see changes of behaviour, but not the sorts of changes of behaviour that the breathless member for Melbourne spoke about. We are starting to see Australian industry move offshore. For instance, about 100 tonnes of concrete are needed to secure each of the wind turbines which are supposedly going to generate all our power. But guess where that concrete is going to come from. It is not going to come from the plant in central New South Wales at Kandos, because, due to the uncertainty over the economy and due to the price of carbon, it has closed—cement is a triple emitter.

Geoff Lyons (Bass, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We haven't got a carbon price yet, and it has closed already.

Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, it has closed; but I do not suppose the good folk of Bass are going to go without cement. No—the good folk of Bass are going to get their cement on a ship that will come from Indonesia or China or Japan where they do not have a carbon trading scheme and where, incidentally, they put out about 20 per cent or 30 per cent—

Mr Stephen Jones interjecting—

You will get your chance. Cement factories in Indonesia or China put out about 20 per cent or 30 per cent more carbon per tonne of cement than the factory in Australia did. So not only will more carbon be produced in a Third World country but the jobs will also be in the Third World country, and we will have ships traversing the globe to bring cement into Australia. It will be the same with the steel. Where does the good member for Melbourne think the steel is going to come from when they need new tracks for their trams in Melbourne? It is going to come from overseas. Where are the jobs that are going to create these things going to be? They are going to be overseas.

Being a member of parliament is not a popularity contest. People say that the coalition is running a popularity contest. In 2008, When I first spoke on the carbon price, 85 per cent of Australians were saying that they wanted an emissions trading scheme—that they wanted to put a price on carbon—but now it is down to about 20 per cent. I would like to think that this change was because of the great work that the coalition has done, but it is not; the reason for the change is that the Australian people have realised that they have been sold a dud and that they are going to be asked to change their lifestyle for no environmental gain. There was an article in the paper today about how the price of Weet-Bix is going to go up one cent per biscuit or something like that and that milk is going to go up by so much, and so on. But that is not the argument. A cement worker at Kandos does not care about the price of Weet-Bix; he has to worry about affording the Weet-Bix in the first place because he has lost his job. What about the steelworkers? We have the member for whatever that suburb is in Wollongong where the steelworkers in Wollongong are losing their jobs. What about the people in Western Sydney who work in the factories which do repair works on the steel mills—who is going to protect their jobs?

For the members of the government and the Greens and the Independents this debate is like a year 5 social studies class where they come in, breathlessly excited, to show the teacher how they are going to save the world with absolutely no practical understanding of the consequences. The reason I am opposed to this legislation is that regional Australia will have an economic downturn of 20 per cent—we are users of energy. Do you think the tractor that grows the wheat to make the bread eaten by those good folk in Melbourne who are so warm and fuzzy about this bill is going to be run on a solar panel? Do you think the irrigation pump that pumps the water which grows the cotton used to make their shirts is going to be run on a solar panel? This is gross ignorance and hypocrisy. This House has turned its back on this tax twice before. It is not too late to save Australia from this tax yet again.

Behind me here sit the Independents—the member for New England and the member for Lyne. The member for New England has been making some very disparaging comments of late about redneck politics. He has been taking the high moral ground: he wants to give the Australian environment the benefit of the doubt. But you don't give something the benefit of the doubt if you know that it is going to have no environmental effect. Why would the member for New England and the member for Lyne support legislation that was clearly going to be detrimental to the economies of their electorates—which are exporters—and their country?

A farmer in my electorate who wants to produce a tonne of grain and process it into bread or stockfeed or something like that will pay a tax; a farmer somewhere else in the world will not. If I want to dig up a tonne of coal at Mudgee in my electorate and mix it with a tonne of iron ore from the electorate of my good colleague up the back here and make something here in Australia, there will be a tax; if I want to put those things on a boat and send them to China to get them to make it and send it back to us, there will be no tax. But how are we going to pay for it when it comes back? Agriculture and mining were the two industries—and, in my electorate, they are now equally productive—that saved this country from global recession. It was not the stupid stimulus package that put up those dodgy walls and burnt houses down with insulation that saved the country; it was mining and agriculture. But those industries are going to be hit. My electorate is going to be hit. The pensioners in my electorate may get some compensation, but it will not be enough. Already we are finding that they are, through fear of the future, shivering in winter because they are not game to turn their heaters on.

Opposing this legislation is about doing the right thing. It is about looking after the future of our children and grandchildren. We have heard the member for Melbourne talking about looking after the future of our children, but you can only look after the environment when you have a couple of bob in your pocket to spend on making the necessary improvements. If you are a farmer who is cash strapped, you cannot afford to make the improvements in technology which you need to be more efficient. If you are a business and you are being taxed, the ability to improve your business to make it more environmentally sustainable is taken away from you. You do not help the Australian people to change and improve the way they live by taxing them.

This legislation is going to have no environmental effect. We have heard from others in this debate that we have to catch up with the rest of the world. Between 2005 and 2011, the EU's emissions trading scheme raised $2.6 billion to $2.9 billion. That operates in over 30 countries, including 27 members of the EU plus Iceland, Lichtenstein and Norway. The Australian carbon tax, which we are speaking about now and will vote on—

Peter Slipper (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! It being 1.45 pm, the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 43. The debate may be resumed at a later hour and the honourable member for Parkes will then have the opportunity to continue his remarks.