Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the 19 pieces of carbon tax legislation before the House. It is a disgrace that members are allotted less than 50 seconds per piece of legislation in which to debate the substantial arguments in relation to carbon tax. Let me state clearly and unequivocally that the issue here is not about whether or not to take actions to reduce Australia's CO2 emissions by five per cent of the 2000 level—that is, to 530 million tonnes of CO2. We all agree that we should give the planet the benefit of any doubt. As both the government and the coalition have the same targeted outcome, there is no dispute. The issue here is solely the method of delivering the achievement of that target.

The Gillard-Brown Labor-Green government's way is to introduce a new carbon tax—a tax based on directly charging $23 per tonne of emissions on the country's top 500 polluters. I also point out that the tax was to be based on the top 1,000 polluters only a month or so ago but, with the stroke of a pen, it is now just 500 major polluters. Taxing these 500 companies, which will include the electrical generators of this nation, will start an avalanche of inflation, a massive price hike and a cumulative tax that puts a price on everyone and everything, without an ounce of education or leadership on how individuals can make a difference. By way of comparison and direct contrast, the coalition's way of achieving a five per cent reduction in emissions is through a well-developed, fully funded direct action plan and an investment sourced from consolidated revenue without increasing taxes but funded through savings in the budget and, most importantly, invested in Australia for Australia.

This government's tax propLabor's way is to outsource its direct action overseas by spending $3.7 billion per annum in carbon credits instead of investing in Australia.osal will not even reduce the emissions created in Australia. I discovered from page 18 of the government's 'carbon Sunday' document, Strong growth, low pollution—modelling a carbon price, that our current emissions are 578 million tonnes. Our obligation is to reduce our nation's emissions by five per cent on 2000 figures by 2020—that is, to get Australia's emissions down to 530 million tonnes. The document is misleading. By the government's own figures, it does not say that we are reducing Australia's emissions by five per cent. The government's own figures say that in fact we are increasing our own domestic emissions from 578 million tonnes to 621 million tonnes, an increase from the 2000 figure of 91 million tonnes. So, at the 2020 figure of $29 a tonne for the carbon tax, our emissions will actually go up from 578 million tonnes now to 621 million tonnes in 2020. At $131 a tonne for the carbon tax in 2050, we do not get an 80 per cent reduction in emissions; we actually get only a six per cent reduction in Australians' emissions. Australia's CO2 emissions in 2050, on the government's own figures, will have gone from 578 million tonnes now to 545 million tonnes.

In 2050 this Labor government will be spending $57 billion per annum offshore. That is right: offshore, buying 400 million tonnes of foreign carbon credits. In fact, it will have spent an estimated $650 billion by 2050 buying offshore carbon credits from foreign carbon traders. This government is just engaging in a massive transfer of wealth from this country to carbon traders overseas, and I have to ask: where is the sense of duty to the environment and the government's fiduciary responsibility to the taxpayers of Australia, to Australian industries and to Australian jobs?

This government is so desperate to avoid any scrutiny of the fact that its carbon tax plan will send billions of Australian taxpayers' dollars—money from hardworking Australian families—straight to foreign carbon traders. Australia will be sending $57 billion a year overseas by 2050 according to its own Treasury modelling. And all of this will be at the expense of investment in Australia, at the expense of Australian industry and at the expense of Australian jobs.

This was highlighted in an article by Gemma Jones in the Daily Telegraph yesterday headlined '950,000 workers in danger, Carbon tax hit on business'. It states:

The Australian Trade and Industry Alliance claimed manufacturers would be worse off than their European counterparts under an emissions trading scheme.

… 950,000 workers were employed by companies which would be exposed to the tax without compensation or government assistance.

… 14.6 million European manufacturing workers were protected through free carbon permits—

… the new data highlights the risk to manufacturing jobs posed by the carbon tax at a time when firms are already under severe strain as a result of the strength of the Australian dollar.

Direct action works, as it has in the past. Australia, under the Howard government, through its direct actions met its Kyoto target to limit greenhouse gas emissions in the 2008-2012 period to 108 per cent of the 1990 emissions. And this nation did it without having to ratify the agreement. It did it through direct action, not by abrogating our responsibility by spending Australian taxpayer dollars offshore buying carbon credits from foreign carbon traders.

It is abundantly clear to any reasonable person that actions and leadership, not rhetoric and taxing, are what have worked to date and what will work in the future. Education and empowering people to make a difference worked with the Clean Up Australia campaign—and I congratulate Ian Kiernan for the outstanding effort in driving that campaign. It is a campaign which has delivered real and measurable outcomes without a tax.

There should be no false illusions as to the likely impact of a carbon tax on our Australian economy. It is time for the rubber to hit the road. For the last four years Labor has talked of taking action on climate change, 'the greatest moral challenge this nation faces', as one former Prime Minister said, but it has done very little. As usual, the Labor way is to talk the talk without walking the walk. That is reinforced when it comes to the record of leading Australians to doing their bit individually and by the fact that this government will be abrogating its responsibility by buying its CO2 reductions overseas.

We should not be in this precarious situation. After all, it was this Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, the one who, hand on heart, promised the Australian people just days before the election on 16 August:

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

And the same Prime Minister promised on 8 July, again just weeks before the election, on the issue of offshore processing:

I would rule out anywhere that is not a signatory to the Refugee Convention.

Labor's credibility is in tatters. Promises of no carbon tax, promises of people assemblies, promises of deep and lasting consensus, promises of no refugees to countries that are not signatories to the UN convention and, sadly, the list goes on. The hallmark of this Gillard government is of one broken promise after another—and poor economic management.

I could forgive the Prime Minister if this was a matter of pure conviction, but it was this Prime Minister who told the Labor cabinet that Abbott's direct action plan would work. And it was this Prime Minister who was the author of that secret memo to the Rudd cabinet wherein she declared that the direct action plan would in fact work, that a direct action plan was capable of bringing down emissions by five per cent, and that a direct action plan was capable of doing it without a carbon tax.

What is in play here is a Prime Minister so desperate to stay at the Lodge that she has sold out on her promises. She has sold out her conviction, sold out the Australian people, who resoundingly, according to any and every poll, rejected this proposal of a carbon tax. So I have to ask the Prime Minister: what is it you actually believe in? Is this carbon tax just some Australian Fabian Society agenda, with its high taxing of Australians and shifting our dollars offshore? Is this a chapter from the book of socialism that you are a member of? I have to ask this because your membership of the Communist Party of Australia linked organisation, the Socialist Forum, that has now merged with the Fabian Society—

Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence Materiel) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The point of order here is relevance. In an earlier part of this debate yesterday, the member opposite was arguing that members on this side of the House were not being relevant to this debate. Surely this member now is no longer relevant to the debate here about the climate change legislation.

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

The member for Paterson will relate his material to the question before the chamber, which is that these bills be now read a second time.

Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, this is directly relevant, because this is a chapter from the book of socialism of which the Prime Minister was a member. Prime Minister, I ask you about this not only because you were a member but you were on the management committee of the Socialist Forum for many years. So let us be clear about it: the Socialist Forum's agenda was, and I quote:

To sever Australia's alliance with the US, remove the spy base at Pine Gap—

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

The member for Paterson will resume his seat, and the minister can resume his seat, because I think I can predict the point of order. The member for Paterson is roaming wide when he starts to talk about the US alliance in the context of this bill. He must try much harder to relate his material to the question before the chair.

Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Socialist Forum agenda was:

To sever Australia's alliance with the US, remove the spy base at Pine Gap, introduce death duties and redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor.

That is what this carbon tax does. Is this what the Prime Minister is upholding? No wonder she is comfortable at being at the mercy of the Greens. Just as we, the coalition, have offered the Prime Minister a way forward with the Nauru solution—a country that is a signatory to the UN convention—that would give her the offshore processing—

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

The member for Paterson must confine his remarks.

Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

she so desperately wants, the coalition now will give the Prime Minister a way forward to achieve the emissions reduction target through a direct action plan, a plan which will, by her own admission, reduce the emissions of carbon to the achievable target.

If this Prime Minister pursues a carbon tax, she is not only jeopardising the Australian economy but also Australian jobs. A DeLoitte Access Economics report predicted job losses of 21,000 in Queensland, while separate Queensland Treasury modelling predicted 12,000 jobs would go. The Victorian government commissioned a DeLoitte report, which found that there would be at least 23,000 fewer jobs created across Victoria by 2015. New South Wales Treasury modelling predicted 31,000 jobs would be lost in New South Wales by 2030 under this tax and 18,500 jobs would be gone from my region of the Hunter Valley alone.

Australian jobs in the steel industry, aluminium industry, energy industry, mining industry, manufacturing industry, tourism and hospitality industry and the agricultural industry are all under threat from this government's socialist agenda. As Englishman John Heywood said in 1546, 'There are none so blind as those who refuse to see and none so deaf as those who refuse to listen.'

That sums up this unholy Labor-Greens alliance: they refuse to see, they refuse to listen to the Australian people, and any polling they conduct or look at will confirm that they are on the wrong path with this tax. That is why I question their agenda. In fact last week, after five days of random phone canvassing across the whole electorate of Paterson, my office found that only 11.5 per cent were in favour of a carbon tax while 73.5 per cent were against it, 8.75 per cent were unsure, and 6.25 per cent refused to comment. I am sure that any polling or focus group sessions that Labor does would be indicating the same response.

Labor and the Greens claim that young people in particular want a carbon tax. Well, last Thursday in discussions with a group of fine young Australians at the National Student Leadership Forum I canvassed their opinions. And, yes, all agreed that action was needed on climate change, and most thought that a carbon tax would fix the problem—that was until they found out that the coalition's direct action plan achieved the same five per cent reduction target. But the real game-changer was when they found out that this government was not taking any remedial action in Australia but buying their environmental future by purchasing carbon credits offshore. Young Australians, all Australians, want action in Australia for Australia.

It is said that Australia's tourist industry is largely driven by about three Australian icons: the reef, the rock and the Opera House. Labor is keen to state at every opportunity that only a carbon tax will save the Great Barrier Reef. Nothing is further from the truth. Only direct action—reducing run-offs, changing from chemical fertilisers to organics, utilising carbon sequestration here in Australia—will help reduce the impact, if any, on our reef.

I have a reasonable understanding of our Great Barrier Reef as I have an association with the reef that goes back over four decades, as a tourism operator, diver, fisherman and ship's captain. I have worked to save it when the crown of thorns invasion threatened the reef, I have toured the very length of it, fished it, dived it. I have lived it—and I love it. Taking environmental action offshore will provide little or no positive impact on our reef. What will the impact on our reef and our tourism industry be with this carbon tax? The Tourism and Transport Forum report, Carbon tax and tourism and travel—Trade and global warming exposed estimates that the introduction of a carbon tax will lead to job losses of around 6,400 in the tourism industry and, worse still, most of those jobs will be in regional or rural Australia. In addition, the negative economic impact will be around $600 to $800 million. The tourism industry employs around half a million Australians—it is second only to the manufacturing industry—and if restaurant and hospitality services are added, it is around one million people. Yet there is not one single cent in the industry adjustment package for this industry under a carbon tax. At the same time this Prime Minister gave $100 million to the steel industry. This is a bad tax by a bad government that will deliver a bad result for Australia; therefore, I oppose it. (Time expired)

Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is with great pleasure and honour that I speak on the Gillard government's Clean Energy Bill 2011 and related bills, particularly following the member for 'Henny Penny', the member for Paterson, who spent the first few minutes complaining that there was not enough time to speak on these bills and then talked about how the sky is going to fall in, without any real evidence at all. He talks about the Great Barrier Reef. What was your plan for the Great Barrier Reef? Your plan was to cover it in shadecloth. That is the answer, that is how you address climate change—cover it in shadecloth. What an absolute joke you lot are!

Speaking on this legislation is probably one of the proudest moments I have had in this place since I was elected to represent the people of McEwen. I am proud to be part of a government that is taking action on climate change and its dangerous effects on our community, not only in the present but for the future. As the member for Paterson pointed out, for the last four years Labor has talked about taking action on climate change, and we are doing it. The only thing in the way is the Luddites on the opposite side of the House who do not want to do anything. Even the shadow minister, Greg Hunt, when asked about how many trees you had to plant, said, 'Oh, 100 square kilometres.' That was all—100 square kilometres—and he found out he was wrong. He could not even get his maths right on how many trees you need to plant. Now we find out that we have got to cover the entire country in trees and we still will not have it done. The 19th century plan that those sitting opposite want to put forward is absolutely ridiculous.

I am proud to be part of a Labor government because, as history shows, it is Labor governments that deliver reforms that benefit each and every Australian, and the passage of this legislation will be no different in setting up the structures and foundations that we rely on. There is no denying the fact that climate change is real. It is something that we in this country have been debating for years and now we are finally getting on with the job because we have a Prime Minister who understands that just because something is tough does not mean you fold in and do not do it—particularly if it is the right thing to do by the country. That is what leaders are elected to do—it is about leadership, not opposition. As much as those opposite may fail to understand, there are things far more important than their sound bites, slogans and fraudulent scare campaigns. A fact that they might find even more astounding is that there are even more important things than the future of the Leader of the Opposition; take the country's future, for example.

Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I would ask you to ask the member to withdraw the term 'fraudulent'. The minister sitting opposite me raised this exact point last night with the occupant of the chair and that member was asked to withdraw the term 'fraudulent'.

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

The member for Paterson will resume his seat. The member for McEwen has the call.

Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am not going to spend too much time talking about climate change and its effects on our country. All I will say is that climate change is real, which is why we have a plan to tackle it. Although the Leader of the Opposition himself, in one of his 'united states of Tony' moments, believes climate change is crap, he still has a plan to reduce emissions, albeit a plan that will hurt Australian families and damage the Australian economy just to help the big polluters—but we will get onto that a bit later.

Australia produces around 500 million tonnes of carbon pollution each year, making us one of the top polluters in the world—even more per person than the United States of America. Currently Australia's biggest polluters create and release pollution into our atmosphere for free, despite the fact that it is damaging our environment. A carbon price changes that. The top 500 polluters in Australia will have to pay a price for every tonne of carbon pollution they create and release into the atmosphere. This, in turn, will create incentives to reduce pollution in the cheapest possible way, by encouraging big polluters to invest in cleaner ways to do business. It will help build the clean energy future our country deserves and our kids are entitled to.

Labor will cut pollution by making the big polluters pay and every cent raised will go to Australian households, Australian jobs and securing a clean energy future for our country, our kids and our grandkids. That is a fact. Pricing carbon will provide new economic opportunities for Australian workers, with opportunities to open up in existing industries as they invest in new technologies to generate less pollution. Jobs will also be created in new industries such as renewable energy, carbon farming and sustainable design. These new industries will strengthen our economy as well as improve our international competitiveness.

With tax cuts and the raising of the tax free threshold we will boost incentives for people to get to work. We will see about 500,000 new jobs created in the next two years and 1.6 million Australian jobs created by 2020. This builds on our record—Labor's record—of creating 750,000 jobs since we came to office, as opposed to those opposite, who would have ripped the guts out of the Australian workforce and left 250,000 Australians out of work during the GFC. What they do is a disgrace.

Labor's plan to make the big polluters pay for the pollution they create and dump into our atmosphere will ensure that Australians are supported. Nine out of 10 households will receive financial benefit through tax cuts and/or payment increases. By making the big polluters pay for their pollution, we are able to provide Australian families with tax cuts. This builds on our tax cuts across the board for three years in a row since we have been in government. The average Australian wage earner is already paying $1,000 less income tax than they were three years ago.

Under the Gillard Labor government's plan, pensioners will receive an extra $338 per year if they are single and $510 per year for couples combined. Families will receive household assistance through their family assistance payments: up to $110 per eligible child for families receiving family tax benefit A and up to $69 per year in assistance for families receiving family tax benefit B. Eligible self-funded retirees will receive an extra $338 per year in assistance for singles and $510 per year for couples combined. Eligible single parents will receive $289 per year. Students will get an extra $177 per year. On top of all this, all Australians earning up to $80,000 get a tax cut. For most people it will be around $300. The tax free threshold will also triple, so nobody will have to pay tax on the first $20,000 that they earn. That means that half a million people go from having to pay tax to paying no tax, and a total of one million people will no longer have to submit a tax return.

The world is acting to tackle climate change and we refuse to allow Australia to be locked into a polluted economy and environment, in turn deterring investment, competitiveness and business in Australia. We have seen this already, directly, through the actions of the Victorian Liberal government, who have wiped out the wind industry and wiped out renewable energy. We are watching jobs and manufacturing leave Victoria purely because of the Luddite attitude of those opposite. The Liberal Party quite simply just do not understand the environment, economics or manufacturing. They fake 'We are the workers friend' but the first thing that they do when it comes to workers is say: 'The economy is a little bit shaky. What is the best thing to do? Cut worker's wages, cut worker's conditions and cut families' safety.' That is the first thing that they do; it is their answer to everything: cut, cut, slash, slash. That is all they can do.

Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, I rise on a point of order. As you reminded me, Mr Speaker, I ask you to bring the member back to direct relevance to the legislation before the House.

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

The member for Paterson will resume his seat. The member for McEwen knows his obligation to relate his material to the question. The member for McEwen has the call.

Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Speaker. We cannot afford to be left behind, and under the Gillard Labor government we will not be. I have said this before and I will say it again. This is not to say Labor is jumping into some time machine and going full throttle into the future. We are trying to keep up with the times, reflecting the views of those we represent and keeping an eye on the future. Labor is the party for today and for the future. It is setting goals because innovation, development and investment will follow. We will see things years from now which we cannot even begin to imagine today. It will be because of Labor that the unimaginable becomes possible and, because of the untapped talent and resources Australia boasts, these possibilities are endless. Al Gore has said:

… the people who still say that global warming isn't real are actually in the same boat with the flat earth society. They get together and party on Saturday nights with the folks that believe the moon landing was in a movie lot in Arizona.

That is what we have opposite in this place. In the 21st century we have an opposition so outdated and prehistoric it is just like the dinosaurs. The Liberal Party will always be around as a reminder of what the past looks like. They are well-conserved, just like dinosaurs in the Melbourne museum—something you go and look at as a reminder of days past. All 22 million people in this country will be affected in some way by the effects of climate change. However, 88 people are trying to get in the way of taking action—all for one person, all for the goal of getting the Leader of the Opposition into the Lodge. They are a self-interested party with no priorities. The Leader of the Opposition's campaign against carbon pricing is as legitimate, credible and believable as a 20c Rolex—it might tick for a while but pretty quickly it stops working and you see it for the cheap, desperate phony it is.

Let us quickly look at the Liberal Party's plan—their 34-page document of deceit, as it was well called. Let us call it what it is: a big tax grab. The Leader of the Opposition will try and cut pollution by making Australians pay. Australian households will have $1,300 ripped off them per year and that money taken from Australian families will go directly to big polluters. The Liberal Party want to give the hard-earned money of Australian working families to the big polluters. We Australians should not have to surrender both our clean air future and our own hard-earned money to pay the big polluters for their dirty habit. It is a ridiculous plan that they put forward, and they know that it will not achieve anything.

We all know the Leader of the Opposition is good at scaring people. He is like a little child at Halloween, except the mask seems to be permanently fixed. I would like to read out one of the many emails that I have received from locals supporting a price on carbon. It reads:

I am writing to show our support for the Labor government to implement a carbon price and other measures for addressing climate change and transforming our economy away from reliance on fossil fuels. Please do not allow a fear campaign to weaken your resolve—stay firm and lets take Australia into a more sustainable future. I am sick of hearing from people who still think they are living in the 1980s—it's time to embrace the 21st century and build new industries. This is a key initiative I want from the Labor government that I voted for.

This is what it is all about. It is risk management for our future and our children's future. What is the worst case scenario? That we invest in a cleaner future, we lower pollution or at best we mitigate the problems that climate change will bring to our future. I ask this question to those opposite: how could anyone look in their child's eyes and say, 'I'm not prepared to do all I can do to give you a cleaner, pollution-free future.'? It is wrong and it is not what we should be doing here. I support putting a price on pollution because I support our country's future.

Alby Schultz (Hume, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to vehemently oppose the package of the Clean Energy Bill 2011 and associated bills. This package of legislation represents the most audacious attempt yet by a government to cripple the Australian economy whilst achieving nothing to abate climate change.

There are three major reasons why I so passionately oppose this package. Firstly, this legislation is illegitimate. The public did not vote for this policy at the last election and have been ruthlessly denied the opportunity to do so since. Secondly, the international community is moving further away from concerted action on climate change. Furthermore, the few schemes that have been enacted are already showing signs of being exploited by white collar criminals and politicians trying to boost their green credentials with no tangible reduction in emissions to show for it. Thirdly, I oppose this legislation because I believe that the Australian economy and small businesses should not become sacrificial lambs to the green movement.

The Clean Energy Bill is a classic illustration of the Labor party's reckless approach to government. Its actions and those of the Prime Minister have rendered this bill illegitimate in the eyes of the Australian people, a fact that should be reflected in this House. It has mismanaged the policy and politics of the climate change debate ever since former Prime Minister Rudd dumped his doomed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. Most disturbingly and deceitfully of all, this government has deliberately deployed a political fear campaign exploiting natural disasters such as bushfires, droughts, floods and heatwaves, using them as an outrageous justification for ramming through climate change legislation. Thousands of pages of historical review have been printed, trying to work out why Mr Rudd threw away the CPRS and his credibility with it. The answer is very simple. The Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott argued for and made the compelling case that Australia should not be the first to drink the Kool-Aid and should not proceed with a market mechanism as part of a climate abatement strategy until the rest of the world had agreed to do so at the Copenhagen summit in 2010—a very sensible approach indeed, vindicated as it was by the failure of the global community to reach an agreement on a market mechanism.

A member of the government once said to me that politics is a stayers' game; so, in that vein, the Labor Party regrouped and rather than persevere dumped both the policy and the Prime Minister and called an early election. It was at that extraordinary election that both major parties outlined their contrasting policies on climate change. In reality only one leader and one party took a policy on climate change to the last election. Tony Abbott presented to the Australian people the coalition's real action policy on climate change which would meet our bipartisan commitment to a five per cent emissions reduction by 2020. Through this policy the coalition has proven that emission cuts can be achieved without Labor's carbon tax. The coalition's plan to tackle climate change has been in public circulation for well over 12 months and supports a range of measures that will reduce emissions and improve Australia's environment.

By contrast the Labor government and the Prime Minister did not have anything that even remotely resembled a responsible policy on climate change at the last election. Outrageously, the Prime Minister took to the Australian people a plan to outsource the development of the nation's climate change policy to an unelected citizen's assembly of 150 individuals. Never has a government so blatantly dismissed the centrality of the Westminster system of parliamentary accountability. Subsequent to the election, which the Prime Minister failed to win, in a deal done out of pure political desperation the Prime Minister succumbed to the demands of the Greens and the opportunistic Independents.

Clinging to the wreckage of a lost election, a perverse alliance was formed between the Greens and the Prime Minister. The Greens agenda is quite simple: tax hardworking Australians back to the Stone Age, and destroy the fruits of generations who have fought and laboured to build this country, so that we can all frolic in the forest with fairies. So detached from reality is the Greens' manifesto that I am amazed good people on the government benches sat by and allowed the Prime Minister to agree to implement Green-Left rubbish like this bill, abandoning all their principles to protect hardworking Australians in the process. The result of the election—in which the Australian people clearly registered their vote of no confidence in the Labor Party to govern—left us with this Frankenstein government beholden to the whims of rural fruit loops and out-of-touch inner city elites.

The Prime Minister could have chosen not to compromise her principles as she did and sent the Australian people back to the polls at the end of 2010 to allow both parties to better articulate their vision for the future of our country. Instead of doing what was best for democracy, instead of doing what was right, the Prime Minister copped out. In one calculated action this Prime Minister chose to cast aside all principle, to tear away those last annoying shreds of dignity clinging to the office of Prime Minister, and to go back on her promise before the election. And not just any promise—not core or non-core but an iron-clad, no ifs or buts promise that 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' I repeat, 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' In all my time involved in politics I have never heard an individual who held the highest office in this country so blatantly and dismissively betray the trust and honour bestowed upon that office. We are here today as a result of this betrayal. I can proudly state that I went to the last election to have the people of the electorate of Hume judge me on my pre-election commitments and the policies that we as the Liberal Party developed and the principles I stand for. When voters—mums, dads, nurses, pensioners, veterans—all went to the polls throughout the country, they made their decisions based on the promises we made before polling day. The public have to take us at our word that we will deliver on the promises we make. People cast their vote anticipating that the promises each candidate and party make are genuine and will be followed through. But that sacred trust, inherent in our democratic system, the one between voter and politician, is destroyed when the person holding the highest office in the land makes a conscious decision to turn her back on her public stated commitment to the Australian people.

I struggle to comprehend the sheer audacity of this Prime Minister to present this series of bills before the parliament. Clearly, she has the most public case of political amnesia or she holds the trust placed in her by the Australian people, that she would not introduce a carbon tax, with complete and utter contempt. This bill has no legitimacy and therefore no place being presented before this House. Nobody in Australia voted for this carbon tax; nobody in Australia was given the opportunity to vote either for or against this carbon tax; nobody in Australia should have to wear the cost being imposed upon us because of this carbon tax.

My second reason for opposing this job-destroying piece of legislation is that the international community is moving further away from concerted action on climate change. As I mentioned earlier, Copenhagen illustrated that the global community has no stomach for imposing a global carbon trading system that will actually reduce emissions. The Prime Minister has already acknowledged that the purchase of carbon credit offsets from other countries will be integral to Labor's ability to achieve the bipartisan five per cent emissions reduction target by 2020. As my colleague the Deputy Leader of the Opposition outlined in her speech to the House the day before yesterday, the Kyoto protocol era international carbon credit market has collapsed within the space of six years. Representing a value of $25 billion in 2005, that market is now valued at a paltry $1.5 billion because the international community are abandoning their commitment to the protocol after its expiry in 2012. Even more disturbingly, in Europe law enforcement agency Europol reported that raids were conducted in Norway, Switzerland, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Latvia, the Netherlands, the Slovak Republic, Italy and Portugal. As the Deputy Leader of the Opposition pointed out, 90 per cent of trades in the European Union emissions trading scheme were fraudulent, resulting in a loss to European taxpayers of more than €6.6 billion. Yet the Prime Minister wilfully ignores this evidence. The Prime Minister also fails to see her moral double standard of continuing to support the export of coal to China and India to pollute the atmosphere yet expects Australians to pay for overseas countries to do so. I cannot possibly support a package of bills that intends to waste over $57 billion of taxpayers' dollars on overseas carbon credits simply to assuage the Green left-leaning politicians and inner-city elites and what they feel over humanity's industrial advancement, with no evidence that climate change will either be stopped or abated.

There is a third major reason I refuse to support the Clean Energy Bill package. This government has already exhibited its appetite for attacking small enterprise. Throughout my electorate, small businesses in places such as Picton, Goulburn, Boorowa, Harden, Young, Yass, Grenfell, Cowra, Cootamundra and Crookwell are struggling under the burden of overregulation and cost increases. As recently as last week, Senator Eric Abetz came to my electorate where I introduced him to small-business people from Goulburn, Boorowa and the Wollondilly region to discuss industrial relations policy. Not only was overregulation a burden on small business, but the message they gave us regarding the carbon tax was overwhelming. Coupled with the colossal increases in the cost of doing business under this government, implementing a carbon tax will devastate the bottom line of many small and family run businesses who cannot keep up with the increase in electricity prices as it is. The money merry-go-round that this legislation hopes to implement delivers virtually no compensation for small enterprise. Even under their own example of assistance for small businesses, a cash-strapped cafe owner would need to find $6,000 for some new equipment to receive a one-off earlier tax benefit of $1,800. Any additional one-off tax benefit will not relieve the ongoing and unavoidable increased operating costs due to escalating energy costs under the carbon tax, particularly the price of electricity.

I have raised the fear being felt by small business on numerous occasions both in this House in August and in opinion pieces highlighting the struggle they will face if this business-busting carbon tax is introduced. Sadly, what I have been hearing out in my electorate from small business is being echoed in towns and suburbs across the country. On Tuesday 13 September the Australian Retailers Association released a statement that declared that retailers could not cope with the price hikes and other flow-on effects of the carbon tax as new research released by Deloitte Access Economics showed the sector had posted the worst growth results in 20 years. The report went on to say:

Almost 85% expect carbon tax will have a negative impact on business profitability

Over a third of retailers surveyed to shed staff as a result of lost trade

Small business will struggle to survive and jobs will be lost if the Prime Minister gets her way and succeeds in passing this package of bills. In all my 23 years in state and federal politics, I have never witnessed anger about a government policy as widespread as I have with the introduction of this carbon tax. The Prime Minister said there would be no carbon tax under the government she led. This bill represents a betrayal of the trust invested in the democratic process by the Australian people. This bill represents a colossal waste of taxpayers' money on offshore carbon credit schemes proven to have been corrupted by the people charged with the white and clean environmental consciences of gutless politicians and latte-sipping socialists. This bill represents the greatest act of economic sabotage since Federation and will destroy the lives of small businesses and employees who will find themselves out of business and out of work. This bill to introduce a carbon tax is a betrayal of Australia's democratic process, an enormous waste of money and will vandalise our economy for absolutely no environmental gain. I cannot and will not support this bill.

Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to have this opportunity to add my support to the Clean Energy Bill 2011 and related bills which set Australia on its path to a clean energy future, a path to a clean energy future that will see our economy transformed in ways that will cut our national emissions of carbon and drive innovation and improvements in efficiency in both existing and emerging industries; a path to a clean energy future that provides for generous compensation to pensioners and families, provides assistance to industries to protect and grow jobs, and delivers tax reform.

As I have said many times in media interviews, my support for this package of bills, the introduction of a carbon price and the other measures that go with it, should come as no surprise to anyone. After all, it was only two years ago that I was up on my feet speaking in support of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, not once but two or three times, and every time the CPRS came back before the House I voted in favour of it. So it should not come as a surprise that, given another opportunity in here to vote on putting a price on carbon, I will act consistently with what I have done in the past and vote for it. We are here with these bills before us again, and faced with this decision yet again, because the reality and the challenge of a changing climate, a warming world, has not gone away. It has not gone away since the defeat of the CPRS two years ago; it has not gone away in all the many years that this parliament and international forums have been presented with increasingly alarming scientific evidence and asked to respond. It is not going away just because some choose to ignore it or deny it. Successive governments starting with John Howard's signing of the Kyoto protocol and commissioning of the Shergold report, and the Rudd government's negotiations over the CPRS have brought us to this point. Now is the time to finish the job they started and pass these clean energy bills. There is no value to Australia in continuing the uncertainty and delay over something that scientists tell us requires urgent action and that economists warn us will only get more difficult and costly to our economy the longer we leave it. As I made clear in my speeches on the CPRS, I strongly support the direction the government is taking. I agree that Australia should do our bit to respond to the threat of climate change and I agree that we should do that by putting a price on carbon. This is not an article of faith for me, rather it is an issue like many others that demand the government of the day to make a decision and take action. Our Labor governments and the Howard Liberal government before us were presented with this problem as one needing attention and a response. Our government and the Howard government before us sought advice from scientists, economists and other experts as to the dimensions of the problem and the range of solutions available to us.

On the basis of that advice, our government and the Howard government before us came to the same conclusion: that climate change is real, that it is caused by human activity, that we should reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions and that the best way of doing that is by means of an emissions trading scheme. That led to both parties going to the 2007 election promising to introduce almost identical emissions trading schemes to cut carbon pollution. I do not remember the Leader of the Opposition getting all hot and bothered about John Howard's emissions trading scheme when he proposed it and started legislating for it back in 2007, a scheme that we now know—and the member for Wentworth confirmed last week—was very similar to the one we are debating today.

This debate has been characterised all along by the inconsistencies of the opposition leader and his determination to never ever let the facts get in the way of his unrelenting scare campaign. The facts start with the science. Although it is going over old ground it is worth restating in this debate why we see the need to do what we are doing to reduce carbon emissions. I could go to any number of sources to support my conclusion and the conclusion of those of us in government that we can be confident in accepting the scientific consensus on climate change and using that as the basis for our judgments about whether and how to take action. There are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Australian Academy of Sciences all telling us the same thing. Professor Garnaut summarised his reasoning for accepting the mainstream science on climate change in his 2011 report:

The vast majority of those who have spent their professional lives seeking to understand climate and the impacts of human activities on it have no doubt that average temperatures on earth are rising and the human-induced increases in greenhouse gases are making major contributions to these rises. They are supported in this by the learned academies of science … in all of the countries of scientific accomplishment.

So much for the world government conspiracy to corrupt scientific data. Depending on what day it is and on what audience he is addressing, you might find the opposition leader accepting the scientific consensus that we should cut carbon emissions or you might find him ridiculing that very same science. Luckily there is a rational voice within the opposition, the member for Wentworth. He tells us that it is absolutely Liberal Party policy to accept the scientific consensus that the globe is warming and that human greenhouse gas emissions are substantially the cause of it. Labor and the Liberals are agreed on the climate change science. The member for Wentworth in the same speech confirmed that both parties are agreed on the need to cut emissions and the extent to which we intend to cut them. Just as the Labor government is pledged to cut emissions in Australia by five per cent on 2000 levels by 2020, we have it from the member for Wentworth that it is also the Liberal Party's policy to take action to cut Australia's greenhouse gas emissions. This is the same unconditional target adopted by the Rudd government and the Gillard government and pledged at Copenhagen. Labor and Liberal are agreed on the target for emissions cuts.

The next fact is that if you want to meet that target for a reduction in the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere, the most effective and least-costly way of doing it is to put a price on carbon. There is almost universal agreement among economists that the best way to meet emissions reduction targets is through a market based mechanism putting a price on carbon. In response to that pricing signal, business and consumers will do what they always do—innovate, look for value, create solutions, find cheaper and better ways of doing things. In that way a price on carbon will lead to lower emissions and will drive the economic reform that we need to build the modern competitive industries and the skilled productive workforce that the 21st century demands.

The world is not going to wait for us; it never has. Australia accepted that challenge in the eighties and nineties, floating the dollar and bringing down the tariff wall and transforming our industries. It was not easy at the time, but we have been reaping the benefits of that change to an open, competitive, outward-looking economy ever since. It is why the government has adopted a similarly market based approach to meeting this latest challenge of reducing carbon emissions and starting the transition to an economy based on efficiency and clean energy. This is a very comprehensive package of legislation. It is based on the best scientific and economic advice, including extensive Treasury modelling. It has been the subject of broad consultation and intense debate for at least the last four years.

I turn to two particular aspects which will be of interest to the people I represent. The first of those is the assistance that individuals and households can expect to receive as a result of this reform. The first point to make in that regard is that the carbon price is not a cost to be paid by individuals. This legislation requires just 500 of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, those companies that emit 25,000 tonnes or more per year, to pay a price of $23 per tonne for the gases they emit. In Central Queensland that equates to the major coalmining companies, Stanwell Power Station and a handful of other businesses. The carbon permits that companies are required to purchase will generate significant revenue for government which leads to the second and very important point.

Over half of that revenue will be returned to families, to workers, to pensioners, to self-funded retirees and to students in the form of either tax cuts, higher Centrelink payments or both. What that means for people in Capricornia is that for most of them any costs that might be passed on to them from companies that have to pay the carbon price will be at least partially compensated and, in most cases, completely covered by the extra money they will have in their pockets from tax cuts and pension increases. For example, there are almost 20,000 pensioners in Capricornia. Single pensioners will receive an extra $338 per year and couples up to an extra $510 in their pension payments. On average the expected increase in costs due to a carbon price for a single pensioner will be $204 per year. With the increase in their pension payments they will be $134 better off. Out of 64,000 taxpayers in Capricornia, around 47,000 will receive a tax cut and out of those 47,000, 39,000 will receive a tax cut of at least $300. We want to support households, families and pensioners while we make this economic transition. The price on carbon will drive that transition and the revenue it raises will allow us to help low- and middle-income households meet any resulting costs. Updated Treasury modelling shows that those costs to consumers will be minimal and for most households more than met by the compensation measures. The average household food bill is estimated to increase by only 80c per week and the overall rise in the cost of living for an average household would be just 0.7 per cent in the first full year of the carbon price. That compares to a cost-of-living jump of about 2½ per cent with the introduction of the GST.

The opposition scare campaign just does not stand up to the facts in this debate. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in Capricornia where opposition members and the Coal Association have been making the most overblown and fanciful claims about the impact the price on carbon will have on the coal industry. I have lost count of how many times I have been asked to respond to their latest warning that this spells the end of the coal industry. The trouble for the opposition is that the mining companies would not stick to the doomsday script. It started with Peabody's multi-billion-dollar bid for Macarthur Coal the day after we announced the details of the carbon price. Then it kept going because the companies, their shareholders and their banks have obviously judged that the future is too bright and the opportunities in the coal sector are too valuable to slow down their investment activity even for a couple of months for the sake of keeping up the pretence about the impact of the carbon price.

Day after day the opposition soldiers on with its scare campaign while the people of Central Queensland can see with their own eyes the evidence of a mining boom that shows not the slightest sign of slowing down. I will give a snapshot of what has been going on in my electorate since this package was announced in July. I met with Xstrata who told me they are full steam ahead with their Wandoan Coal Project—that is, a mine, hundreds of kilometres of railway line and a major new port facility at Balaclava Island. Representatives from Indian company Adani did a roadshow to Bowen to talk up the opportunities coming their way with the expansion of the port at Abbot Point to ship out the coal from Adani's mine in the Galilee Basin. Landholders in the Central Highlands held mass meetings over concerns that not one but three companies are each proposing to build their own individual 500 kilometres of railway line from the Galilee Basin to the coast. BHP was reported as insisting on fly-in fly-out operations in the Bowen Basin because it does not know how else it can fill the hundreds of jobs it is projecting in the region in the coming years. BHP is also encouraging steelworkers from other parts of Australia to come and fill jobs in its Bowen Basin projects. QR National confirmed that it is going ahead with an expansion of its rail network between the Bowen Basin and the Hay Point/Dalrymple Bay coal-loading terminals. Vale came to see me last week to tell me about their long-term plans to lift investment in their coal business in Australia. Proponents of the Fitzroy River Coal Terminal are working hard to progress their project, with huge interest from coal producers in the Surat and Bowen basins. And ABS figures released last week show that a record $207.2 million was spent exploring for coal in the June quarter. That is a jump from the December quarter, and of course that jump happened after the details of the carbon price were announced.

This was all summed up best in a headline in the Australian newspaper's business pages last month: 'Watch what miners do, not say, about the carbon tax'. Exactly. When it comes to the future of the coal industry, my advice to central Queenslanders is to follow the money, because that exposes the opposition's scare campaign as a complete sham. The money trail tells the real story: that investment in mines and infrastructure, the search for workers and the investment by members of the opposition in mining company shares continue to grow.

I am confident that there is nothing in this legislation for my electorate to fear. In fact, there are opportunities in embracing a lower carbon future that I have not had time to detail today: opportunities for farmers and graziers through the Carbon Farming Initiative; opportunities in renewable energy, like Mackay Sugar's cogeneration plant using biomass from sugarcane; and opportunities to improve efficiency in the meat-processing sector, which I know local plants are already investigating.

I attended my first briefing on emissions trading in 1999, my first year in the parliament. We have marked time on this issue for long enough—12 years now. Let us get this debate behind us and get started on the real work of creating a clean energy future for this nation.

Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the carbon bills that are before the House, the Clean Energy Bill 2011 and related bills, which we are debating as part of this move by the government to introduce a carbon tax into the Australian economy by 1 July next year. You cannot have this debate in this chamber without stepping through the history of how we got to this point. I reflect upon some of the comments of the previous speaker, the member for Capricornia. She mentioned that this debate has now been held in this House for three or so years, and indeed it has. The former government took to the 2007 election an emissions trading scheme which the Labor government then put into a proposal called the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in the last parliament. They brought it to this place, I think, on three occasions, and it was defeated each time through the parliament.

Then, of course, the Labor Party, led by the now Prime Minister, decided that it was a policy that they no longer wanted to have as part of their platform to go to the 2010 election, so in April 2010 the 'gang of four', as it was known—the former Prime Minister, the current Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the former Minister for Finance and Deregulation—decided, outside the cabinet process, to do away with the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme because, they said at the time, there was not a consensus for it and therefore they did not want to pursue it any longer. It was reported—of course, these things sometimes leak; we are not sure how these things ever leak—that the now Prime Minister was leading the charge about making that change to the Labor Party's policy position. That is a reasonable thing, of course, for a cabinet to do: to change its mind on a policy. So they went to the 2010 election following a change of leadership in our country. The new Prime Minister, the current Prime Minister, then took a very clear and explicit promise to the last election that there would be no carbon tax under a government she led. She said that five days out. Just a day out from the election, on the front page of the Australian newspaper of 20 August 2010, she was reported as saying, 'I refugee le out a carbon tax.' She was not alone. On 12 August 2010, some nine days before the election, the Treasurer said, 'We have made our position very clear; we have ruled it out.' This specifically dealt with a question that was asked on the 7.30 Report by, I presume, Kerry O'Brien.

So there was a very clear position, and that position was, fundamentally, that the Labor Party would seek to develop a community consensus. They were going to have 150 people chosen from throughout Australia, separate from the parliament, to come to Canberra to develop a community consensus. Of course, 150 people are chosen by the electorate to come to Canberra to develop policy, but they were going to have 150 people who were separate from the parliament to develop a consensus. They were going to have 'cash for clunkers'. That was the big announcement with regard to climate change during the last election, an absolutely economically insane proposal that would have wasted more money than any of their other programs, whether it be wastage on school halls or the insulation debacle. Cash for clunkers would have put all that to a side because it was such a ridiculous policy proposal. Thankfully, it was dumped when the Queensland floods occurred earlier this year.

But that was, in essence, what this Prime Minister and this Labor government took to the election All those members on the other side who were elected—72 of them—were elected on the promise that they would not have a carbon tax as part of their policy program. They very clearly ruled it out. They did not even countenance having an emissions trading scheme, as some have tried to suggest in the last few days. There was a very clear promise at the last election that there would be no carbon tax under a government that this Prime Minister led. In fact, it was a promise that the Treasurer also made. That was the position of the Labor Party.

The position of the Liberal Party and the National Party, if I can speak for my colleague at the table who is part of the coalition, is that we would also not have a carbon tax and we would not support an emissions trading scheme. We made that decision after the Copenhagen consensus fell over, and that meant a big change in the events in the world. There was a view that, because we were coming to the end of 2009, the Copenhagen conference—President Obama and the world—would be able to bring together an agreement which would lead to global action on climate change: global targets and therefore a global price. Of course, that did not happen. Copenhagen, even for its greatest supporters, was an abject failure and that changed the essence of this debate. So we took to the election a very clear promise that we would achieve a five per cent reduction in emissions by 2020 with what is called direct action.

The Labor Party now stand in this place and elsewhere, and their supporters in the community—the ever-diminishing group of people in the community who say they support the Labor government—make the claim that you just have to forget about this promise and move on. They think that somehow the Prime Minister is showing leadership, that this is something she had to bring together because of the parliament—and that is the other excuse we hear. We heard grand speeches by people like the member for Capricornia and the Prime Minister when she introduced this bill about how wonderful this is going to be for the economy, how it is going to lift our standard of living and create jobs and more opportunities. Yet the thing she is most fearful of seems to be actually giving the Australian people the opportunity to have a view on this.

In fact, there was a very interesting article in the Australian newspaper last Friday from a well-renowned economist, Henry Ergas, which talked very specifically about how the bills would be impossible to be unwound. If the Australian people did not like the direction of this government and there was a change of government, the 17 bills we are debating today would be impossible for a future government to unwind. I think that shows the complete lack of regard that the Labor Party and this Prime Minister have for the electorate on this matter. They refuse point blank to listen to what the Australian people want to do on this issue. In my electorate I constantly hear feedback from the Australian people that this issue should be taken to an election before this parliament makes a decision to implement a carbon tax. It is the right thing to do.

To put this in a historical context, many on the Labor Party side, including the minister at the table, will remember that former Prime Minister Howard took to the 1998 election a promise that he would implement a goods and services tax. That was after a promise made in 1995 when he said there would never ever be a GST. In 1997 he changed his mind and he took the proposal to the election. He took the Australian people into his trust. He just won the election, it is fair to say, because there was, dare I say, a scare campaign run against the proposal, but he was able to get it through with a slim majority, it must be said. He passed it through this parliament but in the Senate the Labor Party—even though he had taken it to an election—refused to accept the wisdom of the implementation of a goods and services tax and opposed it every step of the way.

We saw the Minister for Regional Australia, Regional Development and Local Government, the then shadow treasurer, the member for Hotham, day after day come in with the former Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley, and there would be a stunt of the day—there were the Hockey bear pyjamas, there were cans of fruit—they tried every trick in the book to oppose this tax. They predicted the end of the world, they predicted every possible outcome from the implementation of the goods and services tax. Their mates in the states did the same even though they now sit back and enjoy the vast revenue that the GST brings. Let's not be too precious about this claim that somehow there is a scare campaign being run. The fact is that the Labor Party, when they had their opportunity in opposition, when John Howard had taken a policy proposal to an election, still opposed it every step of the way.

I say to the Labor Party, if they are so proud of this legislation, we should stop this debate today. We should have an election, they should take it to an election, they should get the endorsement of the electorate and they will then have the moral right to pursue this policy through the parliament. That is the opportunity that the Labor Party have and they refuse point blank to take it. So this debate is held under a dark cloud of a complete fib prior to the election and a complete backflip on the position. Now we see legislation which is designed to make it impossible for the Australian people in a future time to withdraw their support for a government who did not get their trust in the first place.

While I am talking about scare campaigns and claims, I noticed last night on Four Corners there was a piece which included an interview with the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, who made some unbelievable claims about scare campaigns and how somehow the debate in Australia was being dragged down in comparison with what had happened in the past. I am sure the minister for climate change used to be a very senior member of the ACTU executive; I am nearly positive that was the case. I am happy to be corrected if I am wrong but there was certainly a guy with dark-rimmed glasses, who looks very much like the minister for climate change, who was a very senior member of the ACTU executive when they smashed up Parliament House. They smashed the front of this place to bits. They caused thousands and thousands of dollars of damage in 1996 and I am sure that is the man who was on Four Corners last night making this claim:

You know, the whole hype that Tony Abbott has created about in his terms 'unimaginable you know cost impacts', of course is completely deceitful and untrue.

The concern he has generated about job security is also completely unfounded and untrue.

He has said that the entire coal industry will be destroyed. That's what he said!

He's forecast that entire towns and regions are going to be wiped off the map, that the manufacturing industry will die.

I mean, this is the most absurd hyperventilating tripe that I can remember in public life.

I can take the minister for climate change back to some other hyperventilating tripe if he likes. How about the waterfront dispute? Let us go back to the waterfront dispute when again I am sure a guy who looked very much like the minister for climate change was the head of the ACTU which led the most vicious personal campaign against the minister at the time whose family received death threats and were moved out of Melbourne because of the behaviour of people in the ACTU that he led. Now he seeks in this place and outside to make claims that somehow we on this side, by opposing this tax, are encouraging the most hyperventilating tripe. Give me a break. This man has no credibility when it comes to this issue. He led some of the most vicious protests, some of the biggest fibs ever known in Australian public life when it came to reforms that the Howard government moved, important reforms which have made our country and our economy stronger, and now he seeks to somehow create this perception that it is all the Leader of the Opposition's fault that the Australian people have lost trust in this government who refused to take them into their trust in the first place. They are hung by their own petard when it comes to these issues.

In relation to the actual claims also by those on the other side, in the time I have remaining, that this is somehow moving in concert with the rest of the world, in pace with the rest of the world, that of course is also wrong. We saw with the breakdown of the Copenhagen talks that the world is not moving to put a global price on greenhouse emissions. We saw in their own documentation and their own modelling that there are suggestions that this is based on the fact that somehow the United States by 2016, halfway through the next presidential term, will have a global price on emissions. That is simply not true. The United States will not have a global price on emissions by that time

Yesterday in the Australian Mr John Lee, who is an adjunct associate professor at the University of Sydney, wrote a fascinating piece about the pace of change in China. He said:

While gross domestic product has been growing at about 10 per cent during the past five years, Chinese consumption of coal has been increasing at about 17 per cent each year and coal production has been increasing by more than 20 per cent in the same period.

It is clear from what the Chinese are doing that they are moving to continue their growth and they are doing it in any way they can. The quickest way that they are doing it is through coal fired power plants and through nuclear power plants. So the world is not moving. International comparisons also say that the carbon tax that this government has before the parliament will raise $9 billion a year. The European scheme raised about $500 million each year in its first five years of operation, so this is the world's biggest carbon tax. It is also a carbon tax which will have local effects. A local manufacturer in my electorate Mr David Hall has submitted to the inquiry about the dangers that this has for his business. His competitors are in the United States where they will not have to deal with this carbon tax, but he will have to deal with the carbon tax. This is a bad piece of policy at the wrong time with no environmental gain. At the very least, the Labor Party should take this to an election and get the Australian people's support before they push ahead with it. (Time expired)

Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise in support of the Clean Energy Bill 2011 in this cognate debate. What we have just seen on display from the member for Mayo is in fact the real raw core of what is actually happening in this debate. The science has not changed in this debate. If anything, the science in terms of the effects of climate change is predicting even worse outcomes. The economics has not changed in this debate. What has changed in this debate is the politics. What we just saw from the member for Mayo is all about the politics of this debate not about the policy. Jamie Briggs, the member for Mayo, on 15 October 2008 said:

In this respect, the planned introduction of an emissions trading scheme will be a key test for both sides of the House. I believe this debate risks being hijacked by extremists who are intolerant of a range of legitimate views.

In 2009 the member for Mayo stated:

I believe an emissions trading scheme is one of the policy levers that can be used to change the energy mix in Australia.

Mr Briggs interjecting—

What has changed? It is the politics that has changed. The opposition sniff a political opportunity and that is exactly what they are doing: sniffing a political opportunity, trying to trash the government at every opportunity.

Mr Briggs interjecting—

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

The honourable member for Mayo has had his opportunity.

Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is poor policymaking, and the member for Mayo should be ashamed of himself. In this place he purports to be someone who potentially has frontbench aspirations, someone who is about good policymaking. This is not what this is about, Member for Mayo, this is about absolute and utter pure politics and it shows again that this opposition is determined at every opportunity to trash good policymaking in the interests of its own political opportunity. We are seeing it in the area of immigration and asylum seekers at the moment. We are seeing it across the board in policy making—not having a sense to the advice that is being given, not having any regard whatsoever for what the science says and what economists say, but taking absolutely every opportunity to trash good policy making—and we saw it on display just before.

The need to address the impact of climate change is one of the most important discussions that we, as a nation, will have. The debate is not new. I have been talking about this for the 10 years I have been a member in this place. There are many people who have been talking about it for a lot longer still. The time to act is now. For decades, Australian people have highlighted why we need to act on climate change. Most recently, we saw the former Howard government undertake considerable work in an effort to implement a price on carbon. We have seen climate change policy debated across more than 30 parliamentary committee inquiries. Professor Ross Garnaut has undertaken two extensive reviews into tackling climate change. The Multi-Party Climate Change Committee was established and met for nine months to complete a full review of the approach to tackling climate change. Labor members were invited to the table, as were the Greens, as were the Independents and Liberal and National party members. Only the Liberal and National party members—many of whom, only two years ago under the leadership of the member for Wentworth, agreed to support action on climate change—refused to participate and dealt themselves out of the opportunity to actually get this issue right.

You have to ask yourself what has happened in recent times to change the approach of opposition members, and the answer, as I said previously, is absolutely simple: it is about playing politics, not about implementing good public policy. Like a horde of puppets, they follow the opposition leader in his display of negativity. Instead of listening to the economists, to the scientists, to the advice they are receiving, the established policy—they take advice from people such as Christopher Monckton.

On Thursday, 8 September I spoke at a climate forum at the Wendouree Centre for Performing Arts in my electorate of Ballarat. I spoke to the residents about the government's Clean Energy Future package. I also had the pleasure of hearing from Professor David Karoly, as he spoke at the forum. Professor Karoly outlined the impact that climate change is having on our planet and the impact that humans are having on our climate. The professor's speech was based on science and based on facts. The professor understood the importance of putting a price on carbon. The majority of Australians accept that climate change is real and that human beings are contributing.

The Climate Commission report released in May, The critical decade, provided the strongest evidence yet of the impact of climate change. It showed that global temperatures are rising faster than ever before, with the last decade being the hottest on record. In the last 50 years, the number of hot days in Australia has more than doubled. Sea levels have risen by 20 centimetres globally since the 1800s, impacting many coastal communities. Another 20-centimetre rise by 2050, which the scientists warn is likely, on current climate change projections, would more than double the risk of coastal flooding. The Great Barrier Reef has suffered nine major bleaching events in the past 31 years, where previously it had experienced none. It is now beyond any reasonable doubt that excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, caused mainly through the burning of fossil fuels, is what is triggering the changes we are currently seeing in the climate. In the report, the scientists warn a rise of more than two degrees Celsius in global temperatures will result in dangerous climate change, with more intense weather events like droughts, floods and cyclones. We have to act.

Not only is there an environmental argument; there is a strong economic argument as well. The Commonwealth, along with the state and territory governments, commissioned Professor Ross Garnaut to look at the impact of climate change on the Australian economy. Professor Garnaut and many leading economists have stated that putting a price on carbon is the cheapest and most efficient way to cut pollution in our economy. This is also an effective way of creating new jobs and business opportunities in Australia's renewable energy sector.

The plan before the parliament has four main elements. The first element is to introduce a price on carbon and to establish guidelines around who will pay this price on carbon and how the government will use the revenue raised from the carbon price to provide support for jobs and to assist households. We have decided to put a price on carbon because it is the most effective and cheapest way to cut carbon pollution. We are introducing a direct charge on around 500 of Australia's largest polluters. It is these large polluters that will pay for polluting our atmosphere. I want to emphasise that this is not a direct charge on individual households. It is not a direct charge on small businesses or farmers.

The starting price for Australia's largest polluters is $23 per tonne. This charge will rise by 2.5 per cent in real terms over the first three years. At the end of the fourth year, when we move to an emissions trading scheme, the price will then be set by the market. Australia's largest polluters will have an incentive to drive down emissions. They will invest in cleaner technologies. No longer will they be able to pollute for free. If they do not do their bit, they will have to pay. Households around Australia have been doing their bit for years. Turning off a light switch, installing solar panels, saving water—we are all doing our bit. Now it is time to see a real drive from our nation's biggest polluters.

We understand that those big polluters may pass on some costs to households. We have not tried to hide that. We have done the modelling and we are saying very publicly that we do expect there will be a small impact on prices. That is why over 50 per cent, over half, of the revenue raised from the carbon price is being paid directly back to households as compensation for that rise. We understand it is happening—unlike the opposition, who are refusing to reveal in detail how they intend to pay for their so-called direct action plan. That direct action plan costs money. Where are they going to get the money from? They are going to get that money from households. We at least have been honest about what we think the price impact will be. We have done the modelling. The opposition are trying to deceive the Australian public on that point.

There is substantial compensation as part of these bills. Treasury modelling has shown that the impact of a carbon price will cost around $9.90 per week. That is less than $1 per week for the average grocery bill and around $3 per week on the weekly electricity bill. Petrol for passenger and light commercial vehicles will not be subject to a carbon price. Although $9.90 a week is not much for some, it is a lot for many, and we do understand that. We do know that it is a cost and it may be very difficult for low- and middle-income earners. That is why we are using the revenue obtained from the carbon price to assist households, on average, by about $10.10 a week. Sole pensioners will receive an extra $338 a year, and pensioner couples will receive a combined additional income of $510 a year. Self-funded retirees holding a Commonwealth seniors health card will receive the same as pensioners and may also be eligible for tax cuts or the low-income supplement. Job seekers will get up to $218 extra a year and $390 a year for couples combined, while students will receive up to an extra $177 a year. Single parents will receive an extra $289 a year. All people earning up to $80,000 a year will receive a tax cut, and most will receive a cut of at least $300 a year.

Our household assistance package is directed at assisting low- and middle-income earners. In addition, we have lifted the tax-free threshold from $6,000 to $18,200, which means that an additional one million Australians will no longer be required to fill in a tax return. This assistance to households will be permanent. Also, as the carbon price goes up, so too does the assistance. It is an extremely important part of the package, one which I note pretty continuously that the opposition refuses to actually acknowledge is there and refuses to talk about in any of its debates. In addition to the assistance to households, the remaining revenue will be used to support jobs in high-polluting industries that are exposed to international competition and to support clean energy programs.

The second element of our plan is the $13.2 billion in funding which we will be providing for clean energy projects. It is a significant investment in clean energy projects—investment in renewable technologies like solar, wind, wave and geothermal. Australian companies will be looking to invest in cleaner energy projects as our Clean Energy Future plan rolls out, and this funding will see investment in clean energy technologies to reduce their carbon output. The Gillard government will also establish a $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation to drive private investment in clean energy technologies. Furthermore, the government will establish the Australian Renewable Energy Agency to manage another $3.2 billion in research and development in clean energy technologies. The third element of our Clean Energy Future plan is targeted at helping communities become more energy efficient. These energy efficiency measures are open to small businesses, councils and other community groups. I know the Minister for Regional Australia, Regional Development and Local Government has been talking to a number of local governments and a number of regional communities across Australia who are very excited about the opportunities in clean energy, who have already been working in this space quite substantially, who are keen to see the investment in jobs that clean energy will bring into their local economies and who are very keen to see the clean energy fund put in place. These measures will help local councils, small businesses and other community groups to become more sustainable and reduce the cost of essential services such as power and water.

Many households, businesses, local governments and community organisations across Australia have already been playing their part to reduce energy use, and we want to see this work continue. We will be providing funding of some $330 million under our Low Carbon Communities program for local councils and communities to access competitive grants. These grants will be open to initiatives such as energy efficiency upgrades and retrofits to council and community use buildings, facilities and lighting.

The Low Carbon Communities program includes two new initiatives. The first is the Energy Efficiency Program for Low-Income Households program, which will provide up to $100 million in grants to consortiums of local and state governments, community organisations, energy retailers and energy service companies to assist low-income households to reduce their energy costs. The second is the $30 million Household Energy and Financial Sustainability Scheme, which will help around 100,000 low-income households better manage their energy consumption.

The fourth and final element of our clean energy fund is an agricultural and land package. This package will bring economic benefits to farmers and other land users who reduce pollution or who can store carbon on their properties. This is of significant importance to people living in rural and regional Australia, to whom it will bring significant benefits and opportunities.

I have outlined here today the importance of tackling climate change. It is the reason we are debating this issue in this parliament, and I do not want that point to be lost in the debate. We have also been debating the reason our Clean Energy Future plan is the most effective way of reducing our carbon input. With the four main elements of our plan, along with strong support from industry and community leaders and strong leadership from across the globe, the Gillard government is acting. Opposition members persist with their mindless negativity on this issue. While they do that, we get on with the business of good policymaking in this country. Labor's plan will cut carbon pollution while supporting jobs. It will apply a price to around 500 of the biggest polluters, not to ordinary Australians. We are acting. It is the right thing to do. It is time for this debate to be concluded and to ensure that these bills pass this House and the Senate. The time to act on climate change is now.

Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Here we are, debating a bill that both the Prime Minister and the Treasurer promised, on the eve of the last election, that they would not introduce. What an absolute affront to our democracy. As the Prime Minister has noted:

… the judgment of history comes sooner than we expect.

I suggest that the Prime Minister should be careful what she wishes for. When the vote on this bill comes next month, anyone who sits on that side of the chamber and says yes to introducing a tax that they explicitly promised before the last election they would not introduce, says yes to higher electricity prices, says yes to placing Australian industry at a competitive disadvantage—putting hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk—and says yes to enriching foreign carbon traders by sending billions of dollars offshore will be remembered by history as trashing our democratic principles.

Last Wednesday, 15 September, was the International Day of Democracy. The preamble of the UN resolution for that day states:

Democracy is a universal value based on the freely expressed will of people to determine their own political, economic, social and cultural systems …

The imposition of the world's biggest carbon tax on this economy is not the free will of the Australian people; it is an assault on our democratic principles.

While everyone remembers that infamous misleading statement, 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead', for which history will forever remember this Prime Minister, history should also remember this Prime Minister for another, equally misleading statement. She pledged not to introduce carbon trading until a time 'when the Australian economy is ready and when the Australian people are ready'. The Australian people are certainly not ready for this big tax, having voted against it at an election, and the Australian economy is not ready. Just look at the results of the recent Sensis small business index for September. It found that business confidence is plummeting, with small business profitability falling sharply during the quarter and now standing at record lows. It also found that all key performance indicators fell in the last quarter, and there has been a substantial increase in the number of small businesses looking to either close their doors or sell up. In this climate, how can anyone come into this chamber and even contemplate slugging this economy with the world's biggest carbon tax?

Back in high school, one of the books I studied was George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. It painted a frightening picture of a future in which an authoritarian government maintained power through the systematic use of propaganda and disinformation. Ultimately, Orwell's writings warn us about the fragility of democracy. The parallels between Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the practices of those peddling this carbon tax would have Orwell spinning in his grave. In his novel, the 'Ministry of Truth' was the official government department for telling lies to deceive the population. The parallel with today is that we have a Prime Minister who once stood up before this parliament and proclaimed that 'the Labor Party is the party of truth-telling'. That is right: the same political party that promised, in order to get itself elected, that there would be no carbon tax and that is now introducing one is the very same party that claims to be the party of truth-telling.

In Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the character Syme, admiring the shrinking volume of a new dictionary, says:

'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.'

Today, this government has destroyed the word 'dioxide'. Every government spokesman corrupts the language by referring to carbon pollution, which creates the false impression that the carbon tax is about preventing carbon pollution—that is, black soot being emitted into the atmosphere. But the theory of global warming is all about that clear, odourless gas that makes plants grow: carbon dioxide. According to this logic of carbon pollution, champagne is just chardonnay infused with carbon pollution. So, according to this government, if we want to reduce our emissions of carbon pollution, we could just drink chardonnay instead of champagne. I find the repeated Orwellian chants of 'carbon pollution' and 'big polluters' both offensive and dangerous. In truth, carbon pollution is black soot, also known as particulate matter. Numerous recent studies have found that these substances cause a variety of serious diseases, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and asthma. For the Liverpool area of Sydney, which I represent—where the local council will need to find another $330,000 for electricity costs under this carbon tax—statistics show that people aged between 16 and 24 have a 50 per cent greater chance of suffering from asthma. This is most likely the result of true carbon pollution through particulate matter from diesel exhaust.

However, the government's proposal for a carbon tax—or, more correctly, for a tax on carbon dioxide—will do nothing to address the very serious health concerns associated with particulate matter. It will do nothing to tackle the problem of diesel exhaust. In truth, if we trained our guns on carbon dioxide, we would simply weaken our economy, burdening it with higher costs of producing electricity. By doing so we would in fact weaken our ability to tackle real pollution that is causing harm to human health today and that will cause harm to human health for our next generation.

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four also gave us the concept of 'doublespeak', language that deliberately disguises, distorts or reverses the meaning of words. If Orwell were alive today he might well have used the term 'greenspeak'. By using doublespeak or 'greenspeak', global warming has now morphed into climate change. No less an authority than Professor Phil Jones confirmed in a BBC interview that from 1995 to 2010 there was no statistically significant warming and that since January 2010 there has in fact been slight global cooling. So with no global warming occurring since 1995 in the land of droughts and flooding rains, we can always have a perpetual war against climate change. Using doublespeak—or greenspeak—taxing carbon dioxide emissions has now become the mantra of 'putting a price on carbon,' as this government simply refuses to tell the truth and use the word 'tax'. But if it looks like a tax, if it works like a tax, if it puts prices up like a tax and if this Labor-Greens government has anything to do with it, you can bet your bottom dollar that it is a tax. And—using doublespeak or greenspeak—attempts to control global temperatures by forestalling global warming is twisted into the often repeated Orwellian chant of 'taking action on climate change'. The claim of taking action of climate change implies that something is actually being done that will achieve something to reduce global temperatures, but that is simply a myth that is being spun.

Firstly, even on this government's own figures, under this carbon tax, emissions of carbon dioxide will actually increase. This carbon tax will do nothing to change the temperature. It will do nothing to change the levels of CO2 in our atmosphere. The Orwellian mantra of 'taking action on climate change' also implies that this carbon tax will somehow stop the sea levels from rising, the rise that has been occurring for the last thousand years. But the truth is that this carbon tax will have as much effect on sea levels as King Canute did when he had his throne carried down to the seashore and when the tide came in he commanded the waves to advance no further. So what we have is a carbon tax that is all pain for absolutely no environmental gain.

In Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the government use memory holes to manipulate the past by rewriting history and changing facts to fit the party doctrine—and just look at the parallels today and at how past scare campaigns of the preachers of global warming have been sent down the memory hole. Remember the prediction by the UN climate body that claimed that, by 2010, the world would be flooded with 50 million climate refugees because of rising sea levels. The science was certain, we were told, the time for debate was over! So certain was this prediction, a website affiliated with the UN even had a map showing where these climate refugees would come from. But with 2010 having come and gone, and without any climate refugees—let alone the promised 50 million—this map has now been sent down one of Orwell's memory holes and has been deleted from the World Wide Web.

Then look at one of the other predictions: that climate change had caused the endless drought. We had Tim Flannery telling us, 'Even the rain that falls isn't actually going to fill our dams and rivers.' The science was certain; the time for debate was over. So government spent billions of dollars which have now been wasted on useless and mothballed desalination plants, money that should have been spent and invested elsewhere on badly needed infrastructure. So now the endless drought has ended and we have Lake Eyre in Central Australia full, something that has only happened three times in the last century.

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Fouralso warned us of the psychological manipulation of institutionalised brainwashing with the quote:

Who controls the past controls the future.

Look at the parallels today, with claims by a group pedalling this carbon tax and trashing our democracy under the name of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition. Their website states:

… we want to be able to enjoy a stable climate similar to that which our parents and grandparents enjoyed … we need … a safe climate for our future.

There is no such thing as a safe climate or a stable climate. There has never been one in the past and there will never be one in the future. Our grandparents never enjoyed a safe or stable climate. Just look at some of the facts and disasters from our history: between 1803 and 1992, at least 4,200 people in Australia died as a direct result of heatwaves, including the 1895-96 heatwave, which killed 437 people. As well as heatwaves, our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents have had to live with severe storms and floods. For example, on 24 June in 1852, 89 people were drowned in a flood in Gundagai; in March 1899, 410 people were killed when Cyclone Mahina hit Bathurst Bay; in March 1934 another cyclone killed 99 people by creating a nine-metre storm surge in northern Queensland; and, on 29 November 1934, torrential rain turned Melbourne's Yarra River into a raging torrent, leaving 35 dead, 250 injured and 3,000 homeless. As sure as night follows day these heatwaves, floods and severe storms—these unsafe and unstable climatic conditions of the past—will simply continue to occur again in the future. Whether or not Australia introduces a carbon tax will make absolutely no difference.

Another misleading claim that we often hear is that this carbon tax will build competitive industries. We simply cannot build a competitive economy by generating electricity with Chinese solar panels or by building giant steel windmills while at the same time sending Australian black coal off to China and India where it is turned into low-cost electricity. Let us be clear: this tax will place Australian industry at an internationally competitive disadvantage. It will lower our standard of living and it will reduce our ability to tackle many other pressing environmental problems.

Next, we have the doublespeak or greenspeak of the compensation. The compensation under this bill is little more than a bribe funded by the government borrowing another $4 billion, mainly from overseas. The compensation will be marginal and it will be temporary, but the damage from this carbon tax to the economy will be permanent. If this tax is effective it will act as a penalty. Once the tax gets high enough, instead of using low-cost, efficient black coal electricity, producers will change to hopelessly inefficient Chinese solar panels or giant steel windmills to produce electricity. When this happens and the tax actually has the desired effect, there will simply be no tax collected. So there will be no money to be put into the pot to pay the compensation and so we will be stuck with higher prices, but there will be no government funds left to pay the ongoing compensation that will be required.

And, finally, the world's largest carbon tax is not only the greatest act of economic vandalism and trashing of our democracy since Federation; it will be dwarfed into insignificance once the lunacy of carbon trading starts. Under this nonsense, by 2050, we will be sending $57 billion—that is right, $57 billion—offshore to foreigners to buy pieces of paper called carbon certificates. And, for just a few dollars more, they might even put them in a decorative frame for us, just to keep our lights on. If we calculate the constant increase in the number of permits and their price from $2.7 billion, it is not only $57 billion by 2050 but the cost between 2020 and 2050 adds up to nearly $650 billion.

Finally, Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, gave an apt description of those supporting the government when he described them as possessing:

… paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom…the stability of the Party depended.

Those who support that bill show these parallels apply equally today. (Time expired)

Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I do rise to support the Clean Energy Bill 2011 and related bills. It is interesting to hear the contribution from the member for Hughes, because I was waiting to hear the commitment to the bipartisan target of minus-five per cent of 2000 levels which was supposedly opposition policy. I was waiting for him to confirm that indeed he agreed with that and wanted to commit himself to that. I did not hear that. Also, I was waiting for the member for Hughes to talk about the coalition's policy of how they are going to drive down carbon emissions and, of course, we did not hear any of that. In fact, what we heard from the member for Hughes was just climate denial and information which does not support the coalition's policy of a minus-five per cent bipartisan target, and which did not actually support any action on climate change. I think he will have to go back to his party room, stand up and really criticise the coalition's policy on climate change because in fact they have a much more expensive one than the government's policy on climate change. But I will get to that.

I am proud that it is this Labor government that is bringing forward a credible plan to tackle climate change; a plan that will ensure that we reduce our carbon emissions, encourage clean energy generation and drive investment in clean energy jobs. And we will do that in the most efficient and cost effective way. Climate change is transforming our world. It threatens our way of life, as well as the prosperity of generations to come. We have known for some time that human activity is affecting our climate and that, as a result, our climate is getting warmer. In fact, globally, 2010 was the warmest year on record, tied with 2005. In Australia, 2001 to 2010 was the warmest decade on record, and each decade since the 1940s has been warmer than the preceding decade. I have known this for some time because I first learnt about the effects of climate change in my year-10 social studies class. That was over 18 years ago, and the information and the science presented to us showed that climate change was a real risk and that something was happening.

We have now talked about this for years. We have talked about the negative impact it will have on our economy and way of life. For decades we have been discussing how best to reduce our carbon emissions; how best to tackle climate change; how we in Australia can play our part for the next generation. The longer we delay, the more costly and severe the impacts of climate change will become. There have been countless reports and inquiries, with 35 parliamentary inquiries relating to climate change since 1994. The time for discussion is over. It is now time to act.

The bills before the House today represent action—action that is in our nation's best interests; action for today and action for tomorrow. The bills provide for a mechanism that puts a price on carbon, which is the most environmentally and economically effective means of combating our nation's rising carbon emissions. It will mean that 500 of Australia's biggest polluters will pay for every tonne of carbon pollution they emit into our atmosphere. Putting a price on the companies that emit the greatest amount of carbon provides a meaningful incentive for businesses to reduce their pollution by investing in clean energy technologies and improving efficiency.

Unlike the opposition, who magically have started to take a more communist-style command and control from government approach, this side of the House believes that businesses are the right people and will be able to work out what is most cost effective for their companies in reducing their carbon pollution, but we need an incentive, a price point, for them to do so. The legislation before the House provides for a fixed price for three years for every tonne of pollution that the 500 biggest polluters emit. Then from 2015 the scheme will shift to a cap-and-trade mechanism, which will allow for the carbon price to be set by the market. Under the cap-and-trade scheme the government will set an annual cap on the total emissions of carbon pollution and will provide a number of emissions permits equal to that cap. The cost of these permits will then be set by demand or by the market. I know this seems like a foreign concept to those opposite, who have abandoned their market principles and gone for a government intervention approach. I understand the National Party being keen for that; what I do not understand is the Liberal Party being keen for that.

In shaping our policy, the government have been guided not only by the scientists but by the economists. We have been guided by the facts, what is in our nation's best interests and what is right for our future. This is in sharp contrast to the opposition, who have provided hysteria, information known to be inaccurate and political spin, and have delivered an alternative so-called direct action policy that is supported by neither the scientists nor the economists. Indeed, Tony Abbott's plan is so incoherent, expensive and inefficient that it will cost householders on average $1,300 in additional taxes per year. That is a pretty big carbon tax to be imposed by the opposition on householders to subsidise the big polluters. The opposition's policy allows the big polluters to shirk their environmental responsibilities and instead punishes and taxes hardworking Australians to ensure that they bear the brunt and the cost of its policy.

Given the opposition's incoherent and expensive policy, it is no wonder that there has been so much speculation that the Leader of the Opposition, if he were ever to be elected as Prime Minister, would just throw his policy out the window. It is not surprising that, in the contributions we have heard in this House, very few opposition members have mentioned direct action. They have not mentioned their policy. They have not mentioned their commitment to a minus-five per cent target. That is because most of them do not really believe it. But the Leader of the Opposition continues to walk both sides of the fence: at some forums he will announce that he does not see the point of the minus-five per cent target; at others he says he is committed to it and the best way to get there is direct action. The opposition leader cannot walk both sides of the fence on this issue. And instead of just walking both sides of the fence, what we have also seen is him peddling hysteria and mistruths to the Australian people about the government's plan to price carbon.

Let us look at some of these myths. First of all, there is the myth that this carbon price or the pricing of carbon will have a huge cost impact on the Australian people. Let us look at the facts. Firstly, we have made it clear that companies may wish to pass on the cost, and they may indeed pass on the cost, but we expect that cost to be modest. In fact, we expect the cost impact to be a less than one per cent increase in the cost of living. On average, that is a little less than $10 a week. Let us compare this with the average cost of the coalition's policy, which would be $25 a week—a significantly higher number—for Australian families to tackle climate change. Unlike the coalition, we are offering significant assistance for householders to adjust. In fact, our policy provides for nine out of 10 people to receive either tax cuts or increases in their payments. We have ensured in the design of this policy—

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Twenty-five dollars a week is a big impost for the coalition to be putting on families. It is no wonder that no-one on that side of the House will talk about it. No-one has talked about direct action. Do you have direct action in your speech? No. No-one talks about direct action because everyone knows the truth about it: it costs more, it is inefficient and it will not actually have the outcomes that it says.

We do have assistance, unlike the opposition, who do not have assistance and will lumber the cost on ordinary householders. We are providing assistance for householders. In fact, six million Australian householders will get tax cuts or payment increases that will cover the entire average impact; four million householders will get an extra buffer of assistance that will cover 120 per cent of the average price impact; and over one million householders will not need to lodge a tax return as we will have increased the tax-free threshold. This is significant assistance, which the opposition will tear away and then impose its $25 a week tax on the average householder. So, again, the opposition is peddling a myth. On this side of the House there will be modest cost impacts that we have recognised, and that is why we have assistance. On that side of the House the cost for average householders will be more than double that of the government scheme, but with no assistance.

The other myth that is being peddled constantly by the opposition is that no-one else around the world is acting. Well, if no-one else around the world is acting, it is interesting that there is a bipartisan commitment to the minus-five per cent—but, as I said, no-one on that side of the House seems to be talking about that. The fact is that 89 countries have committed to taking action on climate change. There are 32 countries with an emissions trading scheme, and 10 US states. California, a large economy and the eighth largest in the world, will introduce an emissions trading scheme in 2012. Our top trading partners—China, Japan, the US, Korea and India—have all implemented or are piloting carbon trading or taxation schemes. We know that the EU has had a carbon trading scheme since 2005. New Zealand also has a scheme in place. Even developing countries such as South Africa and Mexico are considering economy-wide emissions targets. So it is a myth the opposition continues to peddle that no-one else around the world is acting. In fact, the evidence is in that there is action on climate change.

Another myth that has been peddled by the Leader of the Opposition is that jobs will be destroyed by the government's policy. This myth has been busted by numerous different economic modelling, including Treasury modelling that shows continued strong jobs growth in this country. New technologies mean new opportunities and new jobs.

Let us be clear: the world is moving forward on this issue. Other countries are investing in clean energy and in innovative industries. This is creating jobs in those countries. If we do not encourage this innovation, we here in Australia will be left behind in the global race for clean-tech jobs. Without change, it will be difficult for our products and services to compete internationally. We are a trading nation and we have continued to benefit from structural economic reforms which have allowed us to look towards the future. I look forward to these new clean-tech industries flourishing in the southern suburbs of Adelaide, in particular at the Mitsubishi site, which is designed to become a clean-tech park supporting investment in jobs for the future. The opposition continues to peddle its myths, but we will be judged on the basis of the strong growth we achieve—strong growth for jobs today and strong growth for jobs in the future.

Australia must use its current strength to ensure that we remain strong in the future. Australia is now in a position to move to a clean energy future. Employment is projected to grow strongly, with 1.6 million jobs to be created by 2020. The carbon price will support $100 billion worth of investment in renewable energy over the next 40 years.

As a Labor government we have always done our best in the past—and will always do our best in the future—to ensure that Australians are fully supported throughout the move to clean energy. The government has said that we want action on climate change and therefore we intend to lead the way. We will do this in the most economically responsible way, the most economically efficient way and the most environmentally efficient and effective way. This is unlike the opposition, who continue to dillydally on both sides of the road—half committed to their policy, half not; half committed to their target, half not; sometimes siding with the climate change deniers and sometimes saying, 'Oh yes, we would like to tackle climate change, just in a different way.' They need to get their policy right. Their current policy is expensive—double, as I said, the impact on households and with no compensation.

I am proud to be part of a government that is not afraid to confront the challenges that face Australia. This government is prepared to protect Australia's environmental and economic future. I certainly hope that the coalition will start listening to sense and do the same. We know the member for Wentworth, if he gets the chance, will be on our side—he knows that this is the right thing for Australia. He knows that the opposition is just playing games when it comes to climate change. This issue is too important to play games with. This issue is something that we need to tackle for tomorrow, for 10 years, for 20 years, for 30 years, for 100 years. I believe, as the Prime Minister said, that history will judge the votes we have in this House over the next few weeks and I am pleased that this government and I will be on the right side of history. I ask the coalition to think seriously about what side of history they will be on. (Time expired)

Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Clean Energy Bill 2011 and related bills. I agree with the member for Kingston's closing remark that this issue is too important to ignore. It is too important to ignore because of the fact that this is a cascading, compounding tax which is deliberately designed to affect every component of our daily lives. It will have seriously detrimental effects on ordinary Australians, on Australian business, on the Australian economy and on the future wealth of this nation.

This all-encompassing, all-pervading, giant new tax is based on a fundamental deception, a deception by the Prime Minister as a result of her statement, six days prior to the election, 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.' Rubbing further salt into the wounds of this deception is the fact that this deception is in and of itself based on the false premise that corrective taxation delivers some sort of economic or societal nirvana. This is a complete fallacy in that it ignores the vast magnitude of externalities. As it is impossible to determine the range or extent of these externalities, it is impossible to calculate the right level of taxation and consequently the correct level of compensation. Economist Ronald Coase demonstrated that externalities vanish only in a wholly unreal world where people can negotiate and carry out transactions at zero cost. Such a world of zero transaction costs would deliver economic perfection. But the fact of the matter is that neither governments nor markets deliver us into this nirvana. In fact there is a real risk that a carbon tax will not be a revolution but will lead to further exclusion, social inertia and the stripping of assets from those already at the bottom of society.

It is the height of arrogance to believe that we as a society can control global climate via a tax on carbon dioxide emissions to which Australia's contribution is a mere 1.5 per cent of total global emissions. The government has yet to answer the all-important question: by how much will the carbon tax reduce global temperatures and what changes in the climate will it therefore prevent? This is particularly relevant given that global average temperatures rose to a peak in 1998 then fell slightly and have been reasonably stable since that time—this during a period when CO2 levels have continued to increase.

This government's blind submission and appeal to authority, whether it be Tim Flannery, the IPCC or any other authority the government considers convenient for its arguments, is a clear demonstration of the government's inability to sell its argument, of the moral and ethical vacuousness of its arguments and of its inability to discuss the issues involved. This government just triumphantly announces a decision and expects everyone to fall into lockstep with it. The carbon tax clearly demonstrates that the government is a shallow manipulator of the truth and despite its protests to the contrary it will only succeed in making the poor poorer while benefitting those already with the wealth and resources to mitigate the effects on their lifestyle and businesses. In addition, the bills make no reference whatsoever to practical, sustainable, long-term measures that will be implemented to deal with on-the-ground environmental issues such as restoring water quality in rivers and waterways and protecting vital areas of biodiversity for future generations. Actually dealing with these issues is a core element of the coalition's direct action plan. I suggest those opposite take some time to read it occasionally. It contains the practical, on-the-ground measures that our communities require to create a sustainable framework for future generations.

There are many reasons why this proposed carbon tax will deliver economic climate change to this nation and create economic drought in many industries, not the least being the manufacturing industry. Firstly, as outlined in research released by the Australian Trade and Industry Alliance, more than 90 per cent of jobs in the manufacturing sector will be exposed to the full effects of the carbon tax. In contrast, only 58 per cent of European manufacturing jobs are exposed to the European carbon pricing scheme. Reports from both Britain and Spain show that, on a net basis, for every one job created two or more jobs in the ordinary economy are lost—and no amount of government compensation can make up for you losing your job. Employers will face higher power costs and higher prices for both raw materials and manufactured inputs under the carbon tax while trying to compete against international rivals who will pay no extra taxes or charges. This is in addition to the government's acknowledgement in its own documentation that at least three million households will be worse off immediately.

A Deloitte Access Economics report commissioned by the Bligh government predicts Queensland's gross state product will be slashed by 2.76 per cent by 2020 and by 4.11 per cent come 2050. Its report also predicts a loss of 21,000 Queensland jobs while separate Queensland Treasury modelling predicts 12,000 jobs will be lost. The Institute of Public Affairs makes the point that unfortunately job increases that the government talks about will be offset by job losses, and net job creation from discriminatory taxes or subsidies is only possible through reduced living standards. A further salient point is that electricity from wind in Australia costs three times as much as electricity generated from coal or gas. It is no wonder electricity prices continue to increase.

Take, for example, a commercial laundry in my electorate who currently employs nearly 200 people. They have estimated an increase in costs of between $150,000 and $200,000 per annum for electricity. These costs will have a direct impact on the profitability of the business, so they may elect to reduce or not replace staff, or they may seek to pass the cost on, which will lead to higher costs to hospitals, restaurants and hotels who utilise their services. This in turn will impact on those businesses and they will have to make decisions on how to manage those increased costs. None of these businesses are trade exposed, so none of them will receive any compensation.

Another example is a local panel beating business, which again will face higher input costs not only for its electricity but also for many of its other costs such as car panels and new machinery. This is in an industry that is already struggling with high costs due to the squeeze put on them by insurance companies. That begs the question: how are the insurance companies going to account for the increased motor vehicle repair costs? In all likelihood, knowing the insurance companies, it will probably lead to higher motor vehicle insurance premiums, further impacting on family budgets. I ask those opposite whether these potential increased costs are being modelled anywhere into the compensation package.

These are just brief examples that clearly illustrate the sinister, unseen aspects of this cascading and compounding tax. This is why it will impact on every area of business and of life, and its effects will be far greater than allowed for under any compensation package. It is increasingly obvious that this tax is all economic pain for no environmental gain. The government's own figures document the fact that there will be an immediate 10 per cent increase in electricity prices, a nine per cent increase in gas bills and, most outrageously, a $4.3 billion black hole in the budget. Of greatest concern is that we do not know whether these figures are based on a carbon price of $20 per tonne or $23 per tonne, because the government still has not released the modelling. The government has also not detailed what will happen once the carbon tax price goes to $29 per tonne or $131 per tonne, as it is forecast to do in the government's own figures.

Prices for electricity and gas will continue to increase and, based on the figures in the government's own documents, they will increase at a rate far greater than inflation. As gas and electricity prices are part of a suite of goods and services used to calculate the CPI, this will result in a higher CPI figure, which in turn will have the potential to result in higher interest rates—and this at a time when Australians are already struggling with the costs of living and housing affordability is a growing concern for many Australians, not just first home buyers.

This brings me to my overriding concern with the proposed carbon tax, and that is the wanton destruction of the wealth of this nation for future generations. We constantly hear the government talk about the mining boom and the potential for the mining boom to build our accumulated national wealth. This is an important issue, as Australia is presently a net importer of capital to fund our economy and lifestyle, with approximately 50 per cent of private debt and 70 per cent of the government's current $200-plus billion debt funded globally. Yet this proposed carbon tax package is not just deliberately designed to see our emissions increase through to 2020 and by 2050 only decrease by three per cent, it is also deliberately designed to transfer by 2020 up to $3.5 billion per annum of the wealth of our mining boom overseas to pay for carbon credits to offset our increasing emissions. This is made even worse by 2050, when it is estimated that $57 billion per annum of our wealth will be sent offshore to purchase foreign carbon credits. Given the known fraud of $5 billion in a sophisticated market such as Norway, how do we ensure that no fraud occurs and real action is taken overseas in the less developed markets?

There are long-term consequences which are not being discussed, such as what the negative effect will be on the share prices and company growth prospects of Australian companies and what the flow-on cost will be to the retirement savings of Australians through their superannuation funds. What will be the effect on future federal government budgets of increased age pension liabilities due to lower retirement savings of Australians caused by the unknown or unforeseen consequences of the carbon tax? In my opinion these are important unanswered questions that go to the heart of the question about the future prosperity of this great nation.

I would finally like to take issue with some comments made by the member for Robertson in her speech last week and her appeal to the ultimate authority. The member referred to Genesis chapter 1, verses 28 and 29, and Genesis chapter 2, verse 15. She is correct that they clearly state we are to tend and keep all that we have been given. But the member then attempted to make a link between this admonition and the carbon tax, and this is a very long bow to draw. The verses she refers to in no way give the government a mandate to impose a tax and create massive new bureaucracies; they in fact are an admonition to each of us individually to do our part to better take care of our environment and all that we have been given and ensure that we leave a positive inheritance for future generations.

An economy-wide wealth-destroying carbon tax that will provide no practical on-the-ground environmental outcomes is not the solution. However, the good news for the Australian community is that the coalition, through its direct action strategy, does have a genuine costed alternative that caps the cost and provides a range of practical measures that will actually contribute to enhancing the quality of our environment, thereby creating a sustainable economic and environmental framework to leave a positive inheritance for future generations.

Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Human Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to contribute to this debate about the Clean Energy Bill 2011 and related bills. The former Labor Premier of New South Wales Neville Wran told the state Labor conference in 1983 that:

I know it was not everyone who thought it was such a great thing to save the rainforests, but I make this prediction here today: when we are all dead and buried and our children's children are reflecting on what was the best thing the Labor Government in New South Wales did in the 20th century, they will come up with the answer that we saved the rainforests.

Were it not for the efforts of the Wran government those majestic ancient rainforests of the Northern Rivers would not exist today, yet with the passage of time we forget about how controversial that move was. It was opposed by some very powerful interests in industry, the media and the parliament. It was even opposed by some in the Labor Party at the time, including a senior minister in Wran's government, Don Day, whose electorate was one of those affected by the decision. Of course, it was vigorously opposed by the state Liberal and National parties. Thirty years on, very few would argue that the decision to preserve these forests for future generations was not a momentous and unambiguously positive achievement. It was an achievement that took leadership, strength of purpose, character and foresight—qualities that Neville Wran possessed in abundance. I think the same applies in this debate.

Earlier generations of Australians remember Ben Chifley for the first Australian made car, for the Snowy scheme and for his 'light on the hill' vision of equality for Australia's future. My generation remembers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating for modernising our economy, opening our nation to the world and giving all Australians economic security in retirement through the introduction of compulsory superannuation. On the environment, they are remembered for saving the Franklin River and Gordon River wilderness in south-west Tasmania and for winning World Heritage listing for the Daintree Rainforest in Far North Queensland.

When the time comes for future generations to remember the contribution of this Labor government, led by our first female Prime Minister, I think one of the things they will remember is that we took the courageous first steps to control pollution and get serious about tackling the impact of dangerous climate change on our nation's economic and environmental future. As the Prime Minister said in her contribution to this debate, carbon pricing and climate change policy have been widely debated in Australia for decades, including through no less than 35 parliamentary committee inquiries. In fact, I think Margaret Thatcher first raised this in Britain many years ago. The first review of emissions trading by an Australian government was undertaken by the Howard government in 1999—12 years ago. Indeed the systems that we have for measuring carbon output were agreed under the Howard government. Extensive policy work was undertaken by the former government, which concluded that pricing carbon was the best approach and that using a market based approach was the most likely to work.

Environmental protection at least cost is the aim. Economic and employment growth continues with increasing incomes and new clean energy jobs. This is something that we should all agree on. Professor Ross Garnaut has conducted two major reviews on Australia's best policy options for tackling climate change. The bills we are debating were developed through a multiparty committee process that met for nine months before completing its work in July 2011. It is now time to put these constant reviews and discussions over generations behind us and act. We have the leadership, vision and foresight in this generation to take the significant steps that help to secure our nation's economic and environmental future. It is not an easy debate because reform of this magnitude is never easy, yet the reforms that will be put in place through these bills before the House today are crucial for our nation. Unfortunately, those opposite have said that they will be opposing these bills—not because they have a clear answer, as the member for Forde suggested, about how they might have an alternative approach. The 'subsidies for big polluters' policy of the opposition has no backing from any credible scientific or economic expert in this country. They are opposing these bills because it is the lowest card on the deck, the card that the opposition leader always plays: it is the 'no' card—oppose, oppose, oppose. It is the same approach that the Liberal Party took in the 1980s and 1990s when they opposed the introduction of compulsory superannuation, with the member for Mackellar, who is not in the chamber at the moment, leading the charge telling us that giving working people economic security in their retirement would be the beginning of the end for Australia. It would be the beginning of creeping socialism for Australia. For years the Liberal Party wanted to abolish Medicare—something that John Howard made crystal clear in his Future Directions blueprint in the 1988 pre-election period that said:

Australia's health care system is in a shambles. The real villain is Labor's doctrinaire commitment to a universal government health insurance system, Medicare. By discouraging self-provision, by increasing health funding from the taxpayer and removing disincentives to overuse of medical services, Medicare has created a system obsessed with cost at the expense of quality, security and comfort.

I would challenge any of those opposite to say now that Medicare was a mistake.

People have popularly quoted John O'Brien, the famous bush poet, saying:

'We'll all be rooned,' said Hanrahan,

'Before the year is out.'

in relation to this debate. I think it is an appropriate description of the level of debate at the moment. It has been said before: 'We'll all be rooned by superannuation; we'll all be rooned by Medicare; we'll all be rooned by the modernisation of the Australian economy and the protections for our environment.' And yet, in each of these instances the opposition have proven completely wrong.

We have in Australia abundant resources—solar, gas, wind and other renewable energy sources. Despite the scaremongering of the Liberal Party we need to remind ourselves and the Australian public that this is not a tax paid by mums and dads; it is not a tax paid by ordinary Australians. This is a tax paid by 500 of our biggest polluters. These bills deliver some assistance to nine out of 10 households across Australia. Yes, the largest supports are targeted to those who need them most—pensioners, low- and moderate-income earners and families doing it tough are particularly looked after. Over four million Australian households will receive assistance that is at least 20 per cent more than their expected average price impact. Remember, the price impact of this will be one-third of the price impact of the GST. So people will notice it one-third as much as they noticed the introduction of the GST. Everyone earning $80,000 a year or less will get a tax cut. For most people it will be at least $300 a year. That means that 500,000 people will no longer have to pay any tax at all and one million people will no longer have to submit a tax return.

In 2009 the Labor government delivered the biggest single increase to the age pension in 100 years. In total, a single age pensioner now receives $148 a fortnight more than they did under the Liberal Party just a few short years ago. We are very proud of that achievement. Yet we now have shadow ministers, people who were ministers in the former Howard government, bleating about their concerns for pensioners. These are people who did not do a single thing, when they had the opportunity to, to increase the age pension or any associated payments. There were then ministers, like the current Leader of the Opposition and the members for Curtin, North Sydney, Menzies and Goldstein, who refused outright to deliver an increase in the age pension in all of those years—12 long years in government. And yet, as well as increasing the rate of the pension, as well as increasing the rate of indexation, we are now proposing, as a government and because of these clean energy bills, to also increase the single rate of the age pension by a further $338 each year for singles and $510 each year for couples combined. That means that on average 1.8 million pensioner households will come out ahead as a result of the clean energy package.

Self-funded retirees who hold a Commonwealth Seniors Health Card will receive automatic assistance before the carbon price starts, through an advance payment of $250 for singles and $190 for each member of a couple, to be paid between May and June 2012. And then, from 20 March 2013, Commonwealth Seniors Health Card holders will be paid their own version of the clean energy supplement. This will be paid on an ongoing quarterly basis at the same time as the seniors supplement. Each year Commonwealth Seniors Health Card holders will receive around $338 for singles and around $255 for each member of a couple in that supplement. That will be the same as the assistance paid to age pensioners.

Labor's package also meets the needs of low- and moderate-income families. Family tax benefit part A will be increased by up to $110 a year per child and families on a single income will also benefit from the single income family supplement—a payment of up to $300 at the end of each year. This supplement will make sure that families on a single income will receive similar assistance to dual income families who may benefit from tax cuts to both incomes. New Start and Youth Allowance recipients will get up to $218 per year for singles and up to $390 per year for couples combined. What that means for a typical family—say, mum, dad and two kids aged six and nine—is that if one parent is earning $52,500 per year and the other parent is working part time and earning $22,500 a year, the family will get an extra $175 in government payments and a $982 tax cut. So in total that family receives about $1,150 a year extra as a result of these bills—the bills that are before the House now that the opposition will oppose.

That is over $600 over and above—on top of—any average expected price impact on that family. That $600 can sit in the bank and people can call on it if they should need it or families can use that $600 to perhaps upgrade to a newer model refrigerator or to perhaps upgrade to newer heating appliances that are more energy efficient. They can reduce their energy consumption further using the improvements in their tax rate and the payments that they are receiving from the government.

It is important to point out that this is in stark contrast to the subsidy for big polluters policy of those opposite. Not only do those opposite want to take back these tax cuts and not only do they want to take back these increased pensions and increased family payments but also the Leader of the Opposition wants those same families to pay from their pockets through the tax system subsidies to big polluters, with no guarantee that any of those subsidies will lead to better pollution outcomes. Those opposite talk about the bureaucracy that is involved in pricing carbon. What kind of bureaucracy is involved in picking winners when it comes to subsidies for big polluters? Is that just going to happen by committee? Are they going to work it out among themselves, are they? The typical Liberal Party answer to everything: take it out of the pockets of hardworking families and put it into the pockets of big business. The trouble is that the Leader of the Opposition is too gutless to admit that his policy takes $1,300 a year from the pockets of ordinary families and pays it to big polluters.

It would be terrific if just for once the Leader of the Opposition did not put big polluters ahead of families. If he put families first, it would be terrific. It would be terrific if the Leader of the Opposition put the needs of small business and the retirement incomes of ordinary Australians before the needs of the big mining companies. It would be terrific if the Leader of the Opposition put the needs of potential future smokers ahead of the needs of big tobacco. It would be terrific if the Leader of the Opposition thought a little bit about problem gamblers rather than about the gambling industry. But we are not seeing that. What we are seeing is constant opposition.

The Australian public needs to understand that this policy will see continued economic growth and continued jobs growth and environmental outcomes that are the equivalent of taking 45 million cars off the road by 2020 with emissions reductions of at least 159 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2020 from where they would have been under a business as usual scenario. I commend the bills to the House.

Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to rise to speak on the Clean Energy Bill 2011 and the enormous package of related bills. These are bills that break a promise to the Australian people by imposing a fixed price tax on carbon starting at $23 per tonne starting from 1 July 2012 and rising at 2.5 per cent per annum in real terms. I want to make three key points in relation to these bills. First, they constitute bad faith and bad process. Second, Australia should not be acting in advance of world agreement and that Labor has committed Australia to a poor bargaining position. Third, this is a poorly designed tax and its internal logic is deeply flawed.

Let me turn first to the question of bad faith and bad process. This government has no mandate to bring these bills before the parliament. A change of this magnitude is being imposed without any support having been secured from the Australian people in a general election. That would be troubling enough. But in fact the Prime Minister went to the last election with an explicit commitment that her government would not make this change. We all recall her infamous statement, 'There will be no carbon tax under a government that I lead.' The 2010 election was decided by a very close margin. One might with some confidence have predicted a different result if the Prime Minister had been frank about her government's intention to introduce a carbon tax if elected. Given that this policy was not presented to the people of Australia at the last election, these reforms should not be implemented until a mandate is obtained from the Australian people in either a general election or through a plebiscite.

Labor's position on this issue has moved all over the shop. Who could forget Prime Minister's extraordinary proposal to convene a citizens assembly to consider the pricing of carbon? And who could forget that during the election campaign the Prime Minister spoke of the need to develop 'deep and lasting' community consensus on climate change? Is it really possible that our Prime Minister stated deep and lasting community consensus was a requirement when you see the position that this government is now adopting, seeking to ram through one of the most significant structural changes to Australia's taxation and public policy regime in our history without any community consensus, let alone a deep and lasting one? This is a result of an illegitimate and fragile consensus of a collection of Independents joined with the government.

Let me turn to the second point that I wish to make. Australia should not be acting in the manner in which the Labor government proposes to commit us to act because to do so involves us adopting a very bad bargaining position. The internal logic for the approach that Labor is following makes no sense. Let us start with the proposition that, if it is to be worthwhile, a carbon tax must be about more than just reducing emissions in Australia. The policy objective is a global one: to stabilise and reduce the total worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases. In 2008, around 30,000 million tonnes of carbon dioxide were emitted due to human activity. If the carbon tax achieves its intended result in Australia, it will reduce emissions by 160 million tonnes—a drop in the ocean compared to the global task. Therefore, the only basis on which the carbon tax could make sense is if it were an effective strategy for encouraging global action. Australia is at a bargaining table with nearly 200 other parties and each party faces conflicting incentives. On the one hand, the internal logic of the carbon tax is that each party would benefit from a global reduction in emissions and, consequently, a reduction in the risk of dangerous warming—so runs the internal logic of the policy which is put to us. But, on the other hand, each country faces economic and other costs in acting to reduce emissions at home. Therefore, if a country chooses to incur these costs, it is taking a risk that it might incur them yet secure no benefit because other countries do not keep their side of the deal.

Madam Deputy Speaker Livermore, as you would be aware, this is a well-known type of problem in economics and business strategy and there is a whole body of thinking, game theory, about the right strategies to be used in dealing with these kinds of problems. The classic problem is called the prisoner's dilemma. What we have in this case with climate change is what theorists would call an end-person multiround prisoner's dilemma. As an individual country considers whether or not to incur the costs of reducing carbon emissions in its own economy, it faces a choice. In the jargon of game theory, it can cooperate—that is to say, it can take action to reduce emissions and incur the costs of doing so; or, again to use the jargon, it can defect—in other words, fail to take such action.

The critical point I want to make is that game theory offers some clear lessons for countries approaching this bargaining table. Firstly, it is both pointless and dangerous to unilaterally choose the option which delivers the outcome which is considered optimal overall. You face a substantial risk that other players will defect, in turn leaving you worse off. I would submit that this is precisely what the Labor Party is doing by seeking to impose a tax in Australia, regardless of what the rest of the world does. Secondly, if you are going to cooperate towards achieving what you determine to be the best overall objective, you need to find a way to strike an enforceable bargain.

A key finding of game theory is that in a multiround game you can use your choices to communicate and enforce such a bargain. The standard advice is to cooperate in the first round and keep cooperating in subsequent rounds if the other player does the same. But, if the other player does not cooperate in a given round, the rational course of action is to respond in the next round by defecting yourself. This logic—the logic of considering carefully how we approach a global bargaining table so as to secure the best outcome, having regard to the individual incentives of the players at the table—is the logic that underlines or is consistent with the approach of the coalition's direct action plan. Under our plan, Australia will take action to reduce carbon emissions at significant economic cost—in fact, $3.2 billion of on-budget expenditure over four years.

Under this plan, we will reduce carbon emissions in 2020 to the same target as Labor has adopted—the five per cent reduction on the year 2000 or approximately 530 million tonnes. As the member for Goldstein has recently pointed out, at that point we can then determine the way forward. He had this to say:

If there is still no global agreement by 2020 Australia will have remained competitive while reducing emissions by five per cent; avoided tens-of-billions-of-tax, yet still be in a good position to assess the way forward from there.

I would argue that our policy can be thought of as pursuing a rational strategy in a multiround game—to cooperate if others cooperate but not to bind ourselves unilaterally to acting unless we can be satisfied that others are also so acting. Some, of course, say we should act regardless of what the rest of the world does, and that essentially is the strategy underpinning the Labor Party's and the Greens' carbon tax. The insights of game theory suggest it is a poor strategy and a naive way to approach the global bargaining table.

Let me turn to my third point. The tax that the House is considering this morning is a badly designed one, even by reference to the principles laid down by the so-called Multi-Party Climate Change Committee. Indeed, it is a bad tax by an even more fundamental criterion—the basic tax policy criterion of certainty. We still do not know which companies are going to pay the tax. Which are the 500 companies that will be legally liable to pay this tax? All we keep hearing is the continued rhetoric of 'the 500 biggest polluters'. On a very basic level, certainty in tax policy is an absolute requirement, and this government has failed to provide that certainty.

Let me now refer to the 11 principles which supposedly guided the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee, including economic efficiency, budget neutrality, the competitiveness of Australian industries, energy security and investment security. This package fails to achieve many of these principles. Let us consider investment certainty, for example. The caps to apply after 2015 have not been set but will be set in the future not by legislation but by regulation. There is no certainty as to what ultimately will be Australia's emissions reduction target for 2020 if the five per cent level is changed and there is uncertainty about the level of the carbon price once the fixed price phase ends. The level of uncertainty which this in turn creates for business will negatively impact on business decisions and investment and will harm the economy and growth to the detriment of all Australians. We were also told that one of the guiding principles was budget neutrality. That principle is also being violated by the tax which is embodied in the package of legislation the House of Representatives is considering today. The policy scheme will result in a deficit exceeding $3 billion over the forward estimates period. What of the criterion of international competitiveness? On this front there is the critical issue of which sectors qualify as trade exposed. The Minerals Council in its submission made the point that only 60 per cent of Australian firms are classified as trade exposed. Those which are not so classified face very significant adverse consequences for their international competitiveness. We are also told that one of the principles which applied in designing this scheme was energy security. Once again this package manifestly fails to live up to that principle. There is some $5.5 billion in compensation to be paid, but almost all of that will go to private-sector generators in Victoria and South Australia and almost none will go to the publicly owned generators in New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia. This inconsistency of treatment is unfair to the owners of generators in New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia and would be unfair to them regardless of their ownership. Because, as it happens, they are government owned, it is also unfair to the taxpayers who are their underlying owners and it is, in turn, unfair to their customers, who are likely to be subject to higher electricity prices.

Let me conclude with a fundamental and overarching criticism of the policy design in this scheme—yet another of the inherent logical inconsistencies in what the House is considering. The underlying theory behind a carbon pricing mechanism, such as the one contained in this package of bills, is to increase the relative price of carbon-intensive goods and services—that is, a carbon tax is meant, as we are told frequently, to unleash the price signal by increasing the price of goods with a high proportion of carbon relative to goods with a lower proportion of carbon. In this context it is very puzzling that the Prime Minister has threatened businesses with fines from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission should they increase prices in response to higher cost inputs due to the carbon tax and has stated that an increase of more than 0.7 of a per cent would be gouging. This undermines the fundamental objective of the scheme: if the tax is meant to provide a price signal then prices should surely be permitted to increase to at least cover the increase in input costs that the product incurs as a result of the carbon tax.

This is a package of bills that should never have been brought before this parliament. A specific promise that there would be no carbon tax was given by the current Prime Minister during the 2010 election campaign. That is to say the fixed price component of this scheme would not be introduced. So this is a policy for which there is no mandate. As I have sought to argue this morning, in addition to that fundamental problem there are some very serious internal logical inconsistencies in this scheme.

Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Many other speakers on this side of the House will expose very clearly during this debate the reality that most Australians will be highly compensated for any increase in the cost of living. They will also drive home that, despite the view of the Australian people that in some ways this is a diametrically opposed debate with regard to cost, in reality the Australian people will be charged $1,300 per household under the Liberal alternative, which has the same end point. One would think from the rhetoric of the Leader of the Opposition that somehow they are pledged to do nothing. That is not the truth. They have an alternative which will pay polluters and which will cost the Australian taxpayers, on estimates not from the Labor Party but from the independent Treasury, $1,300 per household. I will not concentrate on that reality.

One of the problems in this debate has been the way in which Australian public opinion has changed. Indisputably, at an earlier point everyone accepted the reality of climate change and the reality of the need for change. In the last parliament the opposition joined with the Greens in blocking Labor's alternative despite the fact that the Liberals were themselves pledged to change. I want to deal with that change in Australian public opinion today. I noticed the contribution of the member for Hughes. I will not deal with a lot of the rhetoric he had, but he essentially argued that we should ignore climate scientists. They are all wrong. He knows more.

He disputes the views of such a reputable group of people as the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, the Australian Academy of Science and academies around the world. They agree that human activity is almost certainly causing climate change. He has an alternative view. He is allowed to put it. But to say in this parliament that somehow he knows more is extremely doubtful. Ninety-seven per cent of climate scientists—the ones who specialise in studying the atmosphere, including climate change—agree that it is caused by humanity.

He also argued, quite ludicrously, that the world is not heating up. He reckons it is cooling—an interesting point of view. There is some news for this gentleman. In Australia 2001-10 was the warmest decade on record. Each decade since the 1940s has been warmer than the preceding decade. We cannot go on whether there was rain in Kalgoorlie yesterday or whether it is sunny in Darwin today. The fact is that, over a decade across this whole country, that is the pattern. In Australia each decade since the 1940s has been warmer than the last. 2010 is the 34th consecutive year—not a one-off and not an occasional—with global temperatures above the 20th-century average. That says a lot.

The debate here has been framed around giving people equity of time. Even the ABC, the great organisation that is so constantly attacked by the opposition, is unfortunately contributing to part of this problem. There was an interesting article in the last edition of the News and Viewsof the Friends of the ABC. They look at an analysis: a paper entitled 'The politics of reporting climate change at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation' by academics from the School of Journalism and Australian Studies at Monash University. They compared the attention the ABC gave to Dr James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute from Space Studies and a highly regarded climate change scientist promoting government intervention, to that given to Lord Monckton, an infamous celebrity who has even been told by the House of Lords to drop his title. They compared the coverage they got on the ABC. Here are the results of that coverage. In one-third of Monckton's appearances, he was unchallenged by opposing sources on the ABC—just allowed to waffle on and give his point of view unchallenged.

On the other hand, Hansen never appeared on ABC television. He had only two interviews on Radio National (one on a program that goes to air at 10pm) and three mentions in online coverage. The extent of Hansen's ABC presence was five appearances in total, compared to 47 for Monckton.

That is part of the situation we have here. It is like giving equal time, five years from the end of the Rugby League season, to somebody who is arguing that Parramatta can still win the premiership. That is what is happening in this debate.

I want to deal with some of the so-called experts that are put forward by those that are basically saying there is doubt and debate. The article in Uniken made some interesting points. It looked at Dr Ken Ring, a noted commentator on this matter:

Ring not only denies any human role in climate change but purports to use astrology to predict weather and earthquakes. In former times he was a clown, magician and author of the book Pawmistry: How To Read Your Cat's Paws.

This is a person who is put out there by them to deny climate change. The article also noted that the George C Marshall Institute in the United States, one of the leading peak groups that is opposing the obvious evidence of climate change, has an interesting history. It previously told us there was no danger in smoking. It also put forward that acid rain was not an issue, that the Antarctic ozone hole did not exist and that the use of the pesticide DDT was no problem for the world. That is the kind of evidence they are trying to produce to say that the rest of the climate scientists in the world are wrong and that they know better.

Quite frankly, many of these so-called expert sources that are brought forward have a record of operating for corporations. They have a financial interest in regard to what they put forward. Talking of that, the article notes one of our Australian experts, Professor Ian Plimer. The article in Uniken made this point:

While scientists have been accused of being on a funding gravy-train, independent journalist Graham Readfearn has also turned the spotlight on Plimer's growing personal wealth—about $920,000 in the in the past two years alone, he asserts—from fees and share sales related to his "role as a director and chairman with several mining companies …"

This person, again, has a very clear commercial interest in arguing for those companies that are scared about climate action around the world.

If we are talking about the economists, there seems to be a fairly single debate on this as well. I note the article by Michael Dwyer in the Australian Financial Review of 18 July. He reported that, as many of us are also aware, 'a timely survey of its members by the Economic Society of Australia' had been released the previous week. It found that about 79 per cent of about 530 respondents 'agreed or strongly agreed that price-based mechanisms as opposed to direct regulation were the more appropriate way of cutting greenhouse gas'.

In a smaller poll of 140 members, conducted after the release of the government's carbon tax package on July 10, about 60 per cent of respondents described it as good economic policy.

More than 80 per cent of respondents who expressed a view said they didn't think the Coalition's approach to reducing carbon emissions was a sound economic proposal.

Once again, these are people who have academic credentials. They are not always right, but I think that on balance we would respect their objectivity, their experience, their knowledge and the fact that they are in the public domain and have to defend their position and their credibility in academia.

Recently I asked the Parliamentary Library, which I think even the opposition would agree is an independent source of information for all of us, about the balance of climate debate amongst the experts. The article they sent me, a review of abstracts from all peer-reviewed articles on the subject 'global climate change' published from 1993 to 2003, 'revealed that not one article claimed that the consensus on man-made global warming was incorrect'. The Library said:

Of the 928 papers reviewed, 75 per cent explicitly—

I stress 'explicitly'—

endorsed the consensus position on climate change and 25 per cent took no position … Another study surveyed 3146 earth scientists asking them whether they thought human activity was a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures. The table below—

which I will cite—

shows that 97.5 per cent of climatologists that actively publish articles in peer-reviewed journals answered yes.

That is 97.5 per cent of the people who, unlike me, have scientific credentials, have been through years of study in this area and have produced articles that are peer reviewed—in other words, they have been looked at by others before they are published—say that climate change is humanly directed.

Despite the swaying of the Leader of the Opposition—one day it is 'crap'; one day he believes in it; one day he is uncertain; one day he is going to think about it next week—the truth is that there are significant numbers on the opposite side who, when they get half a chance, are out there denying and undermining that evidence. We have seen again today from the member for Hughes a reprehensible example of that. He is the kind of loose cannon that they have difficulties holding in. He is out there in the public domain saying something very different from what Mr Hunt, the opposition spokesman, is saying on these matters.

I will further quote the CSIRO once again. I personally think they are a reputable body. Their summary of position in regard to this country is:

Australia will be hotter in coming decades

Australian average temperatures are projected to rise by 0.6 to 1.5 ºC by 2030. If global greenhouse gas emissions continue—

at current levels—

warming is projected to be in the range of 2.2 to 5.0 ºC by 2070.

They further comment that much of this country will be drier:

In Australia compared to the period 1981-2000, decreases in rainfall are likely in the decades to come in southern areas of Australia during winter

They say in conclusion:

Climate change is real

Our observations clearly demonstrate that climate change is real.

Finally, I want to talk about the question of us being alone and leading the world. This is not the truth, and everyone who follows this issue is well aware of it. Eighty-nine nations contributing 80 per cent of pollution are taking action. South Korea has twice our population, yet its contributions to the international problem of pollution are equal to ours. Our contribution is 1.5 per cent of global pollution. The United Kingdom, with three times our population, contributes 1.7 per cent. These countries will not tolerate giving Australia a blank cheque. They will no longer allow a free ride for this country. Airlines, and Qantas in particular, will face a very real challenge in Europe if this country does not act. It is alleged that China is inactive. The reality is that six provinces and a significant number of cities next year are bringing in similar measures to ours. We have endorsement from the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. It has said that Australia must take advantage of its favourable economic position and pursue its carbon reduction policy. It said that the Australian business climate remained positive despite the disasters with mining commodities et cetera:

The authorities must take advantage of the favourable economic situation to pursue long term structural reforms, including those that favour output involving less CO2 emissions.

That was from the OECD, a recognised authority on economic policy, a group that is often cited by those opposite in industrial relations. Those opposite come to us with what the OECD says about our productivity, saying we have loosened the labour markets too much or we have given the unions and the workers too many rights. On this issue, the OECD says Australia should act. There has also been a call from among the significant number of superannuation funds of some size in Europe saying that these reforms are the future, that this is where it is going and this is where countries can lead for their own economic future. I quote finally from the British Guardian Weekly of 29 May. It said:

Last year, a record 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuel—a rise of 1.6Gt on 2009, according to estimates from the IEA regarded as the gold standard for emissions data.

Climate change projections such as those we are doing at the moment:

… would mean around a 50% chance of a rise in global average temperature of more than 4C by 2100

…   …   …

… disaster could yet be averted, if governments heed the warning. "If we have bold, decisive and urgent action, very soon, we still have a chance of succeeding …

…   …   …

Yet even now politicians in each of the great powers are eyeing up extraordinary and risky ways to extract the world's last remaining reserves of fossil fuels—even from under the melting ice of the Arctic.

As I have said before, Canada and the United States have had very pleasant, very civil relations since the 1812 war. Canada has been very vocal in recent months in its concerns about US exploration and US movement in the Arctic because it is basically disappearing. There will be new passages to Europe. There will be exploration of oil and gas. That is part of the climate change reality. It is happening and it is leading to very poor relations between those past friends. (Time expired)

Luke Simpkins (Cowan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The great thing about being on this side of the House is that we still have our integrity. As we know, almost everyone in this House at the last election promised that there would be no carbon tax. I can understand there are people on the other side that are pretty glad that the Prime Minister said, with six days to go before the last election, 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.' Clearly, when the polling told her to make that promise she helped some of her colleagues hold their seats. I suggest that the members for Corangamite, Deakin, Greenway, Robertson, Lindsay, Moreton and Banks, all on a 1.5 per cent majority or less, are all very grateful for the pre-election Labor policy of no carbon tax, yet it appears they now have no problem at all with this carbon tax legislation that they stood against before.

As I said, it does feel pretty good to have a great degree of integrity. I make that claim despite the hero worship effort on the ABC program last night making out the Labor government, the Prime Minister and the highly funded supporters and taxpayer funded proponents of the carbon tax as the persecuted yet heroic figures in this debate. Who said the ABC does not create good fiction? Yet, as is so often the case, the interests and concerns of the people of this nation are neglected in such programs. The people of Australia are treated as stupid when they are not. They are portrayed as easily led when they are critical and savvy about the lines they are being fed by this government. Whether it is in the headlines, programs or alleged balanced critiques, normally we just see support for the government or the Greens and never is a hard question asked of this government.

When we think back to the last parliament, I do not think there was ever an end to the Labor Party claiming a mandate for this or that item of legislation. It was endless. Each one was cited as the No. 1 priority for the Rudd government. In this debate, and also with the government's latest border control failure, the government clearly has no mandate. Now the language changes from a claim for a mandate to instead a lecture in the Prime Minister's usual condescending style about being on the wrong side of history and the national interest.

Putting aside the deception and political opportunism of the Labor Party that no longer knows where it is, where it is going or even where it came from, I wish to speak to these clean energy bills. This legislation is nothing more than a tax designed to generate money and redistribute it. It will not change global temperatures, it will not save the world and it is built on statements and exaggerations devoid of relevant facts. As the federal MP for Cowan, I am very pleased to have two clear thinkers on the subject of anthropogenic global warming as my constituents. I refer to Joanne Nova and David Evans, being two people that have assisted in helping Australians understand the reality of the debate. I thank them for their courageous and constructive contribution to the debate at a time when the Labor government can only call any that question the theory by cheap names. Indeed, we are used to getting nothing but assertions and unproven claims from those that promote the theory of human induced climate change. The Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency keeps telling us that the time for discussion and debate is over and that the time for action is now. I say that the debate is still in progress and subscribers to the human induced climate change theory are in fact rapidly declining in numbers.

Clearly I am not a true believer because I have read into the subject and therefore wish to take this opportunity today to explode some myths around the subject. Is CO2, carbon dioxide, the great evil and upward forcer of global temperatures that the government assures us that it is? If it were, why is it that CO2 in the atmosphere increases some 800 years after the rise in temperature? Why is it that CO2 has continued to rise in the last 10 years but global temperatures have not risen? Furthermore, another important element in the human induced global warming theory is that there must actually be a tell-tale sign 10 kilometres above the tropics. The trouble is that this hot spot does not exist. Weather balloons could not even find such a sign when there was warming between 1979 and 1999. If that hot spot does not exist, then this means that the temperature increases were not caused by greenhouse gases. Some say that the researchers Sherwood and Santer found the hot spot, but this is not true. Santer said he thought it may be hidden, but did not find it. Sherwood said that the thermometer should be ignored in favour of wind gauges.

Leaving aside these critical points, what about the effect of CO2 on actually increasing temperature? It looks a little scary when you think that the first 20 parts per million of CO2 causes an increase in temperature of just over 1.5 per cent. That sounds pretty worrying, yet the next 20 parts per million would add less than 0.4 per cent in temperature. What we should concern ourselves with are the sorts of CO2 levels that we have now, because so often we hear of alarming claims of dangerous climate change linked to 385 parts per million, 295 parts per million or 410 parts per million. We hear of tipping points et cetera. That is one of the classic claims. But what does happen when there are 380 parts per million or 400 parts per million in the atmosphere? The difference is so small that it is in the area of 0.02 per cent increase in temperature change and it is therefore slowing.

Even if this carbon tax achieves a reduction in emissions, which it does not, or a reduction in world CO2 levels, which it will not, is a $9 billion tax really worth pursuing when it does not do anything for the environment? What makes it even more pointless is the difference in warming caused by CO2 between 385 parts per million and 395 parts per million is negligible. The reality is that this carbon tax is nothing but a tax. It is not an environmental policy. It has only ever been a means of raising funds so that this government can either hand it out here or, worst of all, send the money offshore. As Tim Flannery, the government's climate change commissioner, who in many ways is the chief engineer aboard the climate change gravy train, says:

If we cut emissions today, global temperatures are not likely to drop for about a thousand years.

That really says it all.

Perhaps not all Australians are fully aware of these matters, but I can assure the government that the families that this Labor government have forsaken are not stupid. The government may try to sell them lines in their taxpayer funded advertising campaigns but they remain smart, because they know what is a tax and they know what a tax does to the cost of living. They know that a tax that keeps going up will ensure their costs of living keep going up as well. They know that this Labor tax represents $9 billion a year in more taxes. They know that in the first year their electricity prices will rise by some 10 per cent and their gas prices will rise by nine per cent, that there will be higher marginal tax rates for low- and middle-income earners and that there will be a $4.3 billion hit on the budget bottom line.

The government wants to make people think that they will not be worse off because they will be compensated for higher costs. The longer this fiasco of a tax goes on the greater the costs will be, particularly when the Labor partners, the Greens, talk about a $40 or even a $100 a tonne price for carbon. Compensation can never keep up, particularly when the productivity and the competitive advantages of this country are being attacked by the same tax. So the people will be more and more negatively impacted by this tax.

What surprises me is that the minority groups in Australia believe that the Australian people can be fooled by exaggerated claims and crude name-calling such as 'denier' or 'sceptic'. The minority groups I refer to include supporters of the Labor Party, Green party zealots and those whose jobs depend on the theory of anthropogenic global warming, or human induced global warming. It is getting pretty hard to convince an increasingly suspicious population as they see the end to the drought and the lack of extreme weather conditions here and elsewhere around the world. Similarly, the need for productivity- and confidence-destroying taxation is being questioned as the retail, housing and manufacturing sectors in this country are going through intense pain. The retail, housing and manufacturing sectors in China are not going through this pain. With this carbon tax those sectors will not be worried at all.

Since the year 2000 Chinese CO2 emissions have risen by 171 per cent and will rise by 500 per cent by 2020. Indian emissions will rise by 350 per cent. We know that no other nation is bringing in an economy-wide carbon tax or an emissions-trading scheme. The much lauded European ETS system raises just $500 million per year, compared to the $9 billion that this Labor-Green carbon tax will raise, with certain industries in Europe not even included by being given free emission permits.

We know that this postelection policy leads to the most comprehensive carbon tax in the world, the most damaging economic manoeuvre in the world and the most deceitful political strategy that this country has seen. With this government's plan, emissions will increase from 2012 to 2020 from 578 million tonnes to 620 million tonnes. So much of the carbon tax revenue will just be shipped overseas to carbon credit traders, who are just waiting for their next quick buck. This government just wants to transfer the wealth of this country in the form of $3.5 billion per year. Why would this government just ship the money produced by Australians overseas to highly questionable market schemes that have already been subject to as much as $5 billion in fraudulent transactions?

This government's policy is failure in motion. Worse than that, it is a sell-out of the national interest. This is a supertax, presiding over the destruction of Australian industries and jobs, whilst sending our national wealth overseas and without any climate modification. So far in my speech today I have shown why this should be rejected scientifically and why it should be rejected economically. In the years ahead Australians will want to know why this government sold out our nation and why they worked with vested interests to hurt the national interest.

I have spoken before on the vested interests that work very hard to get this carbon tax through this place and to further the theory of human induced global warming. They are well funded and they are dedicated to the cause, as I suppose you would be if your job depended on only one side of an argument being advanced. The reality is that when the nexus between CO2 and temperature rises is broken—and that is coming soon—then all those whose research jobs, projects, academic chairs and associated positions depend on that nexus will be in trouble. It is little wonder they are trying so hard to get this legislation through.

I spoke earlier of chief climate commissioner Tim Flannery. He is just one among many now employed—and I use that term loosely—in the climate change industry. There are others who rely on the propagation of climate alarmism for their daily bread. The left-wing lobby group GetUp! and its director, Simon Sheikh, have raised the mindless repetition of buzzwords to an art form. Paul Keating used to say that the most dangerous place to stand was between a state Premier and a bucket of money. I venture to suggest that these days the most dangerous place to stand is between Simon Sheikh and a television camera.

GetUp! boldly professes to be committed to the pursuit of social justice, a nebulous concept which I have previously discussed at length in this House and which is at its core little more than a pretty name for old-fashioned socialist income redistribution. It is not surprising that the adherents of this doctrine are attracted to the carbon tax like moths to the flame.

Getup! exhorts its members to 'take action' on climate change. So far as I have been able to ascertain, taking action amounts to little more than signing up to an email list, sending standard template emails to members of parliament and the media and, of course, making weekly donations to keep Mr Sheikh and his spin machine well oiled. The issues are barely touched upon. The facts are not addressed. The impact of this toxic tax on hardworking Australian families is all but ignored. Instead, GetUp! rolls out the likes of 'Carbon Cate Blanchett' to hector those already doing it tough about why they should pay more tax. They are more interested in symbolic gestures than they are in actually dealing with real issues. Small wonder that GetUp! finds a friend in the Gillard Labor government.

I note that last week we received so-called facts sheets from the 'Vested Interest Institute' or, as I should say, the Climate Institute. They are struggling against an increasingly critical Australian population that are no longer backing the cliche causes of global warming. In these facts sheets, they provided us with five so-called facts to oppose a specific myth in each case. I used to think that the Climate Institute was a highly sophisticated organisation, but they have not even understood the concerns of Australians. I really thought that something of the big issues would have been attacked in the pages they sent, but they are in fact just so far off the mark. The trouble with the Climate Institute is that by being on level 15 of 179 Elizabeth Street in Sydney, while they may have a magnificent view of Hyde Park to the east, they have their backs to the rest of Australia. These guys cannot see the realities of the suburbs and country Australia. They need to realise that if Australians have to feel the pain of higher prices, they want to know what change in the temperature will occur.

The Climate Institute do not get that Australians want to know that the competitive position of our industries will not be reduced compared to other countries that we compete with. They fail to address the job losses that face affected industries like manufacturing, aluminium, concrete and others. They even had a so-called fact sheet that suggested something I had never heard of before was a myth, that a pollution price means you do not need other clean energy measures. If the Climate Institute had talked of science, they may have been useful. If they had talked of maintaining the Australian standard of living, they may have been of value. If they had talked about no-one losing their job, then those in vulnerable sectors may have embraced what they said. If they had talked about temperatures coming down whilst Australia maintains its competitive position, then they would have made a reasonable case worthy of some consideration.

The reality is that the Climate Institute is as out of touch with the vast majority of Australians as are the Gillard government and the Greens. Australians are suspicious of taxes. If they are told of a tax they want to know that it will actually do something useful and not hurt them more than others. The problem for the government and for the myriad of vested interests is that the majority of Australians see a huge tax and no resulting change to world temperatures, but they do see the risks to their jobs and their lifestyles and standards of living. That is why the debate in Australia is being lost by the government. That is why they want to avoid at all cost taking this issue to the people. This tax will be all pain and no environmental gain, and Australians know it.

There is only one side that has a mandate to vote on this matter in this place. We always said that we were against this carbon tax. The government said before the election they were against it. Now they have turned their backs on the Australian people and it will come at their cost. (Time expired)

Chris Hayes (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Since coming to this place in 2005, there have been very few opportunities to speak on climate change that I have not participated in. I have been in those discussions probably because before coming here, in my business dealings I worked very closely with the renewable and sustainable energy sectors. My involvement with these sectors was to assist in overcoming challenges to commercialising their new and innovative technologies, challenges in raising funds for research and development and challenges in demonstrating to the market that cleaner energy technology is commercially viable in a modern Australia.

The one consistent thing I have said in all my contributions associated with the climate change debate in this House and in business is that we do need to have an appropriate price on carbon. Without that we will not have effective change. Without a price on carbon there would be absolutely no incentive to move from a primitive and highly polluting energy source, as well as the cheapest power generation sources in the world—that is, relying on our brown coal stocks. People may not appreciate that, whilst it is all those things, we have 800 years supply of brown coal left. Why would we consider changing to cleaner energy technologies for this country—such as carbon capture and storage, clean coal, greater utilisation of gas fired power and renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and geothermal as well as some of the cutting edge ones being developed in this country such as harnessing wave and tidal power? By the way, Australia is one of the leading researchers in these fields.

Why would we change when we already have the cheapest power in the world? The answer is pretty clear. Devoid of all the politics and the rhetoric, we know we must change our approach to protect the environment for our kids and for future generations. We know it is the right thing to do. As parents, we try to give our kids a better life than we had, a natural inclination of parents—and it flows through a few of us as grandparents. It is in our DNA to protect and assure the future of our offspring. In the same way this government is committed to delivering better environmental outcomes as well as positioning ourselves to take advantage of the emerging and highly competitive international economy.

Leaving politics aside, most people know that we need to engage in an effective methodology to address climate change. Most Australians agree that there is a need to act, not ignore the consensus of scientific opinion when it comes to our environmental future. The overwhelming majority of scientists report that climate change is occurring and that carbon emissions are the principal cause of these changes. The other major scientific consensus is that governments need to act to protect the environment. Simple research shows that as a parliament we have been talking about climate change since 1988. Since then there have been more than 35 inquiries as to the best way to tackle climate change. More recently we have seen the outcomes of the reviews conducted by Peter Shergold, commissioned by John Howard's government, and the recommendations and report of Professor Ross Garnaut. Despite being commissioned by different parliaments and despite their being of different political persuasions and different governments, the economic position both sides arrived at through those reviews was remarkably similar. The recommendations were remarkably similar—that the most effective, least costly and most efficient method of driving change in this regard is to have an appropriate price on carbon. It is not just members on this side of the House that have subscribed to that view. Indeed, the Leader of the Opposition in his book Battlelines said:

The Howard Government … proposed an emissions trading scheme because this seemed the best way to obtain the highest emission reduction at the lowest cost.

This time last year, Malcolm Turnbull, the member for Wentworth, said:

My views on climate change—the need for a carbon price, the fact that market-based mechanisms are the most efficient ways of cutting emissions—

and, he went on to say—

my views are the same today as they were when I was part of John Howard’s cabinet, and those views were held by the Howard government.

Indeed, last year, the shadow Treasurer, Joe Hockey, told the Sydney Morning Herald:

… inevitably we will have a price on carbon … we will have to …

But, given this debate, as we move to put a price on carbon while those opposite only want to talk about 'a new tax'—a very simplistic line—let me remind you of what Tony Abbot had to say about carbon pricing in July 2009. His contribution to the debate back then was:

I also think that if you want to put a price on carbon why not just do it with a simple tax …

That was the line of the Leader of the Opposition. You want to talk about hypocrisy? You have it in spades when it comes to the opposition's approach to dealing with climate change. I think this shows the level of concern of some of those opposite about finding the right thing to do to protect the future of our community. They will, every time, put politics ahead of community.

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

Oh, come on!

Chris Hayes (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They know what the right thing to do is; they have expressed that time and again. I know the member for Tangney may take a slightly different view of that, but he will have to admit that these were actual statements made by his current leaders in terms of how they should approach what they say is climate change. They commissioned their own inquiries and they went to the 2007 election with a very similar scheme to that proposed by Labor, one which was fundamentally designed to put a price on carbon. As some type of black joke on the electorate at large and to exploit politics to its full, Abbott now says:

I don't think we can say that the science is settled here.

He says:

… whether carbon dioxide is quite the environmental villain that some people make it out to be is not yet proven.

This is devoid of any real political leadership; this is just rank opportunism.

The bills before us give effect to the emissions target shared by both sides of politics. Yes, it is a bipartisan position that we have a five per cent reduction on the 2000 levels of emission by 2020. I know from discussions and the street meetings in my electorate with my constituents that most people simply do not believe that the Liberal-National party share the same emissions targets as the government. I suppose the coalition do not want to talk about it all that much. They cannot decide amongst themselves if they believe in climate change; is the balance of opinion now held by the sceptics?

The bills before us today also provide that the charge on carbon emissions be paid by only the biggest polluters. We have defined big-polluting companies as those that emit 25,000 tonnes or more of carbon dioxide each year. In effect, this limits the number of those who will pay the carbon tax to a little over 500 companies. Pricing carbon in this way will act as a price signal, providing an incentive for big polluters to address efficiency and to engage in new methods and technologies to limit or lessen their financial liability. In a competitive industry, simply passing on all the costs does not make good economic sense.

However, I acknowledge that some costs will find their way through the economy and will have an impact on consumers. It is for that reason that these bills also seek to address the financial impacts, particularly on families. In fact, nine out of 10 households will receive financial support to cushion the likely impacts of carbon pricing on the overall economy. Most of the money raised through the carbon tax will be used to cut income tax, increase pensioner payments, assist self-funded retirees and provide higher family payments. It has also given the government an opportunity, once again, to pursue further tax reform by increasing the tax-free threshold, which will now see people earning less than $20,500 per year paying no tax at all.

While these bills establish an initial carbon price of $23 per tonne of carbon emissions, most importantly, they also provide for the development of a cap-and-trade system—an emissions trading system, a system that was actually embraced by both sides of this parliament not all that long ago, one that the opposition even took to the general election in 2007. Yes, these bills will enable that to occur.

As opposed to the notion of 'a simple tax', as once advocated by the Leader of the Opposition, under an emissions trading or cap-and-trade system, we will place a cap on carbon emissions. Despite a growing population in this country, emission levels will therefore remain capped. This, together with the target of a five per cent reduction in emissions from 2000 levels by 2020, means a reduction in the annual amount of carbon dioxide pollution of 160 million tonnes by 2020. I am reliably told that this is the equivalent of taking 45 million cars off the road—if we had that many cars.

This shows that it is possible to make very substantial inroads into our pollution levels. That is why those opposite shared that emissions target. Those that designed it took the view that we needed to act to do something about climate change and that we needed to act in a way which would have an actual impact—by sending a price signal—but which would also protect the economy. Over the longer term, these measures are capable of achieving an 80 per cent reduction in emissions from 2000 levels by 2050. These are real and achievable outcomes. These are things to work for. Establishing a price on carbon will provide business with the certainty it needs to set about making structural adjustments for the future. It will also allow business to respond to the development of a clean energy economy.

Devoid of the politics and away from the shock jocks, redneck radio and the climate change deniers—and there might be one or two on the other side; I am sure one of them is about to speak soon—the science is clear. Other than the member for Tangney—he is a good friend, but I think he knows I am somewhat critical of his scientific views on this subject—there is scientific consensus that climate change is real, that it is occurring and that human behaviour has had an impact.

We need to deal with our carbon emissions. The consensus is that the most efficient and effective way to do that is by putting a price on carbon—notwithstanding that back in 2009, as I said, the Leader of the Opposition was of the view that the easiest way to do it was to have a simple one-off tax. Whether they base it on Peter Shergold's review or Professor Ross Garnaut's report, I think most people on both sides of this parliament know what needs to be done. Both sides of parliament know what we need to do to future proof our economy and both sides of parliament should be committed to doing what they have always said they would do. Above all, we need to act and we need to act now. Transition towards a cleaner energy economy is achievable and is the most effective way of protecting our future. I commend these bills to the House.

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

I have been dreading this moment since I first became interested in the science of climate change and anthropogenic global warming, and particularly since the Prime Minister misled the Australian people by saying that there would be no carbon tax under the government she led. As the only PhD qualified scientist in this parliament, I have watched with dismay as the local and international scientific communities and our elected leaders have taken a seemingly benign scientific theory and turned it into a regulatory monolith designed to solve an environmental misnomer. With a proper understanding of the science, I believe we would not even be entering into this carbon tax debate. To put it simply, the carbon tax, with all its regulatory machinations, is built on quicksand. Take away the dodgy science and the need for a carbon tax becomes void. I do not accept the premise of anthropogenic climate change, I do not accept that we are causing significant global warming and I reject the findings of the IPCC and its local scientific affiliates.

On the subject of the science, I note that pre-eminent 19th century physicist Lord Kelvin said to physicists at the British Association in 1900:

There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

Settled science indeed! Quoting 'the science' is the same as appeals to 'God says' hundreds of years ago. It is an attempt to stop debate. When I hear the likes of the member for Sydney invoking 'the science', as she did in her utterly unsupported claim that the Central Coast will be the area of New South Wales hardest hit by sea level rise resulting from AGW, I look for the snake oil.

Science does not work the way that those opposite believe or would have us believe. It is strange how Al Gore, a failed student in science, is automatically accorded reverential scientific status by those opposite while they castigate the likes of Professors Bob Carter and Ian Plimer, people well qualified to talk about the science. I would happily debate the science with any member opposite but I know they are too gutless to take me on. I will take the likes of Al Gore and Tim Flannery seriously when they live the emissions-austere lifestyles they advocate for everyone else, rather than the emissions-profligate lifestyles they themselves hypocritically live.

Still on the subject of the science, have a look at the data for Darwin. If you look at the raw data from the last 110 years, it shows that temperatures have gone down by 0.7 degrees per century. Funnily enough, after 'homogenisation' by the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, the data magically shows an increase of 1.2 degrees per century. You wonder why I call for a royal commission!

A whole lot of the argument for a carbon tax is premised on models, but models only have any relevance if they have predictive capacity. The reality is that this graph I am holding up shows the prediction of the IPCC's fourth assessment report. All of their ensemble models indicated that there should have been an increase in temperatures this decade. This other graph I am now holding up is the reality according to the Hadley Climate Research Unit, the repository of the IPCC's data. Initially, the so-called 'consensus scientists' rejected the theory that there has been no temperature increase in the last decade. They are now coming to the realisation that they have to deal with it, so we get peer reviewed papers, papers that Al Gore said did not exist, like: 'Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998-2008' and 'Trend analysis of satellite global temperature data'. They both accept that there has been no temperature increase this decade. The reconciling paper suggests that maybe it is global dimming that has caused the problem. The problem is they did not do their literature survey. If they had had a look at global aerosol climatology, they would have realised there has been no change to the optical depth in the last 10 years.

Let us look at the models. 'Tracking earth's energy', by Kevin Trenberth—lead author with the IPCC, second, third and fourth assessment reports, and still a current lead author—says that we cannot explain it. I have a chart here from Kevin Trenberth showing a massive deficiency in the global net energy budget. Also by Kevin Trenberth is 'An imperative for climate change planning: tracking earth's global energy'. Another: 'On the observational determination of climate sensitivity and its implications' by pre-eminent scientist, Richard Lindzen, found that the feedbacks have been overstated. The paper on the misdiagnosis of climate feedbacks and variations found a large discrepancy between observed and stimulated precipitation. I have numerous papers here that I will seek to table.

On ocean temperature, the projections were all for increased ocean temperatures. Since the launch of the Argo network, what do we have? 'Tracing the upper ocean's missing heat' acknowledges there has been no increase but in fact a decrease in ocean temperature since 2003—they cannot explain it. The 'Importance of the deep ocean for estimating decadal changes' accepts there has been a reduction in the globe's ocean temperatures. 'On the decadal rates of sea level change during the 20th century', by Holgate, found no acceleration of sea levels. Similarly, the paper on the dynamic response of reef islands showed that many of the islands in the Pacific have actually been increasing in area. 'Sea-level acceleration based on US tide gauges and extensions of previous global-gauge analyses' shows there has been no acceleration—in fact, a deceleration in sea-level rise. The conclusion from the paper 'Is there evidence yet of acceleration in mean sea level rise around mainland Australia?' is that, no, there has not been acceleration.

What we see is that the peer reviewed science is not anywhere near as solid as those opposite suggest. If the science is settled, ask the scientists if they believe we should stop funding the IPCC and anthropogenic global warming science. Let us investigate some of the science and assume that the IPCC models are correct. Even if we reach the five per cent reduction—and government figures show an increase from 580 million tonnes to 620 million tonnes by 2020, an increase not a decrease—then global average temperatures will only be a few thousandths of a degree cooler than business as usual. If we reach 50 per cent less CO2 emissions than today in 2050 and hold that to 2100, the reduction in global average temperatures will be less than one-hundredth of a degree. No wonder the government is trying to spin this policy as a clean energy bill, as it patently does nothing to address the so-called anthropogenic global warming problem. I thought that was the point of the pain associated with this tax—so a whole lot of pain for essentially no temperature reduction.

The reality is that bankers and the like are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospects of the billions, at least, to be made in trading a commodity with no intrinsic value. Even with this tax, most Australians will maintain their current fossil fuel consumption and, more crucially, Labor's tax will have no effect on the big polluters overseas. It should go without saying that any solutions Australia considers for global warming must have real, measurable impacts on reducing global temperatures. But it seems this point has been lost in the rhetoric and catchcry.

We must ask the fundamental questions: will the carbon tax fulfil its purpose and energise other nations to join us and cool the globe? If not, why are we barrelling ahead? At this time of global economic uncertainty, governments and public policymakers around the world are focused on saving old jobs and creating new jobs. Why then is the government introducing job-killing legislation? The government's own modelling acknowledges that this scheme is not of itself enough to reach the 2020 targets. To make up the shortfall, Australian taxpayers will be spending an estimated $3.5 billion a year by 2020 to buy foreign carbon credits. By 2050, funding going overseas for foreign carbon credits is expected to rise to $57 billion per year—the government's own figures.

Why are we paying any money overseas for carbon credits? Even if you accept 'the science', there are numerous other ways to tackle the issue, including putting money into research and development—the cheap end of the innovation pipeline. Funding for advanced energy R&D will lead to a more energy efficient future by making low-emission technologies more accessible. If we can get sustainable energy to be cheaper than fossil fuels then an economic imperative will drive industry and big business. Copenhagen showed us we cannot get a global approach to climate change at this time. The big polluters of the world—China, India and the US—just are not interested. The Australian government are being completely disingenuous, saying that only 500 or so companies will pay—but then again they have a complete lack of economic understanding; after all, they believe that they can tax the mining industry into greater prosperity and that instituting a carbon tax will drive green jobs. Ask Spain and California how successful that has been. If there are these wonderful opportunities waiting out there, the reality is that industry would be doing it with alacrity.

Further, in order to change behaviour, you need alternatives to go to. In the case of electricity, apart from nuclear we have nowhere to go. We are already paying massive costs associated with a small penetration from renewables. Germany, touted by the government in terms of solar power, led the world in putting up solar panels—€47 billion in subsidies. Using IPCC models, the legacy of that bill will mean a seven-hour delay in global climate change by 2100. Regarding wind power, Denmark led the world in embracing wind power, yet their wind industry is almost completely dependent on taxpayer subsidies and the Danes pay the highest electricity prices in the world. When Cyclone Yasi hit Queensland, we desperately needed power due to some of those Queensland power stations shutting down. Wind in South Australia provided two megawatts out of an installed capacity of 400—some success.

In terms of transportation there are similarly no alternatives to fossil fuels at present. Indeed the government's scheme has a negative impact as it makes public transport less competitive than private vehicles. Trying to force carbon cuts instead of investing first in research puts the cart ahead of the horse. Then there is the whole issue of carbon leakage—that is, cement and aluminium industries going overseas, killing our industries, but still emitting carbon dioxide.

The PM backstabbed former Prime Minister Rudd. Now she plans to backstab the Australian people, not only with legislation she promised the Australian people she would not introduce but also by adding landmines to that legislation—with clauses such as carbon credits being personal property—to make the carbon tax harder to rescind. The Russians used scorched earth against Napoleon and against the Germans respectively when they invaded. This Prime Minister plans to use scorched earth as well, not against an invading enemy, but against the very people she purports to represent. There should always be a get-out-of-jail clause in legislation. I ask those opposite this: if the scientific view were to change to one of unanimity that we were not causing a problem on the day after this bill becomes law, what would you think of those mines placed in the legislation then? We do not have cars because we taxed flatulence from horses.

The fact is there are things in the environment we all want—clean air, clean water, good food and reducing birth rates. Look at the countries in the world with the cleanest air, cleanest water, lowest birth rates and best food. They share affluence. Why are we attempting to make ourselves and the world less affluent?

We are promised most Australians will be compensated for the impost of the carbon tax. Calculating the impact of the carbon tax is hard enough, but what happens when it becomes an ETS? You will have an extremely volatile price. The government is betting it will be around $30 a tonne but you can trade it down to $15 a tonne. What happens if it comes in at $15 and you are compensating at $30? Hello, taxpayer, we need some more money please for that compensation. Alternatively, if you compensate for $15 and it comes in at $30 or $45, the compensation will be totally inadequate. More taxes will be needed to cover the shortfalls.

The whole point of this carbon tax is to change behaviour to reduce emissions, which means there must be pain if we are to move from an efficient industry to one that is less efficient. The simple fact is that the Gillard government is being deliberately disingenuous on this issue as they know full well that they will never be able to compensate the people adequately or economically when it becomes an ETS. In the national interest it is time to move past the politics of fear, such as, 'You need to be heavily taxed or the Great Barrier Reef or Kakadu gets it!' In conclusion, for all these and multiple other reasons, the Gillard government should not pass this legislation without the consent of Australians. Madam Deputy Speaker Burke, I seek leave to table these peer reviewed science reports.

Leave not granted.

Sharon Grierson (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I rise to speak in support of our proactive plan to take action to reduce the harmful effects of climate change. I rise to speak in support of putting a price on carbon pollution. I rise to speak in support of the Clean Energy Bill 2011 and the related package of bills, which will provide the foundation of a clean energy future in this country.

Although I always welcome the opportunity to speak to issues of environmental sustainability and the future of our nation, as I said in February last year when I spoke on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation, this is not a debate that can go on forever. There is no longer a genuine debate in the community as to whether we trust the science of climate change. They have already made their decision. There is only a debate in the caucus of the Liberal and National parties as to whether man-made climate change is occurring. I think it is time the opposition caught up with reality.

I just heard the member for Tangney passionately espouse peer reviewed science that questions whether climate change is real or due to any human activity. I would say to him: yes, that may be so, but it is well and truly in the minority. I would like to draw to the attention of everyone to a website called skepticalscience.com. It is put up by an Australian scientist, John Cook, who I know has been nominated for a Eureka Award. At his own expense and with the assistance of his wife, he puts up all the arguments from sceptics, which at times seem quite rational. I can understand why sometimes people put forward alternative views. He also puts up the scientific answers and the peer reviewed data it rests on. I do recommend everyone look at skepticalscience.com and I put on the record my praise and appreciation for Australian scientist John Cook.

As the most recent report from the Climate Commission noted:

This is the critical decade. Decisions we make from now to 2020 will determine the severity of climate change our children and grandchildren experience.

Our nation is the world's 15th largest total emitter and has the highest per capita emissions in the world. The time for action on climate change is now and it is up to us in this place to make tough decisions in the long-term interests of our nation. The choice that we will make when we come to vote on this legislation is a choice between the past and the future, between doubt and belief, between action and inaction. We on this side of the House will not stand impotent in response to these challenges. As a government, we have a responsibility to the Australian people to take action. To do any less would be to abrogate the public contract that we have entered into with the people of Australia to promote their welfare and the welfare and success of our environment as well.

To my colleagues in this parliament and to the men and women of the branches of the Australian Labor Party, I say that these are tough reforms. Due to the misinformation campaign coming from those members opposite, the task of explaining these reforms has been made even tougher and more difficult. It is for that reason that we will work to ensure that our voice is more concise, more truthful and better heard than the voice of our opponents. Reform is never easy, but we cannot afford to walk lamely along the path to reform, heckled by the slogans of fear and disbelief. If we were to halt now, after we have already waited so long, we would be condemning Australia and our children to an uncertain and polluted future. This package of 18 bills implements the government's commitment to creating a clean energy future. This is a chance for Australia: we can create a clean energy future. This is a chance for the international community of nations: together we can create a clean energy future. Through these bills we are acting on climate change and we are doing it in a distinctly Labor way. It is only a Labor government—not a Liberal government or a Greens government—that would get the balance right. It is a federal Labor government that will price carbon in a way that will protect jobs and make the big polluters, not Australian taxpayers, pay for that pollution. It is a federal Labor government that will sustain industry, particularly trade exposed industries, and provide certainty for business while mandating change. It is a federal Labor government that will ensure, by offsetting cost of living pressures, that pensioners and low-income earners are supported. It is a federal Labor government that will invest in the future energy needs of Australia by incentivising renewable energy developments, thereby investing in a cleaner environment as well. That is the Labor way; it is the way that I believe in.

We will never turn our backs on the industries in Newcastle and the Hunter. We will never turn our backs and walk away from the metalworkers, the miners or the manufacturers. A jobs and competitiveness program will support jobs in high-polluting but trade exposed industries, through the allocation of free carbon permits—or almost free carbon permits. Supplemented by a Clean Technology Investment Program, investments in research and development and the Food and Foundries Investment Program, this reform package will clean up our economy while supporting workers.

On Thursday we heard the member for Paterson and the member for Canning ask who is standing up for the Hunter and speculate about what workers in my electorate think of pricing carbon. What I can tell the member for Paterson is that the Australian Labor Party are standing up for the Hunter. What I can tell the member for Paterson is that support for renewable energy and the continued development of non-renewable energy sources are not mutually exclusive. What I can tell the member for Canning is that members on this side of the House consult with our electorates and, in particular, we talk to workers and they know that we will always endeavour to keep people in jobs because we recognise, always, the dignity of work. Although the concern of the member for Canning for the jobs of workers is respectable, I fear that he has been misled by his own party room. What they may not have told him is that the Alcoa aluminium smelter at Tomago, which he mentioned, will be shielded from 94.5 per cent of the carbon price. Construction consultancy Davis Langdon has said that the impact on the cost of aluminium will be negligible, rising by only 0.16 per cent. I have met with Tomago Aluminium and we have had frank discussions. They are fine with the way things are and the way things are in this legislation. They are of course concerned about the long-term prospects, and as long as they require shielding there will be up to 50 per cent shielding—if the rest of the world has not changed. So they understand that, they make me understand that, and we understand that we need to work together.

We recently heard the member for Paterson predict that 31,000 jobs would be lost in New South Wales by 2030. What he did not tell the House was that the same report found that employment in New South Wales will continue to grow under a carbon price. What he tried to hide from the people of New South Wales was that modelling by the federal Treasury shows that around 400,000 extra jobs will be created in New South Wales by 2020 under a carbon price. According to the Climate Institute:

All credible studies show strong employment growth under a pollution price and in the transition to a low carbon economy. It’s estimated we’ll see an additional 1.6 million jobs between now and 2020 whilst cutting pollution by at least 159 million tonnes.

That is a win-win. They continue:

Even the coal industry is expected to see between 10,000 and 16,000 new mining jobs above 2008 levels.

Unfortunately, the clamouring of the conservative nay-sayers in the opposition is little different to the clamouring of the merchants of London and the landed gentry of Great Britain of old who argued against the abolition of the slave trade more than 200 years ago. At the time, commerce in slavery represented a quarter of Britain's gross domestic product and opponents of abolition threatened that it would bring financial ruin to the country and fatally wound the economy. But they were wrong; Britain's economy did not decline but accelerated while civil liberties and freedoms meant a new age of recognition and respect. Conservatives then, just as now, were on the wrong side of history.

I believe that Australians are too honest and too civilised to wear such a fear campaign. And we on this side of the House know that when the carbon price takes effect from the start of the 2012 financial year and the sky does not fall, the Leader of the Opposition and his colleagues on a Tea Party bender will no longer be able to disseminate untruths and misrepresentations that fly in the face of fact. The Australian people will see that the Leader of the Opposition's plan is no plan at all. Under his plan, every Australian taxpayer would pay an extra $1,300 each year; Australians would be subsidising industry's pollution. Under our plan, in contrast, around 500 of the biggest polluters—not Australian taxpayers—will pay for each tonne of pollution they produce.

'Give me the job or I'll trash the joint!' That is how former Prime Minister Paul Keating described the approach of the Leader of the Opposition. Keating, as always, had the Leader of the Opposition's measure. The Leader of the Opposition will not only trash the joint but also trash the economy, trash the environment and trash the nation—all for political expediency.

Since my election in 2001, I have seen my electorate welcome and subsequently embrace change as, together, we have worked to build a clean energy agenda for the city of Newcastle. It is an agenda that has seen more than $300 million invested in a clean energy future in my electorate, including $20 million for the Clean Technology Innovation Centre, $30 million for the Newcastle Institute for Energy and Resources, $150 million for the Australian Solar Institute and $100 million for the Smart Grid, Smart City project based in Newcastle. These investments came under a federal Labor government and through strong leadership in my electorate with myself and stakeholders. For 11 years prior to that, the Howard government was missing in action on climate change, missing in action on renewable energy and missing in action on clean energy—just as the member for Paterson was missing in action when we began developing a clean energy future for the Hunter to position Newcastle as a hub for clean energy.

On his website, the member for Paterson says that he ran for parliament because he wanted to create a better future for his children and all children. If that is truly the case, he should cross the floor and vote with the government on this legislation. If he wants to create a better future for all children, he should work with the government to create a clean energy future, and he should work with the people of his electorate to build on the clean energy future that we have been developing for the Hunter.

This clean energy reform package will incentivise further investment in clean energy technologies and infrastructure by increasing the viability of renewable technologies for consumers—the commercialisation opportunities we really need. The price signal that is there will make it more attractive for investment in new cleaner technologies. According to Treasury modelling, the implementation of a carbon price will see over 40 per cent of Australia's electricity coming from renewable sources by 2050. These reforms will help build the clean energy future our children and our grandchildren deserve—the clean energy future our children and our grandchildren need. I note that in the community—and the opposition certainly gives a lot of support to this idea—there is concern about the impact of increased energy prices on people. But I note that the ABS household spending survey that was released a week or so ago showed that in Australia we spend on average as much on alcohol as we do on energy. We should think about things before we go out promoting the idea that things are costing people much too much; we should look at some of the facts.

But we have seen that it is not only the conservative opposition that have obstructed the path of change. Members of the Greens party in the Senate were unwilling to pass the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation in 2009 and 2010. It demonstrated that their party was also one grounded in political opportunism rather than a commitment to acting on climate change. They demonstrated that they are not a party committed to the protection of workers in the steel industry, the manufacturing industry or the coal industry. It is we who will be making sure of that protection.

However, I welcome the constructive approach that has been adopted by all members on the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee. I would like to acknowledge the conscientiousness and dedication of the Prime Minister; the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, Greg Combet; members of the Greens Party; and the member for Lyne and the member for New England. I thank them for their wonderful work.

All major economies are acting on climate change, limiting pollution and unlocking clean energy technologies. Emissions trading schemes now exist in more than 30 European countries and in New Zealand. Carbon pricing systems exist in Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, India, Japan, Sweden and the United Kingdom. And China has the intention of having an emissions trading scheme by 2015. Like dominoes, every nation is gradually introducing measures to cap pollution and transition to a low carbon economy.

Writing yesterday in the Australian, Adair Turner, the chairman of the United Kingdom Committee on Climate Change, wrote: 'In Britain there is a general appreciation that a low carbon economy can be a prosperous one, and that the costs of global inaction on climate change would be great.' As the Climate Institute have said: 'There is absolutely no risk of Australia moving ahead of the rest of the world; the far greater risk is that Australia gets left behind.' When we look at the wonders of our natural environment, under threat from rising sea temperatures and weather fluctuations, the imperative to act is clear. As the coral of the Great Barrier Reef bleaches at an increasing rate, the importance of this reform package for the future prosperity of our nation and the ongoing sustainability and biodiversity of our natural environment cannot be muddied with the slogans of fear and hate of those opposite. My colleagues and I know that we must build a better future for our children and our grandchildren. All our words, all our policies and all our actions are directed to this end.

We also know that we have to build a strong economy. We have that and it came about through reform and change. That is why I ask this question of the men and women of my electorate: will you allow inaction on climate change? Of the men and women of my home state of New South Wales, I ask this question: will you entrust the future of our nation to those who had 11 years in government in which to take action on climate change, and yet did nothing? Can Australia afford another three years like the last term of the Howard government? No. I ask all Australians this question: will you accept the misinformation campaign of those opposite or will you work with my colleagues and I in the national interest to build a clean energy future? As the Prime Minister has queried, will you be on the right side of history? With the passage of these bills through both houses of parliament, we will be committing our nation to a great future. We will be turning a corner, and it is a clean energy future that is coming at us right around the bend.

Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to say in passing to the member for Newcastle that I think we on this side are being very hard on the Prime Minister and the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency in saying that they are the ones who said before the election that there would be no carbon tax under a government that they led. I say this because every one of you over there would have said that before the election. I do not think that one person over there would have said, 'I'm going to introduce a carbon tax.' Not one person over there would have said, 'Come what may, we are going to introduce a carbon tax, no matter what the Prime Minister says.' So, when we are talking about the national interest and putting your own interests first, you should avail yourselves of the offer by the member for Tangney for a debate on the actual science.

I rise to give the House the perspective from my electorate of Herbert on the Clean Energy Bill 2011 and related bills. I do so in the knowledge that the majority of residents in my electorate believe that action must be taken to clean up our part of the world and that we must act to support renewable energy. I have spoken to researchers from James Cook University and the Australian Institute of Marine Science and they have made it clear to me that we must act. But this tax does not act in attacking pollution. It does not act on sustainable energy. It does not act in union with the world. It acts alone as a cascading and compounding tax, with the end user—those people who can least afford it—paying for it.

This government tells us that the tax will be levied on the big polluters. These big companies will be faced with a choice. Do they take the pain, causing lower share prices and inflicting internal pressures on themselves, or do they pass it on? Look at Qantas. They were one of the first to come out of the blocks to support putting a price on carbon and to support the government's carbon tax. They did this after also ensuring that it was not levied on international travel, as that would have impacted on their competitiveness. And, quick as a flash, they announced that they would pass on the domestic cost of the carbon tax straight onto the punter.

Turning to Townsville, I would like to discuss this from the perspective of mining and resources using two examples. First, there is the Xstrata copper refinery. Xstrata has announced that the Townsville refinery will close and it has stated categorically that this is not directly related to the carbon tax. And I take them at their word. The fact remains that the ore will still be mined and converted to concentrate. It will not be refined in Townsville, and those 170 people who were employed to do that will find themselves out of a job. That concentrate will instead be shipped offshore to be refined. The big question is: what will the net result be for world pollution? No-one will tell me the answer to that question, least of all the climate change minister.

Xstrata says that it is moving because the cost of production is less overseas. It would not be too much of a stretch, then, to assume that Australia's rigid environmental regulations may not be enforced overseas, thus creating a climate in which over 300 direct and indirect jobs in Townsville have been lost for a worse net result for worldwide pollution. We are still a quarry; we just do not value add any more in this industry. My city and region are not happy with this. Second, I put to the House the example of Queensland Nickel—the company saved from closure by Townsville's community of refiners and Clive Palmer. It was estimated that had Clive Palmer not stepped in, the closure of this company would have had a devastating $4.5 billion negative impact on our local economy. Queensland Nickel employs 900 people directly, and it is estimated that another 1,200 owe their living to this enterprise. No-one at Queensland Nickel will tell you that it is not energy intensive; it certainly is. But here is the most perfect example of why this tax is bad. Queensland Nickel is a 100 per cent import and export business. The ore is sourced and bought on the international market from Noumea and New Caledonia and shipped to Townsville, where it is refined and then sold 100 per cent on that international market. It is price sensitive and so an equitable tax is extremely important.

Queensland Nickel's method of refining is termed a Caron. It is a roasting method and it involves energy. There are two other countries with which it competes in this market and which use this process. They are Brazil and Cuba. Queensland Nickel has improved its environmental performance steadily over the years. They now produce a large portion of their own electricity. To further reduce the energy required, they sun dry the ore to facilitate a quicker, cleaner process. The plants in Brazil and Cuba are, from what I am told, environmental disasters. I have not been there. They say that you can see them on the satellite photos, and they are disasters. The guys at Queensland Nickel will tell you that you can walk across the smoke in Brazil and no-one fishes near the Cuba facility. I can tell you, Madam Deputy Speaker, that people still fish in Cleveland Bay and they still live all around the plant. It is estimated that Queensland Nickel will at the start be up for $32 million with this carbon tax.

My problem with this tax is not that it affects profitability when the price for nickel is high. When the price is over $15 per pound, they can probably afford it. It is when the price drops and Queensland Nickel is still up for $32 million that I have a real problem, and so does Townsville. When the price drops, the forward estimates are below $8.50 per pound and there is a strong dollar, maintenance and jobs will have to be shed. It is that simple. The ore will still be mined. The ore will still be purchased on the international market.

If Queensland Nickel is out of the game, the ore will still be processed in Cuba and Brazil, with the result that world pollution will skyrocket for no reason other than this government wants to look its grandchildren in the eye. I want to look them in the eye as well, but I want them to have jobs. This tax does not reward good business. It does not reward world's best practice. It does not support industry. It does not support refining, and it does not support Townsville.

I want to talk about small business. I come from a family which worked hard in a corner store. Small businesses all over the country are the same no matter what the business. Long hours, living frugally and doing everything for the business are the orders of the day. Running a corner store means that you always have to be open, so your electricity costs are high. Corner stores are full of refrigeration, and they run on electricity. The deli fridge, the meat slicer, the scales, the cash register all run on electricity, and electricity is planned to get dearer and dearer and dearer.

A small business of any kind must look at its costs, set its margins to meet those costs and then make something on top of that. With the ever-increasing competition from large corporate organisations, the last thing a small business needs is taxes which will not help anyone achieve anything. Be that small business a corner store or an engineering firm, the challenges before them today are great. Be it big multinational or national competitors or Chinese steel manufacturers, the challenges are the same. To add to these challenges an unwieldy and overly complicated tax which will require a huge number of public servants to administer its operation beggars belief. Every small business operator will be sitting there filling out forms, completing the returns and complying with legislation. They will be doing that for absolutely no money. They will be working in their business and not on their business. They will see the waste which has made this government the most profligate in history as another example of them having to bear the load for a bunch of others tucked safely in their beds. This government does not want to see small business thrive, otherwise it would not introduce this tax.

I want to tell you about my wife's family. They are cane farmers in the Burdekin. They work hard. They are trying to deal with the strength of the dollar but they are also heavy users of electricity, diesel and fertilisers. All three are exposed to the carbon tax. All three impact on my wife's family being part of a country which makes and grows stuff. My wife's family do not want anything they do not deserve, but this is not giving them a fair go. How do we go to them and ask them to cop it in the neck again with the strong dollar and then load them up with a tax that other sugar-producing nations are simply not paying. Even our charities and organisations will not escape this tax—take North Queensland Community Transport. They supply cheap transport to people in the community who do not have options. They provide buses and wheelchair lifts. These are driven by diesel. Do you as a government simply say to them who survive on the very least that they will have to go without, again?

This brings me to direct action. The basic philosophy of it is what speaks to me. We do things. We are a country of innovators and inventers. We take the best the rest of the world has to offer and we adapt it to our ways. We produce tangible, positive, effective measures which improve the way we live. Australia is already in the middle of the pack when it comes to action on climate change. That gets glossed over by this government too much. We are by and large acting on climate change. Look at the cars we drive. Look at the influence our car manufacturers are having on the way we drive. We are certainly doing a damn sight better on this environment caper than when I started work in 1978. In those days, solvents, acids and oils were all just poured down the drain and into the stormwater. It does not happen anymore, and most of that has been driven by the community. Business and industry are not without blame here, but we have cleaned up our act. We are one of the best countries in the world when it comes to acting on climate change. But we can always do more, and that is what direct action is all about.

Let us look at the algae project at James Cook University in Townsville. The algae attacks and collects carbon dioxide and converts it into a food source and biodiesel. It can be designed to attack any pollutant and remove it from the air. Above all, it is not genetically modified in any way. By using this science, we could build a coal-fired power station, integrate this algae project into its design and get a coal fired baseload power station with zero emissions. Sure, there are costs involved here, but everyone can see that those costs produce tangible, visible and positive outcomes. This government should be backing this project and pushing it as far as it can to ensure that Australia is leading the world in this science. We can clean up our patch and not spend a cent overseas. To spend $3.5 billion of our taxpayer money to buy credits overseas for those people burning our coal is just ridiculous as far as my city is concerned. We can clean up our patch and we can look after ourselves.

There is simply not enough time to discuss the legislation before us in one speech. I object to not being able to examine in detail this tax's effects on the timber industry, the steel industry and all the value-adding industries. I object to not being given enough time to explain Townsville's perspective when it comes to the additional cost to health care, child care, road works, public transport and the cement and building industries. Just about all our food comes in on trucks which are diesel powered and travel on roads. Everything I have just mentioned will cost more under this tax.

For the life of me I cannot understand why we are going down this path. The people to whom I speak in Townsville do not understand why the government is doing this when the Prime Minister and everyone on that side of the House stated clearly before the election that there would be no carbon tax under the government she led or of which they were a part. The people of Townsville do not believe it when the government says that the average cost to a person will be about 20c a week. I do not believe that there is a single person in the country who would believe that.

At that end of the day, this is a bad tax. It tries to be too clever by half and it is so convoluted by design that it cannot possibly work. There are those in my community who do not believe that there is a need to do anything at all, but they are in the minority. However, the vast—and I do mean vast—majority of people feel that, if this tax comes in, they will be losing something in our city and our country. We object to that and we will not be supporting these bills.

In closing, the member for Newcastle said 'the Labor way'. When I was a kid the Labor way was the man standing out the front and talking to people. He fronted up to people. He had a trade background, he worked hard and he was part of it. When I was a young man the Labor way was to lead the way. It was to say things before an election, stand up there and have a go—articulate a position and carry it through. Take the great debates that came from 1983 and the moments of true pride that Labor must have had. Look at what has happened now. There must be people on that side of the House who sit there and shake their heads, wondering what happened that this government can say one thing before an election—everyone who got elected over there said the same thing. Now they are saying the time has come to act and yet they are not prepared to go to the very people they purport to represent and put their names to a ballot paper on this issue. I think you should all hang your heads in shame.

Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before getting into the bulk of my address I would like to address a few of the comments that the member for Herbert made. I think it demonstrates quite clearly the lack of knowledge of what is in some of these bills. The member for Herbert spoke about the price of fuel going up. If there is any mention of passenger vehicles or long-distance road transport vehicles in those bills—

Mr Ewen Jones interjecting—

No, listen. I listened to you.

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

The member for Herbert was heard in silence.

Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If there is any mention of passenger vehicles or long-distance road transport vehicles—the types of vehicles you talked about when you said, 'You're going to strangle Townsville'—in those bills, I will not vote for them. A challenge to you: look in the bills, read what is there and stop spreading this fear that fuel is going to increase dramatically because of these clean energy legislative arrangements.

The other thing that I would like to comment on is that he talked about the mining boom. I think we are all well aware of the impact that the mining boom is having. He also talked about the high dollar. The two things are related. They are having an impact on our community. I would hope that, when we get to debate the contribution in a two-speed economy that the mining industry in boom times may well be able to make towards those others who are struggling, he would have a more constructive view.

What if the climate scientists are right? I am not a climate scientist. I was not very good at science at school and am too old to learn. But what if they are right? What if we avoid the precautionary principle—the warnings that are out there at the moment? What if we do nothing and they are right? It would be okay for the people of Townsville, I guess. It would be okay for me. It would be okay for a lot of us in this room. We will get by. But what about future generations? What about intergenerational equity? What if they are right and there is a tipping point in the oceans, if they are right in terms of quite dramatic events, if they are right about a drying of the Australian continent, if they are right about what could happen in Bangladesh and suddenly millions of people are trying to find somewhere else to live? What if they are right? Given the short-term nature of this debate, we will be all right, but future generations of our people may well have to face very severe consequences in respect of what we do not do. Obviously Australia is not going to create all the changes that revolutionise the world on this issue. We all know that. But we do have to play our role. We are contributors on a per capita basis. We are quite high contributors. I think it is time that we show a little bit of leadership on this.

What if the climate scientists are wrong? The majority of advice and information suggests they are not, but what if they are? What have we done? Nothing that is irreversible, unlike the other consequence. We have probably cleaned up our backyard; made it a bit tidier for people to live; addressed some of the more challenging scientific issues in renewable energy et cetera; and presided over an advancement in wind, water, geothermal, biomass, biofuel and a whole range of renewable energy resource sciences that may well come out of the next 10 years and may well even come out of these bills. I will talk about the funding packages that are actually in the bills. So I am pleased to be part of this debate. I sit on a committee that has just chaired a review of the Murray-Darling Basin. One of the issues that kept coming back to those who served on that committee was some of the decisions that were made in the past, whether in terms of salinity, the Lower Lakes or just the integrity of the river systems themselves. They were political decisions that were all made in the short term for the short-term advantage, and all the similar words would have been spoken.

My vote could be absolutely crucial to this particular issue, and I do not want to be placed in a situation where people look back in 100 years and say: 'These people were warned about this. Why didn't they do something? Oh, it was just short-term politics of the day. They just wanted to avoid it. There was an attempt a few years earlier by a bloke called Turnbull, another bloke called Macfarlane and someone called Wong to try and resolve this issue in a bipartisan way, and then another fellow came along, called Abbott, who could see the benefit of dividing the nation, creating fear and some of the stuff we have heard already, on a very long-term issue. The debate became about a tax and a lie. It wasn't about climate change. It wasn't about climate variability or adaptation. It was about some tax they were going to impose and a lie that someone had told, thinking they might have got a majority in the parliament. Then it suddenly got changed into something else because they didn't get a majority in the parliament and some others said, "Look, if you want to form government, you'd better have a serious look at this issue," and then history as we know it took place: the tax morphed into a piece of legislation that eventually became the emissions trading scheme in a few years time.'

As I said, I am pleased to be part of that process. I was part of the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee. I think it worked very hard. It has been pilloried from outside because of the short-term, knuckle-dragging nature of this particular parliament on some of these longer term issues, but, irrespective of whether I am elected next time or not, it is something that I will remember: being part of a group of people that actually wanted to make a difference, not for themselves and not in the short term but in the longer term.

The Prime Minister has been blamed for changing her mind. That is the cheap politics, and in a sense she has. I am sure that in some ways she would rather have gone to an emissions trading scheme as quickly as possible than go through this convoluted fixed-price arrangement for three years that the Greens and others have pressured upon her. I think that a year, as in the Howard arrangement, would have been sufficient. Even out to two years as in the Turnbull-Macfarlane arrangement with Senator Wong would have been preferable to a three-year arrangement. But, nonetheless, at the end of this it is an emissions trading scheme. It is internationally linked, because the whole objective of the market mechanism is to try to achieve carbon abatement and greenhouse gas emission abatement at the lowest possible price.

The hypocrisy of this debate has been about this issue: which is the cheapest way of getting to five per cent of 1990 levels by 2020—the direct action or a market mechanism that puts a price on emissions and lets the market determine the outcome? Quite obviously, any economist worth his salt has identified that a market mechanism, normally the preferred option of the Liberal-National Party—not necessarily the preferred option of the Labor Party—is the cheapest way of achieving that outcome.

Within my electorate there are people who do not agree with my stance on this particular issue. I just say to those people that I went to the election on this issue. They elected me at the last election on this issue. I introduced a bill in 2008 called the Climate Protection Bill, and my opponents at the last election kept saying: 'This man believes in climate change. He's introduced a bill. It's talking about a market mechanism. It could be either some sort of tax or an emissions trading scheme. He's talking about the precautionary principle and the "what ifs" in a bill introduced before the election.' So for anybody, either within or without the electorate, to say that I have suddenly had some change of mind since the minority government has been formed is quite incorrect. No-one in this place, probably, has spoken more often than me about renewable energy, biofuels, biomass, agriculture and soil carbon.

There are mechanisms in the legislative arrangements—the bills. If there were a simplistic way of identifying soil carbon as the solution to this problem, I would be the first to be on the bandwagon. I have been dealing with some of the conservation and tillage practices since 1977. I probably have the piece of land that has gone the longest of any in Australia being continually cropped but never actually cultivated. There is a build-up in soil carbon there, but it is not of the magnitude that we require to be a major player in this particular issue.

There are opportunities in this bill. There is a revenue stream. Part of that revenue will go into clean energy—$10 billion, an enormous impetus in terms of renewable energy, research and development grants and assistance. There are a whole range of things—real opportunities. And where are those opportunities going to reside? Most of them will be in regional Australia. We are seeing them in Moree, Chinchilla and other parts of Australia at the moment. Algae to fuel, algae to diesel and those sorts of things could be funded out of here in terms of the research, getting the costs down—biomass to biofuels and those sorts of research that are going on internationally. I was recently in Scotland, where they are working on the cell structure of the barley and wheat straw to weaken the lignin in the cell structure so that it can be digested by the enzymes et cetera to achieve a fuel outcome in a shorter period of time and hence rearrange the economics of that particular process. That is where this $10 billion will be used: to assist the transformation to a cleaner energy economy. The big opportunities for longevity and sustainability are in regional Australia. I do not shy away from supporting the general thrust of this reform and I was pleased to be part of it. The other revenue stream will be to what I loosely call the landscape sector, the Carbon Farming Initiative. There is a whole range of biodiversity issues in these bills, one of which is a 15 per cent rebate to encourage people both in the cropping sector and in the grazing sector to change their farming practices to more sustainable, less soil-disturbing practices such as conservation tillage, no till—there is a whole range of descriptions. Those practices are quite possibly the greatest adaptation to climate change we have seen in the last 20 years in agriculture. A lot of people are not doing them. The rebate arrangement that is built into these bills is to encourage those people to get the correct equipment, to encourage them to go somewhere. If the climate scientists happen to be wrong, those people will increase their productivity anyway because they will be better able to deal with climate variability in their cropping and pasture practices.

I am more than happy to be a part of the committee that is looking at this legislation. I think it is a disgrace that the coalition is not looking at the fine detail of these bills. It is just saying, 'No, no, no, we do not want to know what is in the bills; we do not want to modify them.' I am getting a lot of constituents both in the business community and in the farm sector wanting to get to the detail of the bills to remove some of the uncertainties that are there, whether that be about some of the landfill and local government issues, the off-road use of the fuel rebate in local government, the food processing sector or the Western Australian electricity industry. There is a number of issues in these bills. I am going to take the committee seriously. If there are things that do need to be modified in the structure of the bills, let us look seriously at them.

I congratulate the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, Mr Combet, for the work he has put into this legislation. It has been an enormous task. Any minority government that embarks on reform of this nature needs to be congratulated because it is not about today, it is not about the players that are here now, whether it is a Gillard or an Abbott in the main job; it is about the long-term survival of those who have not even been born yet—something that I regard as very important and critical. I think we should ignore some of this short-term negativity that is out there and start to address some of the longer-term issues that will have impacts long after we are gone. (Time expired)

Joanna Gash (Gilmore, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for New England spoke about his knowledge of these clean energy bills and having inside information. Bully for you, Member for New England. We in the coalition cannot even get information on the 400 to 500 biggest polluters. But then you support the government and I do not.

Mr Windsor interjecting—

I listened to you in silence.

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

Order! The honourable member for New England would know that he ought not to interject, as he is in the process of leaving the chamber.

Joanna Gash (Gilmore, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Just over a couple of months ago I received a letter from a young trainee farmhand who works on a dairy farm in Milton. He has been thinking long and hard about how a carbon tax is going to impact on his life and, frankly, he is worried. The thing that struck me was that he was only 16 years old and was actually moved to put pen to paper and to write to his local member. This is what he wrote:

Dear Joanna Gash,

Hi. I am John, a 16 year old boy. I am writing to you as I have a traineeship on a dairy farm at Milton and think that the carbon tax will not be fair on farming with all the prices that will be going up. We have also been hit with the milk price also.

We work very hard. It is a 7 day week, 365 days a year and out in all weather. But we love our jobs and would like to keep it. But if there is no help for what farmers that are left we could all be out of work and that would be hard as I have just started my life in the work force and want to keep my job as a dairy worker.

Thank you.

Young John is not an isolated case. The only difference is that he is just one young person who has expressed openly to me what many of his peers are thinking. The government has been relentlessly repeating the mantra that this tax is necessary, that this tax will help the global environment and that this tax reflects what other countries are doing. The tax is being introduced without bothering to ask the Australian people what they think and despite the fact that it is they who will be paying for it.

This tax is being introduced by a Prime Minister who was selected by stealth, a Prime Minister who is a prisoner to Greens Senator Bob Brown, who everyone can see is calling the shots. He has been made Prime Minister by proxy. Labor's carbon tax has been crafted against the fabricated and imaginary international environment that exists only in the minds of the Greens and Prime Minister Gillard. It is a tax that is enthusiastically supported by the two so-called Independents, who will ultimately have to account to their constituency.

These bills are full of holes. The modelling is incomplete and much of the detail necessary to make an informed opinion is either nonexistent or deliberately withheld from the public. It relies on grand statements not backed up by facts or evidence. The alleged facts that have been presented so far have been widely challenged and are dubious at best. Modelling is based on an unrealistic $20 per tonne when it should be $23 per tonne, according to the government's own advice. The promised green jobs are spoken about only in the vaguest of terms without any specifics being offered whatsoever—no descriptions, no quantities, not even when they will start appearing or in what form. Still this government will not release, as I said earlier, the names of the 400 to 500 companies that will be paying.

This government's record of big-ticket projects is abysmal, so it is little wonder that Australians are suspicious of what this government is saying. They are not stupid and they understand the ramifications of this tax to them and their families. Let me ask the question: are we following the lead of other countries, as the government is trying to tell us? The report of the Productivity Commission provides some clues and reported:

… no country currently imposes an economy-wide tax on greenhouse gas emissions or has in place an economy-wide ETS.

The commission only looked at eight other countries and, importantly, did not examine major competitor countries such as Indonesia, Russia, Brazil, Colombia, South Africa, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Canada. Wayne Swan must explain why he failed to have the commission examine these countries. The fact that our major export competitors do not have a carbon price means that not only will a carbon tax in Australia send Australian jobs offshore but these jobs will still continue pumping out carbon dioxide, albeit from another country. Nothing will be achieved other than jeopardising our economy for nothing more than a gesture.

The report also demonstrates that Australia is not behind other countries in terms of taking action on climate change. The report finds our current abatement efforts are on par with those of the United States and China, yet we want to reward these countries by giving them our manufacturing jobs and penalising our people by increasing our production costs. Other countries are showing that you do not need a carbon tax to take action on climate change, as we in the coalition have said and proved with our policy on direct action.

Treasurer Wayne Swan made the ridiculous claim that Australia was simultaneously in the middle of the pack and in danger of being left behind. Wayne Swan's claims that Australia will be left behind by other countries in the future is wrong because Japan announced in December 2010 an indefinite postponement of its consideration of a cap-and-trade system. The United States has stepped back indefinitely from a cap-and-trade system and President Obama will look to other policies. The United States has reiterated that it would remain outside the Kyoto protocol. Canada dropped any plans for a cap-and-trade system under the minority Harper government and the Conservatives won a majority in the recent election pledging not to introduce a cap-and-trade system. South Korea has delayed carbon trading until 2015, after industry rejected an offer of 90 per cent free permits until an opportune time. Russia, Japan and Canada informed the G8 in May that they would not join a second round of carbon cuts under the Kyoto protocol at the United Nations talks this year.

The Productivity Commission report confirms that any carbon tax or ETS will be passed through to consumers. Since 2007, across Australia electricity prices have increased by an average of 51 per cent; gas prices have increased by an average of 30 per cent; water and sewerage rates have increased by an average of 46 per cent; health costs—hospital, dental and pharmaceuticals—have increased by an average of 20 per cent; education costs—school fees et cetera—have increased by an average of 24 per cent; and rent has increased by 20 per cent. All of that is before the $9 billion a year new carbon tax, which will mean a 10 per cent hike in electricity bills in the first year alone, a nine per cent hike in gas bills in the first year alone, higher marginal tax rates for low- and middle-income earners and a $4.3 billion hit on the budget bottom line. This tax has been set deliberately at an artificially low price to start and will continue to rise and add to the cost of living in the years ahead.

The government's own modelling shows that emissions will increase from 578 million tonnes in 2012 to 621 million tonnes in 2020 despite the carbon tax. In 2020, $3.5 billion of carbon tax revenue will be spent buying 100 million tonnes of carbon credits from overseas. That will grow to 400 million tonnes by 2050, at a cost of $57 billion. By the government's own reckoning this will lower our gross national income per person by something like $5,000 by 2050.

According to the International Energy Agency in 2008, China's output was estimated to make up almost one-quarter of the world's output of carbon dioxide. The United States was not far behind, at just a little over 18 per cent. Those countries sit at first and second place of the world's emitters. Australia sits at 16th place, with 1.6 per cent. China's economy is predicted to grow to $123 trillion by 2040 in today's terms. This is equivalent to three times the economic output of what the whole world produced just in the year 2000. China's emissions are forecast to rise by 500 per cent by 2020. With growth like that how realistic is it to expect that global carbon emissions are going to be reduced? How can we here in Australia make any difference on our own? That is just fantasy.

If Australia immediately ceased to exist, all the carbon dioxide we are putting out now will be replaced by China's present output in the space of less than three months. Carbon dioxide emissions will not diminish at all, but will continue to grow, along with the world's population. This government is hell-bent on making Australian products more expensive and less competitive in the international marketplace, yet will sell materials that will enrich and enlarge our major competitors.

We have every right to be sceptical, if not cautious, over a tax built on deception. Will this carbon tax introduced in Australia alone deliver appreciable change to the global environment? The answer is an emphatic no. Even on the government side there is considerable scepticism. The former climate change minister and current Minister for Finance and Deregulation, Senator Penny Wong, says a carbon tax is a bad idea. She said at a press conference on 3 November 2009:

I have been very upfront about why I think a carbon tax isn’t the most sensible thing for Australia.

Professor Tim Flannery, the government's own expert on climate change, admits that Australia's efforts are so token as to be inconsequential. He said on MTR radio in Melbourne on 25 March this year:

If we cut emissions today, global temperatures are not likely to drop for about a thousand years.

…   …   …

If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as a thousand years because the system is overburdened with CO2 that has to be absorbed and that only happens slowly.

Why then is this government hell-bent on imposing a heavy, permanent burden on the Australian people when, practically speaking, nothing will be achieved?

Labor has promised to compensate polluting industries that are vital to our economy. Instead of the dirty 1,000, that number has been whittled down to less than 400. By definition that could include an organisation like the Shoalhaven City Council in my electorate, which has not been able to cut costs—predicted to be at least $1 million a year—owing to the council's methane recovery plants at their waste sites. Carbon tax costs imposed on the council would be passed onto ratepayers because the council will not be compensated. 'We will return all the money raised to people through the tax mechanism,' said Simon Crean in the Australian on 10 March 2011. But then the government changed its mind. Prime Minister Gillard announced in April 2011 that about only 50 per cent of carbon tax revenue will be going to families as compensation for cost-of-living hikes. Yet at a press conference on 13 April the Prime Minister said:

… millions of Australians will be better off receiving more in assistance than what will be required by them to deal with any price impacts.

By providing more offsets than the price requires, isn't the Prime Minister actually going to encourage consumption?

This has all the hallmarks of a GFC bailout mark 2, when $900 cheques were being thrown around like confetti. This was a policy overreaction that took us from a $22 billion surplus in 2007 to what is today a gross debt of over $197 billion and rising. My concern is that this tax may well make many of our manufactured and export goods less competitive and therefore expose industry to the temptation to move their operations offshore. The natural consequence would be a loss of further jobs. Yet the Prime Minister herself said that direct action is the way to go to keep jobs in Australia, not a tax.

The constituents of Gilmore want jobs. They do not want to see their jobs going overseas. What is the point of compensation if you do not have a job? What is the point of the Prime Minister proudly proclaiming that a basket of groceries will only cost 80c more when you do not even have a job? The rest of the world has overwhelmingly rejected the Australian model of a deep, punitive carbon tax. The coalition has shown that there are other ways of achieving similar outcomes. Why will the government not listen?

Gilmore is made up of two distinct regions. In the north we have Shellharbour, a part of the Illawarra which has grown on the back of heavy manufacturing. The steelworks and the coalmines are dominant industries. Many thousands of smaller businesses support that core activity. They are energy hungry because that is a consequence of the activity that brings wealth to our region. Those industries still sustain the Illawarra through the jobs they have created directly and indirectly—shops, service industries, public servants and so on.

It is a huge and complex social and economic network, but this government wants to turn off the tap. Just a few short weeks ago, BlueScope Steel announced 800 jobs were to go. This was bought about predominantly by tough competition from overseas. This is just going to add more costs to the product. How is making a local product more expensive going to help Illawarra's industry base? Recently Regional Development Australia announced all their projects and not one project was for the Illawarra. Yet June quarter unemployment figures revealed the central Shoalhaven's unemployment rate was 10 per cent, almost double the national average. In some areas, youth unemployment was as high as 35 per cent. In the Shellharbour LGA, the rate was 7.4 per cent. Both were up on the previous year.

I simply cannot see where these thousands of promised, mythical 'green jobs' will be. The Prime Minister keeps talking about them, but cannot or will not provide any detail whatsoever as to when or where they will be created. What is needed in Gilmore is not just compensation for the impact of the carbon cost. We need substantial initiatives to meet the challenge of a changing economic and cultural landscape. What we need is for the Australian people to have a vote on this issue. I call on the Prime Minister to call a very early election.

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

Before calling the next speaker, I remind all members of the provisions of standing order 64 which provide that no member shall be referred to by his or her name.

John Alexander (Bennelong, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

When great governments issue great policies, sometimes mere mortals like us ponder what could possibly have been their inspiration for such vision. My contention in speaking on the Clean Energy Bill 2011 and concurrent legislation is that the Gillard government have drawn their inspiration from one of our great nation's traditions, the Melbourne Cup. This is a fantastic time of year as Australians from across the continent look forward to the familiar sights and sounds of the Spring Racing Carnival leading to the special feeling of anticipation for our race that stops the nation. On 1 November, we will celebrate 150 years since the first race in what has become such an iconic international event.

It began with the best thoroughbreds that Australia could produce, and the legendary Archer winning the first two cups. By 1930, the truest Australian superstar—of course, born in New Zealand—became our great champion, the legendary Phar Lap. Our great race now attracts the greatest thoroughbreds from across the globe with trainers from the Middle East to Ireland to the United States pursuing the ultimate prize. Despite the growth of the race the same general principle still applies that saw its pinnacle at the height of Phar Lap's powers. Competing 35 times in his short life, Phar Lap won an extraordinary 32 races and twice ran second. The only race in which Phar Lap did not place was when he came a very ordinary eighth in the Melbourne Cup of 1931, during the depths of the Great Depression. Our champion had won all 14 races he had competed in that year, providing such great inspiration and hope for the millions of Australians who were doing it tough during those dark economic times.

Due to this great success racing officials decided to weigh down this great stallion with a massive 68 kilograms as he attempted to become the first back-to-back champion since Archer. To put this in perspective, Phar Lap's weight of 68 kilograms was an incredible 24.5 kilograms more than the weight carried by White Nose, the horse that won the race that year. This was simply too much of a burden for our nation's greatest champion. Now, 80 years later, our nation has another great champion, a resource that powers our economy to greatness, that carries the weight of the Australian dream and that provides riches for all. This great champion is not a foal, it is our economy's heart and soul—yes, it is coal. It is our country's greatest natural resource, the rock that drives our economy away from the threats of global depression and that gives us such a magnificent competitive advantage on the world's racetracks.

It is time for inspiration and vision on how best to use this champion resource for the benefit of all. Instead this government is choosing to handicap our nation's great champion to add such a weight through this tax that this industry will be reduced to the very ordinary. Just as Phar Lap's next step was to move overseas to compete, many of our industries will be forced to relocate to another country where they can avoid this tax, this handicap, that eliminates their competitiveness. We have already seen a late scratching in the most mighty of thoroughbreds, BlueScope Steel. She was a fiery competitor that had previously run with steely determination, but now she runs no more and those blue-collar punters who had ridden her wave of success are now left beaten, hoping there is enough coal revenue to fund their dole. The average Aussie punter is forever getting smashed by this government, straining under so many policy failures sired by that disappointing grey from Griffith and damed by the Welsh warmblood of Lalor. This government loves a punt themselves, not on the pokies but on pink batts, school halls, the NBN and an overseas flutter on Malaysia—but not the certainty of Nauru. They like an outsider, all paid for by debt that has spiralled to well over $200 billion. Having learned from their past mistakes, it appears they now punt to lose. Lack of honesty has been a great failing of this government, and that failing has never been greater than in this representation of these so-called clean energy bills. Originally the greatest moral challenge of our time, the policy is then dropped and, subsequently, our Prime Minister looks us in the eye and promises us:

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

But now we have new leadership through a marriage to the Greens—and Bob's your uncle. However, upon investigation, this is not about saving the planet. Under the disguise of an environmental policy, this is tax reform that will stop the nation. The truest words spoken in this room highlight the Prime Minister's real objective, when our leader said of her:

… the Prime Minister has never seen a tax she didn’t like and never had a tax she wouldn’t hike.

This is her Christmas, and it comes every day—a new tax that is so far reaching that it sits on top of every other tax unimpeded and that takes from big businesses, businesses of national importance that create massive amounts of foreign income, and every single one of us in virtually everything we do—taxed. She is a new kind of Robin Hood: she takes from the rich and she takes from the poor! Yes, this tax will get the better of our Phar Lap and all those who punt on her—the tax that never sleeps, that never rests, the tax that can make this Phar Lap of a country, stripped of its ability to run like no other, reduced to the very ordinary. Let us in this place advocate to seek a global solution to this global problem of global warming. Let us not inflict domestic pain for no global gain.

The Prime Minister assumes the role of leading our nation with an oath to well and truly serve the Commonwealth of Australia, her land and her people. Yet this decision to tax our champion, to burden our Phar Lap, for no environmental gain is a crime against our economy and does not 'well and truly serve' our nation. Australia's best interests will be served by developing ways to maintain our champion's ability to run within the new race rules, not by taxing it out of the competition. With a focus on clean coal technology, on emission capture, on sequestration and on carbon farming, we can maintain our current competitive advantage and keep banking our winnings whilst also meeting our environmental targets. This investment in research and development, this embrace of innovation, is what will be in our nation's best interests. This government so lacks credibility that, when they finally get a good runner, they embark on this folly—a tax policy hastily put together without consultation and with little consideration of the consequences. After feeling the heat of community outrage over the imminent surge in power bill prices, they pull out the candies. Because of a claim there will be no injury, they are determined to pay excessive amounts of compensation. The compensation is calculated on some complicated matrix of grocery costs and power bills, but this tax will pervade every single element of our lives.

A local example in my electorate of Bennelong is the balance-sheet impact on the City of Ryde, the main local council in the region, and the flow-on effect to mums and dads in our community. The City of Ryde paid a total of $2.96 million in electricity charges across its entire organisation in the 2009-10 financial year, $1.89 million of which was for street lighting, which generates 39 per cent of the council's greenhouse gas emissions. I am going to take a big leap and presume that my local council is not going to stop lighting up the streets as a result of this carbon tax. I know that Ryde council is a member of the Street Lighting Improvement Program, which is managed by the Southern Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils. This program implements measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by introducing energy-efficient lighting technologies. However, to quote Sam Cappelli, environment manager for the City of Ryde, 'Transition has been slow, and the increased provision of street lighting infrastructure, coupled with popular community expectation of increased night-time light levels, is presenting financial, social and environmental constraints for the City of Ryde and its community.' So a carbon tax is applied to council's highest expense, meaning that increased revenues will have to be found from somewhere to pay for it.

Local government does not receive compensation. Their highest source of income is from rates, which are locked in for the next four years under an agreement with the state government. The second highest source of revenue is from community tenants, primarily those using sport and recreational facilities. These tenants—the football and cricket clubs that local mums and dads take their kids to on weekends—will inevitably face a sharp increase in their costs, leading to major pass-through costs to those same mums and dads just for giving their kids some time to enjoy the Australian rite of organised sport at the local park or pool.

In essence, this policy dictates that we tax the cheap and dirty stuff and that the revenues raised subsidise the much higher cost of the expensive and clean stuff, and pay compensation for these higher charges that are passed on to the consumer. The logic is that this legislation will motivate less use of the cheap and dirty stuff, leading to greater demand for the clean stuff that is several times more expensive to produce. Let us just pretend for a moment—a wild, speculative, insane moment—that this government is actually successful in this policy. Let us pretend that, as a result, there is 50 per cent less demand for cheap and dirty stuff, meaning that 50 per cent less tax revenue will be raised. As a result, there is significantly higher demand for more income to offset the increased use of the much more expensive clean stuff and, therefore, the need for exponentially more compensation. But where does this money come from?

To offset reduced global coal burning we would need the much more expensive renewable energy so that the costs went up proportionally. The less coal we burn, the less tax we raise and the less money we have to spend. The more renewables we use, the higher the costs and the more compensation needed. It would appear that the government has not contemplated any level of success in this purported environmental policy.

Debate interrupted.