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

My question is to the Prime Minister. I remind her of the Treasurer's statement in the House yesterday that:

… one of the foundations of growth in the 21st century is putting a price on carbon …

If pricing carbon is the key to unlocking growth, why does the government's own modelling show that her carbon tax reduces GDP growth every year, to at least 2050, by a cumulative reduction of over $1 trillion?

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the Leader of the Opposition for his question, and we end the week as we started it—with the opposition back on their campaign of fear, their mendacious claim to try and scare the Australian people about the impact of carbon pricing. All of these claims come from a leader of the opposition that brought you the statements that Whyalla would be wiped off the map, the coal industry would shut down and roasts would cost $100.

To the Leader of the Opposition: he ought not to verbal the Treasurer; the Treasurer yesterday went through a number of factors which, in combination, bring us economic growth. Put simply, we have to be ready for the challenges of the future. We live in an era of remarkable change. We are in the area of the world that is changing the most. It is the area of the world undergoing a profound transformation which, in its size and scale and speed, leaves the industrial revolution in its wake.

When you are living in an era of change, you can either decide to be ready for that change or sit and do nothing—or, even worse, pine for the past and not be ready for that change. Undoubtedly, one of the things that is changing in our world is that people are dealing with climate change and tackling carbon pollution. Provinces in China are, South Korea is and nations in our region are moving. And we have a choice for our economy: do we wait till the final moment and have a huge dislocation in our economy to try and catch it up to what will then be required by the world, or do we have the most efficient transformation possible at the lowest cost?

The Leader of the Opposition has endorsed a target of reducing carbon pollution by five per cent by 2020. That, supposedly, is bipartisan policy. You then ask yourself the question: if we are going to get there, does it pay to start now or leave it to 2019? Well, common sense tells you: the sooner you act, the easier the transition will be.

Then the other question you ask yourself is: what is the most efficient way of doing it? The Liberal Party, before it was led by this Leader of the Opposition, believed in a market mechanism to achieve that transition, as do we. The Liberal Party of Prime Minister John Howard believed that. It is truly to be regretted that this Leader of the Opposition has driven the Liberal Party into climate change denial and extremes, and that is what is represented by his question today.