Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That, in respect of the proceedings on the Clean Energy Legislation (Carbon Tax Repeal) Bill 2013, the Ozone Protection and Synthetic Greenhouse Gas (Import Levy) Amendment (Carbon Tax Repeal) Bill 2013, the Ozone Protection and Synthetic Greenhouse Gas (Import Levy) (Transitional Provisions) Bill 2013, the Ozone Protection and Synthetic Greenhouse Gas (Manufacture Levy) Amendment (Carbon Tax Repeal) Bill 2013, the True-up Shortfall Levy (General) (Carbon Tax Repeal) Bill 2013, the True-up Shortfall Levy (Excise) (Carbon Tax Repeal) Bill 2013, the Climate Change Authority (Abolition) Bill 2013, the Customs Tariff Amendment (Carbon Tax Repeal) Bill 2013, the Excise Tariff Amendment (Carbon Tax Repeal) Bill 2013, the Clean Energy (Income Tax Rates and Other Amendments) Bill 2013, and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (Abolition) Bill 2013, so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the following from occurring:

(1) the resumption of debate on the second readings of the bills being called on together;

(2) at the conclusion of the second reading debate or at 12 noon, Thursday, 21 November 2013, whichever is the earlier, a Minister being called to sum up the second reading debate, then without delay, (a) one question being put on any amendments moved to motions for the second readings by non-Government Members, and (b) one question being put on the second readings of the bills together;

(3) if the second readings of the bills have been agreed to, messages from the Governor-General recommending appropriations for any of the bills being announced together;

(4) the consideration in detail stages, if required, on all the bills being taken together for a period not exceeding 60 minutes at which time any Government amendments that have been circulated in respect of any of the bills shall be treated as if they have been moved together with (a) one question being put on all the Government amendments, (b) one question being put on any amendments which have been moved by non-Government Members, and (c) any further questions necessary to complete the detail stage being put;

(5) at the conclusion of the detail stage, one question being put on the remaining stages of all the bills together; and

(6) any variation to this arrangement to be made only by a motion moved by a Minister.

The reason I move this motion is obviously because the government wishes to deal with the carbon tax legislation this week. On Thursday at noon the first second reading vote will be called on for a ballot and then there will be consideration in detail, and all stages will be finished by the end of this week.

I assume that the opposition will in this debate continue to run the arguments about why the carbon tax should not be repealed, which will surprise many members of the public who voted for a change of government on September7 because the election was a referendum on the carbon tax.

The motion that I move today is a very straightforward debate management motion as we call them. This allows the House to have full knowledge of the process by which they will be able to debate this legislation but with the sure understanding that it will be completed at a particular time.

I would be very surprised if the Labor Party opposed this debate management motion. I say that because the list of speakers that the Labor Party have put forward for the carbon tax legislation is hardly exhaustive—in fact most members of the Labor caucus have not listed themselves for debate on the carbon tax repeal bills. You would have thought if Labor had planned to make this their cause celebre for the next three years that every member of the Labor caucus would loyally list themselves for debate on the carbon tax repeal bills.

It seems rather passing strange that not that many members of the Labor Party caucus have put their names to this speaking list. I guess of course the reason for that would be that very few of them want to be associated with a political party and a debate that denies the will of the people.

On September 7 it was a very clear election result: this side of the House won 90 seats. I do not really need to remind the parliament, because we won so many seats that we spill over onto the opposition side of the House. Some of my colleagues are very generously sitting on the other side of the House because there are so many more members of the coalition than Labor. That would suggest that Labor lost the election. Labor won 55 seats and there are five crossbenchers.

Labor achieved its worst election result since 1903—their worst primary result. They had their worst Senate result since the Senate was increased to 12 senators per state in 1984, so the message that I would be picking up is that probably they lost the election, and the referendum of the election was on the carbon tax. Nobody could deny—and you were part of those great debates—that the coalition made it abundantly clear to the Australian public over a four-year period that we would not support a carbon tax and that, once the collapse of the Copenhagen talks was apparent, that the whole atmosphere about emissions trading schemes, carbon taxes and dealing with climate change had occurred.

The coalition went to the election with a policy of direct action—a policy that was supported by the Australian public. Why do the Australian public support direct action? They support it, because they know that even if you believe or do not believe in climate change being induced by humans, the changes that we would make to the direct action plan are good for the environment anyway. Nobody would deny that we need to use better technology in producing the goods and services that run our economy. Nobody would deny that it is better to plant more trees and no-one would deny that it is more important to have better farming practices than less important.

As a result, the Australian public think to themselves at the election: 'We know with the coalition we going to get a direct action policy and that will improve the environment whether you believe in climate change being human induced or not. With the Labor Party, they have a carbon tax, which they fibbed about in the 2013 election.' And, quite rightly, the opposition has made it one of their signature tunes throughout the last parliament that we would abolish it.

So today, we turn up to the House. We have a debate management motion to debate the carbon tax this week and to end that debate on Thursday, which will have given many days of debate in this parliament on whether the carbon tax should be repealed. Honestly, does anyone in the Labor Party need to pore through the documentation to determine whether they are in favour or against a carbon tax? Surely, these debates have been around every parameter of the parliament and the Australian public for four years.

Everyone knows their position. The Liberal Party and the National Party are in favour of abolishing the carbon tax, because we want to reduce electricity prices and we do not want the cost of living to be needlessly more expensive than it already is. Therefore if we abandon the carbon tax and reduce electricity prices, this will flow through the entire economy and help reduce cost of living pressures. That is what the Australian public voted for on September 7 and that is what the coalition government will deliver by passing the carbon tax repeal bills this week.

It will not surprise me if the Leader of the Opposition jumps to his feet and opposes this debate management motion and reaffirms his commitment—

Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Families and Payments) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's a gag.

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You would know—to keeping the carbon tax in place, keeping prices high, keeping electricity prices high. As a politician I might grant myself the indulgence momentarily to say that if the Labor Party want to fight the next election on the carbon tax again, they should go right ahead. I do not think the Australian public in three years time will be thanking the Labor Party for having another debate, another election campaign, about the carbon tax, which they rejected quite empirically in the election on 7 September and have rejected in every published poll for many, many years. As those opposite have said on many occasions, the carbon tax has destroyed many leaders of both political parties, whether it was an emissions trading scheme or a carbon tax.

This debate management motion will allow a full debate in the House of Representatives on the issue of the repeal of the carbon tax. I look forward to that debate and I look forward to hearing the Leader of the Opposition, if he wishes to jump up and speak against this debate management motion, reconfirming how out of touch Labor have become from their working-class roots, their working-class base. They want to keep prices high for working families, I suppose to please the commentariat in the press gallery, the commentariat amongst the inner city electorates—not like the member for Port Adelaide's electorate. He must be scratching his head about why his party want to keep the cost of living going up when there are so many difficulties in his electorate of Port Adelaide. But I suppose Labor want to stick closely to the inner urban voters, the academics and the commentariat who think this is a do or die issue for Labor, whereas Australian families, Australian businesses, trade-exposed industries, farmers and rural and regional Australians all know that if we are going to improve our economy, grow our economy, provide jobs, protect our industries from overseas competition, we have to do so by abolishing the carbon tax. You stick to the inner city elites if you wish too. You stick with them and if you do that you will stay in opposition for a very long time.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the motion be agreed to. I call the manager of government business—

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you very much—

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

of opposition business.

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I prefer the first, but that will do.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I decline to give it to you.

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Who would have thought that after four years of hearing those opposite constantly suspend standing orders so they could talk about carbon pricing they would now bring a motion to this House to suspend standing orders, to shut down debate about pricing carbon, to shut down debate about there being a limit on pollution. That is exactly what the resolution in front of us does. It is not there to manage debate, as the Leader of the House kept referring to—as a debate management motion. It is here to shut down debate. It is here to prevent debate and to gag debate, to make sure that the long list of people who have put their names forward wanting to speak on this debate are denied the chance to do so.

There was an interesting claim from the Leader of the House. He said that there are not many names on the list as to how many people want to speak on this. He did not read the final thing that the whips put on there which says, 'More names are available and will be added.' That is the normal practice of the whips. The fact is that what the Leader of the House is saying is that after an entire election campaign where they claimed and their members claimed that they wanted to come into this House and talk about this issue they are going to deny that opportunity, and deny the members on this side the opportunity to even contribute to the debate. Where is the urgency in this? The Prime Minister himself went to business and said he did not believe these bills were about to be carried. The Prime Minister would have an impact. Yet the manager of government business, the Leader of the House, flatly refuses to allow members of this House to even be able to put their views on the record. This is not an ordinary way of managing debate in any way, shape or form.

Go through the sorts of ideas that the Leader of the House has put forward—and we respect that he is new to the job—but he has put forward that all non-government amendments will be voted on as one. So if we have a circumstance where there are members of the crossbench who put forward amendments to the same clause that are different to the amendments put forward by the opposition, we will vote on those amendments as one block. We actually have a situation where the government have put forward a resolution where contradictory amendments get voted on together. It is absolutely procedurally impossible for that to be implemented.

We have a motion from the person who is meant to lead debate in this House which, if followed through, will create a possibility within this House that we get contradictory amendments to the same bill at the exact same moment. We have had situations previously where debate has been sought to be managed and where it has sought to be managed in the ordinary event it happens which is after there has been a long and protracted debate, not as we have today where it is being gagged after only one person has spoken. We have only had one speech on these bills.

We have a circumstance at the moment where the other place is not even meeting yet we have this strange cry for urgency from the Leader of the House. He is wanting to do one thing and one thing only—that is, shut the debate down. But he is doing so in a way that procedurally makes a farce of the entire debate here. How can we have a circumstance where the House is dealing with a resolution which, if carried, says contradictory amendments will be dealt with in the same vote? How do you do that? How do you have a circumstance where the same clause gets amended in two different ways simultaneously? How does the House actually deal with that? I went through Practice and, unsurprisingly, there is no precedent for this because, unsurprisingly, no-one has ever attempted something as absurd as what the Leader of the House has just brought forward. No-one has ever tried to have contradictory amendments dealt with in the same breath. Yet that is how we are meant to deal with this—on crazy urgency but something that the Prime Minister has said is not going to be dealt with until mid next year.

There is one reason that the Leader of the House would want to shut down debate and that is the embarrassment of carrying forward an argument that no economists agree with, that no scientists agree with—and I would love to see what was in the Minister for the Environment's incoming government brief—and that they know no sensible advice can say has merit as an argument. And when you are dealt with a circumstance where everywhere you look the policy does not have merit, what is the one option open to you? Shut down the debate altogether. Shut down the debate, shut down the argument and shut down the opportunity for members of this parliament, including members on each side, who ran this argument and ran it hard during the election campaign, even to put their views on the table.

The Leader of the House has already wasted no time in moving the gag, in preventing members from speaking and in preventing—

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's a debate management motion!

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

He says again 'the debate management motion'. I wish he could say it with a straight face because the Leader of the House knows exactly what an affront to democratic debate this is! He knows exactly what it means when you put the House in a circumstance where contradictions are meant to be voted on together. He knows exactly what it means when people who spoke about it and told their consistencies that they would have something to say on this issue are going to be denied that exact opportunity here in the parliament.

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They've got all week !

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

He says they have all week—how much time has he set aside today for debate on this issue? How much time in the Notice Paper is set aside for debate on this issue? Are there even two hours set aside for debate on this issue today? I think you will find it falls short of even that. And when he says, 'We've got all week,' what that means is that if the next two days are anything like the paucity of time we have set aside today we will see the vast majority of members of parliament not being allowed to put their case on these bills—the vast majority of members of parliament not being allowed to have their voice even heard within the parliament.

Now, they have a big majority. They have a lot of members of that side of the House, and the Leader of the House kept referring to it. But there is a reason why they do not want to hear any of them speak. You wonder how many Jaymez Diazes are lurking over there who they want to make sure cannot be heard! You want to make sure how many members over there will give a first speech and then will be hidden under a rock—the invisibility cloak of the Minister for Immigration gets shared around on members of that side of the House.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! I would remind the Manager of Opposition Business that he is going perilously close to reflecting on members.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The motion that we have in front of us is a motion that will deny people from even having their case heard, and I do not know what reasons the Leader of the House could have not to want members on his side of the House to be heard.

Certainly, members on this side of House want the chance to be able to hold this government to account, want the chance to be able to put our side of the case and want the chance to be able to argue what all the expert advice packs in and what I have very little doubt the incoming government brief that the Minister for the Environment wants to hide—what that might have been able to reflect on. The culture of secrecy which is pervading and which has reached the floor of this parliament is there for one very simple reason, because if you are confident of your arguments you do not need to shut debate down. If you are confident of your arguments you do not need to gag everyone at every chance you get. If you are confident of your arguments then you do not find a circumstance where you get the Leader of the House walking in with a resolution like this. And if you are confident of your arguments and you are running an orderly government you do not end up with a resolution that at its heart has the chaotic concept that contradictory amendments would be voted on together.

In the history of this parliament no-one has ever previously floated that contradictory amendments would be voted on at the same moment. This is the first time we have seen it, but it is not the first time we have seen that Leader of the House try to shut down the debate. This parliament should resist—

Mr Pyne interjecting—

You would move that I no longer be heard, probably!

This resolution should be rejected, and members of parliament certainly, if there is any meaning to democracy in this chamber, should at the very least be given the opportunity to put their views.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the motion be agreed to.