Ian Campbell (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, that is four words, Senator Kemp. For 11 years they have been saying the four words ‘national emissions trading scheme’, but they are no closer to telling us what it is.

We know that if you have a trading scheme you will have a price on carbon. The last time we heard from the Labor Party about a price on carbon was when they were in power. The then environment minister, Senator John Faulkner, now sits, a lonely figure, on the back bench with the coffee plunger he inherited from Cheryl Kernot and the scars he inherited from his flirtation with Mark Latham. The only thing he has left in terms of his failed policies, let alone his failed allegiances with Kernot and Latham, is his carbon tax. He came into this place just over 11 years ago—he sat where Senator Abetz now sits—and proposed a carbon tax. Of course, the political flak flew within hours of him proposing a carbon tax. He had come back from a climate change conference in Bonn. He had decided that a carbon tax was the answer. He came back from Bonn all brave—having sat in the first-class section of an aeroplane—and said: ‘Let’s have a carbon tax for Australia. We’ll lead the world.’ Of course, greater minds and greater political thinkers than Senator Faulkner—and there are a lot of those around the place—said, ‘You’d better go quiet on the carbon price.’

You at least have to give credit where it is due. Senator Faulkner had the guts to say, ‘We need a carbon tax and a carbon price.’ But that was the last time Labor said anything specific. Ever since then, for 11 long years in opposition—not long enough, I say—they have been talking about a national emissions trading scheme. The closest we got to that came not from the lazy sods opposite who call themselves an opposition but from Roger Wilkins, the former head of the Cabinet Office in New South Wales under the Labor government of Mr Carr. To his credit, Roger Wilkins worked away with his state comrades for a number of months and they came up with a design for a national emissions trading scheme. Labor have not signed on to it federally; they have not done any work like this.

Roger Wilkins got the states together and they launched this scheme. You will recall, Mr Deputy President, that the Premier of Queensland, your home state, said: ‘We’re not going to be part of Roger Wilkins’s New South Wales policy. We’re out.’ They were out by, I think, lunchtime. Then Alan Carpenter figured that it would be very bad for Western Australia because it would kill jobs in WA—just as Mr Beattie had figured that it was going to kill jobs in Queensland—and he pulled out. So, at the state level, the best the Labor Party has been able to come up with in terms of a trading scheme is a document that the two big resource-rich states pulled out of within 12 hours. We are yet to see Mr Rudd come up with a policy. What is the best thing he can offer the Australian people after 11 years of lazy opposition? What are they going to do this weekend? ‘Let’s have a summit. Let’s have a meeting.’ Talk about lazy!

I would just like to correct the record in relation to the US not ratifying the Kyoto protocol. There was a vote by the United States Senate on what was called the Byrd-Hagel amendment. It was a vote on Mr Gore’s proposal to ratify the Kyoto protocol, and it went down 95 votes to nil. Do you know who were the great President Bush supporters who voted against ratifying the Kyoto protocol? Senator Edward Kennedy, Senator Joe Lieberman, Senator John Kerry—all those people. It was not some sort of Bush conspiracy. The Democratic Party of the United States knew that signing the Kyoto protocol would be bad for the jobs of United States citizens, just as our government recognised it would be bad for our citizens. (Time expired)