Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance and Administration) Share this | Hansard source

is that the European scheme has been a monumental failure. The Europeans have demonstrated that you do have to be careful; you do have to plan these things with great care and consideration if you actually want them to achieve the objectives you seek without doing enormous damage to your economy. The European system has not worked because they handed out too many permits, and therefore it has achieved none of its objectives. It is universally regarded as a joke.

We have taken advantage of the experience of Europe to ensure that we do plan properly and carefully to put in place a cap and trade system that not only achieves the objectives of containing our emissions but does so in a way that does not trash the Australian economy in the way that the Labor Party and the Greens overtly intend to do. The proposition that you come out and say, in the Labor Party’s case, ‘Let’s just cut emissions by 60 per cent from 1990 levels by 2050’ or, in the case of the Greens, by 80 per cent by 2050, is absurd. They have no idea how they would achieve that objective. They have had no idea of the economic implications of such propositions, which anyone can tell would do enormous damage to this economy and the workers that the Labor Party professes to represent in so many energy-intensive industries across this country.

So it is our view that if you set up an emissions-trading system carefully, properly and with sensitivity to the structure of the Australian economy, it should let the market determine and bring forward the supply response in terms of renewable energy, nuclear energy and geothermal energy. The point is that if you put a price on carbon and allow the market to work, that will render viable the alternative energy sources that can then come on stream to meet demand for energy at the price that is set according to the operation of the emissions-trading scheme. So we have great confidence that, carefully planned—and in the capable hands of the coalition government, which has proved itself a capable manager of the Australian economy—an emissions-trading scheme can be safely and securely put in place that will not do untold damage to the Australian economy.