Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

And Family First. Take a bit of advice from me, Senator Conroy: we have five minutes to go and this bill will not come to conclusion. If I were you, I would go over and see the Prime Minister during the lunch break and say, ‘Listen, we are on the verge of a tragedy here.’ There is nothing political about this. We are marching down to one of the greatest disasters we are ever going to see. It can be stopped. I suspect it is not being stopped because of some sort of fear among the coalition and the Labor Party—‘If we pull out of here our credentials on climate change will be damaged, so we’ve gotta both march over the cliff like a pack of lemmings’—that there will be a disaster.

Let me address something that Senator Brown said. He said that this is in law; the law is operating as now. Collectively, it went under our radar. It was taken out of T1 and put into another tax package and it slipped under the radar and got through. So it does not matter what we do in this place, we cannot change the law unless the law is changed in the House of Representatives. That is the reality of life. I have seen the Clerk on a number of occasions and have tried to think of ways through this. But, unless you can get support for your amendment in the lower house, then it is not going to work. You can do anything you like—you can scream, you can shout, you can shout it from the hilltops—but it is not going to work.

What we have left is to have a Senate inquiry. It will be up to Barnaby Joyce, Senator Heffernan and me to invite the sugar industry and the banana industry down and to talk to the dairy industry. It will go further than an inquiry, and the inquiry will be as good or as bad as we let it be. I am not a member of that particular committee but I will certainly be a participating member. Senator Joyce and I will go around Queensland saying: ‘Hey, there’s a Senate inquiry. This is your opportunity, your big chance, to stop these managed investment schemes and carbon sinks.’