Alan Eggleston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I note that the Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Wong, has followed the coalition’s approach of waiting to see where the rest of the world is going before deciding targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions. But the question is: why does the government continue to rush the introduction of their own emissions trading scheme without waiting to see the outcome of the meeting of all countries being held in Copenhagen late next year and the detail of what the new United States President, Barack Obama, will want to see implemented?

The coalition has long warned that the government’s rushed 2010 deadline will lead to a flawed model that will damage Australian industry and employment in this country. Likely to greatly influence the impact infrastructure can have in the years ahead is the design and timing of the government’s planned emissions trading scheme. To this end an effective emissions trading scheme must be designed to protect our export and import competing industries until the rest of the world has signed up to a course of action. However, as it stands today, the Rudd government’s preferred design for an emissions trading scheme would effectively impose billions of dollars of additional tax on those Australian import and export competing industries which are high users of energy ahead of any commitment by our major trade competitors to sign up to such a scheme. This surely makes no sense.

The proposal for an emissions trading scheme is a structural change of major proportions. The opposition has met with many companies over the last two months—concrete, zinc, lime, steel, energy, metal works, paper waste, dairy and many more—and all confirm that the government’s determination to heavily tax the emissions of these export and import competing industries, irrespective of what the rest of the world is doing, is a very reckless action indeed.

We must be very careful not to shoot ourselves in the foot by letting industries close and move offshore or by having resource projects that never materialise. Woodside has made the point that if the cost of the ETS is too high there will be no further gas developments by them off the North West Shelf. In all of these cases jobs will head overseas. The Rudd government must defer the politically inspired start date of 2010 until we have some idea of what the rest of the world decides to do late next year in Copenhagen and what the new United States President intends to do.

As well, we must have some feel for the impact of the financial meltdown currently affecting the global economy on Australia’s real economy and the capacity of Australian industry to cope with a new tax. The revelation that the government’s economic modelling takes no account of the global financial meltdown absolutely beggars belief and leaves the exercise dead in the water.

The government also just assumes that the rest of the world will sign up to a global emissions reduction scheme and it did not even bother to model the cost to Australia of pursuing a scheme in haste ahead of the rest of the world. After all, it was the Prime Minister who told us just two and a half weeks ago that the world as we know it has changed in the wake of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. And may I say that it reveals much about the Rudd government’s ideological rush to implement an emissions trading scheme by an artificial 2010 date that they are rushing to put this in place in total defiance of world economic conditions. Australian industries can— (Time expired)

Question agreed to.