Mary Fisher (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak against the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009 [No. 2] and related bills. About three months ago, I voted against the same package of bills, because I was very conscious of the Prime Minister’s promise to bring to the Australian people evidence based policy. For example, on the 7.30 Report on 27 November 2007, the Prime Minister said, ‘I believe in evidence based policy, not just sort of grand statements.’ I voted against this package of bills three months ago because they are still not evidence based policy. They are lots of grand statements—worse than that, they are irresponsible and reckless statements. I voted against these same bills three months ago, conscious of comments made by Minister Wong on 10 March this year, when she said, ‘We are building a vehicle that will take us to the future. Some people want it to be a Ferrari, but if you can’t have the Ferrari would you really have no vehicle at all?’ I voted against these same bills three months ago, because I did not understand—and I still do not understand—the minister’s vision for the future or the Prime Minister’s vision for our future with this package of CPRS bills. As for a vehicle; no, it need not be a Ferrari but it does have to be fit for the purpose. A vehicle has to be capable of taking us from A to B. This bill is not that. In fact, if we want to talk about vehicles, this package of bills is—no disrespect to Doctor Who—more or less a Tardis. It is more like a Tardis to take us to the minister’s fanciful future and the government’s fanciful future.

What is the Prime Minister’s evidence based policy really trying to do? What is he really trying to do? What is Rudd Labor really trying to do with this package of CPRS legislation? How do we do it, and does this proposed set of solutions fix the problem? That is what evidence based policy is all about. Is the problem that the climate is changing? Is that what we are trying to fix? The climate has always changed and it always will. Is man causing our climate to change? I do not know. I really do not know. I do not know that the Prime Minister or the minister knows. But I certainly do know that the evidence—to the extent that the government has allowed it to come into the public arena—does not convince me. But I really do not know. So let us just say, ‘I don’t know our role in our changing climate.’

Let us say that we give the planet the benefit of the doubt and we decide to manage the risk of our climate changing and the prospect that man can somehow help. In that case, the role of evidence based policy is to decide whether or not the solution we are proposing will actually work. Whatever we do with our wonderful country and our emissions, when Australia contributes about 1.4 per cent to emissions globally how can the Prime Minister expect to convince the Australian public that this carbon pollution reduction scheme will have any effect on global emissions? He has not shown that. If the aim is to reduce global emissions, how will the package represented by these CPRS bills achieve that? The Prime Minister has not shown us any evidence based path to prove that. He has shown us that there will be bad side effects, like costs to jobs, lower real wages over time and increased costs to consumers.

As for Minister Wong’s Tardis to take us to her future, let’s use her analogy. If it is a vehicle, we must be going on a journey. So we have to know: from where are we going today and where is the government going to take us? What is A, your starting point; and what is B, your destination? The Australian people should be concerned that Minister Wong’s B, her destination, her future, is not even on a map. And it is fanciful to think that this package of CPRS bills is the way to get there. What about the obstacles and hazards along the way? That is what you think about when you go on a journey. You think about how much it is going to cost you—how much it is going to cost you to fill your tank, how much it is going to cost you in time out of work perhaps—to take this journey. You factor in how long you want it to take.

I voted against these bills in their current form because they are not evidence based policy and because the CPRS package is more a Tardis than any sort of vehicle that is ‘fit’ for the supposed purpose that the government would have us believe it would achieve. Rudd Labor are again getting away with being reckless with the truth. It is not telling us what this package of CPRS bills will do and it is also mute on what it will not be doing. It will be all Australian pain for little to no global gain. What role does evidence have in that? The Prime Minister would have us believe that all the evidence points to his package of CPRS legislation; but it just points to his ineptitude and incompetence. The current package representing the scheme is reckless and flawed. The process has been mismanaged and mishandled by the government from the start. How about telling us about the jobs it will cost, about the lower real wages over time, about the cost to consumers and about how it will export carbon? Why do not we hear that? We do not hear that, because the Rudd Labor government are very good at censoring its critics.

At the moment well-intentioned bureaucrats effectively censor what the opposition is able to send to Australian electorates under the publicly funded communications allowance. So, if I want to send out, for example, Hansard of this speech today as a component of the publicly funded communications allowance, I would be pretty jolly wise to first get my speech censored by the bureaucrats. Given that the banned words—or the words that might as well come back blacked out—include ‘disgraceful’, ‘flawed’, ‘dreadful’, ‘inept’, ‘mismanagement’, ‘reckless’, ‘incompetence’ and ‘irresponsible’—I think much of this speech will already be censored by the bureaucrats. But get over it, Senator Mary Jo, what about the experts who should be in this debate? CSIRO: censored! It censors itself by its internal processes and the supposed public research agency process by which it arranges with the government how it will handle the release of research.

Effectively, the CSIRO censored Dr Clive Spash earlier this year. He was told, essentially, that he could not publish his research on the economic underpinning of the carbon trading scheme versus other options. He was reportedly told in February this year that, provided he got his research peer reviewed, it could be released publicly. He got international peer review. Once cleared, he was still told that it could not be published because of ‘political sensitivities’. Science Minister Carr says scientists should have freedom of expression and that this Rudd Labor government will allow the publication of scientific research provided it has been peer reviewed, yet he somehow allows research within CSIRO to be censored due to ‘political sensitivities’. That is why, thus far, Rudd Labor seems to be getting away with not having to tell people what the CPRS should do versus what it will or will not do.

What will it not do? The government tries to say that it will not cost jobs. The government tries to say that jobs may move from one part of the economy to another, but that the CPRS package will not cost jobs. The trouble is that the evidence is that, in order to maintain an assumption that jobs will not be lost in the economy overall, the government’s modelling, done by Treasury, has to assume a fall in real wages over time. It assumes lower real wages over time—lower real wages than they would otherwise be, were it not for this package of CPRS legislation. I refer to questioning in the Senate Economics Legislation Committee on 29 May, when respected economist Dr Brian Fisher, formerly of ABARE said:

… what the Treasury has done is to make an assumption that, if we take the full economy, for every job that is lost in one place there will be another job of some description elsewhere.

He went on to say:

… to make that work what both the Treasury and I have done in the national modelling is to allow the real wages of workers to fall. We have held total employment constant but to allow that to occur we have allowed real wages to fall.

So, real wages will have to be lower than they otherwise would be, without a CPRS, in order to maintain the government’s claim that jobs will not be lost.

Let us look at what else the package of CPRS bills will not do. We do not hear from the government about what important things it will not do, but we hear from other places about issue No.1—global food security. Ban Ki-moon, on 27 January 2008, said:

During 2008, a chain reaction pushed up food prices so high that basic rations were beyond the reach of millions of people. By the end of the year, the total number of hungry people in our world approached an intolerable one billion.

What is Australia going to do to ensure our contribution to feeding ourselves—our ‘big Australia’ that the Prime Minister is very keen to build—as well as the rest of the world? This CPRS does not address that. Indeed it takes things in the opposite direction. Farmers have already reduced their greenhouse emissions by some 40 per cent since 1990. Around the world, food prices rose 140 per cent between 2002 and 2008, making food more expensive for those who, arguably, need it most and can least afford to pay for it. Changes in our climate and emissions trading—what place do they have in ensuring the production of our food and the security of our food?

What place does carbon have? Accept that pollution goes with carbon. What about the fuel for fires? It will be 43 degrees in Adelaide today, most likely. It is rather hot in South Australia and rather hot in some other states. What has happened since the tragic bushfires in Victoria to relieve the carbon load? Not enough. In any one year, emissions from wildfires in this country could amount to some 30 per cent of Australia’s net emissions for that year. In fact, the tragic Victorian bushfires would have contributed, had they been taken into account, some 20 per cent of Australia’s global emissions for that year. And guess what? Carbon emissions from wildfires are not taken into account in net emissions globally—not in Australia, not elsewhere. This is for a range of reasons but, given the amount of carbon contributed to the atmosphere by wildfires and bushfires, why is that so in the Prime Minister’s world of supposedly evidence based policy?

What about water? What about water for our food production and security? Not only is Rudd Labor letting state Labor governments get away with not doing enough to reduce the carbon fuel for bushfires; Rudd Labor is letting state Labor governments get away with not managing water as the national asset that it must be and should be. Rudd Labor is letting Labor states, for example my state of South Australia, hide behind the charade of domestic water restrictions and the charade of a High Court challenge, pitting states against states, instead of delivering a genuine national plan to manage the Murray-Darling and scarce water resources.

Rudd Labor is letting Labor states hide behind domestic water restrictions, which—says the boss of Minister Wong’s National Water Commission, Ken Matthews—when imposed initially may be followed by a period of reduced use of water but which, after a period of time will trend up, as people get what he called ‘restriction fatigue’ and demand for water ‘hardens’, because we live in first world cities in first world countries and we work out that there is a lowest usage point below which cannot reasonably be expected to go, with or without water restrictions. State Labor governments, particularly in my state of South Australia, have not proved that any sort of water restrictions will save water for Adelaide or will save the Murray. They cannot, because they do not—and they know they do not. Water restrictions are instead a smokescreen for Labor government inaction on properly collecting, storing, using, reusing and appropriately pricing water—the so-valuable asset that it is.

The CPRS totally misses other components that go into producing and securing Rudd Labor’s ‘big Australia’s’ food supply and the food for the world. It totally misses on delivering on any evidence based policy. This package of CPRS bills is not that. This package of CPRS bills, far from being a Ferrari, is battling to be a vehicle that is fit for the supposed purpose for which the government says it is designed. It is, unfortunately, little better than a Tardis that does not fit in our current world—leaving aside whatever Minister Wong fantasises for our future.

Opposition spokesman, Ian Macfarlane, said earlier today that the package of CPRS bills will change the way that business is to be done—at every level of business. And he said, ‘We will take the time needed to negotiate with the government and get this right.’ He said, ‘Copenhagen can wait.’ To reflect on a time-worn advertisement—actually, to plagiarise it: ‘It’s the bills that this coalition opposition rejects that make this coalition opposition the best.’ If the government serves and re-serves this package of CPRS bills to the coalition opposition, I will vote against it again.