Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Climate Change and Water (Senator Wong) to a question without notice asked by Senator Joyce today, relating to climate change.

I would specifically like to note the complete incapacity of the Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Wong, to be succinct in her answers. Canada has deferred their decision until after Copenhagen. As much as we tried to persuade Minister Wong to come forward with a straight and honest answer, she ducked and dived but never gave a straight answer. We got the usual rendition of calamity as she talked about sea level rises, ocean acidification and inundation. Never once did she explain to us how this massive tax will actually affect it, because we know it will not affect it. This massive tax works in isolation and is nothing but an assault on working families and a revenue raiser for the government because there is no way that this tax in isolation can do anything about the climate. But they are so cunning and shrewd that they worked this little web around the issue. You can see it personified in the way the minister answers the questions—or, more to the point, does not answer the questions.

We know that the United States has also deferred legislation. In fact, the whole world is waiting for Copenhagen, except for Kevin Rudd. He is not waiting. He is on his solo trip to save the world. Why is he doing that? Because he says that he is a world leader. We know at this point in time that Barack Obama must be tossing and turning in his bed thinking, ‘What on earth is Kevin up to?’ We know that Hu Jintao in China must be running around the Communist Party saying: ‘Look, we can’t go any further; we’ve got to wait until Kevin gets somewhere.’ We know that Dmitry Medvedev and Manmohan Singh are, within Russia and India respectively, worried about the position of Australia’s climate change policy. This is the ludicrous proposition that the Australian Labor Party put forward. Who does worry about the position of the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd? There is only one group that is worried about the position of Kevin Rudd—the people of Australia. They are truly worried about the position of Kevin Rudd. I can see it on a petition presented today that was started last week. There are 13,000 signatures on it expressing the view that this process, this ludicrous lemming-like careening over the policy cliff, should be curtailed and stopped.

But what do we have? We have the Copenhagen agreement merely days away and the conceit of this Prime Minister is so great and immense that he refuses to wait a matter of days. He insists on taking Australia on his unilateral crusade. We know what happens to unilateral crusades: you end up getting slaughtered. That is what will happen to the economy of this nation. We are about to do the worst thing we could possibly do to working families, and that is to create an environment where we put them out of work. In all of these illustrious statements about green jobs, we have not seen one example of them. Where are they? Beyond the statement of ‘green job’, where are they? Show me the examples. They do not have any examples. We have nothing more than this rhetorical entourage of calamitous events because they refuse to engage in the debate. That shows the paucity of their claims. The debate is whether their scheme will affect the temperature of the globe. Of course, it will not, but they will not engage in that. In the same evasive manner, they are now refusing to acknowledge the position of Canada and the United States. They are making excuses for every other nation. They have an excuse for why every other nation is appearing to be in a different position from that of Australia. But how do we deal with this? Once they set us up for this massive new tax, what do we do? Who will be the benefactors of this? I might suggest that it will be people close to Treasury who are going to be the benefactors of this.

It is also perplexing at this point of time to see that nothing has been delivered to this parliament by way of an amendment or an examination. There is nothing to see. Is there any conjecture over there? Is there something of concern? Is it possibly the case that modelling is starting to suggest that we might have a bit of a problem here, because the modelling only dealt with Australia working conjointly with other nations in a policy— (Time expired)