John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

That is what their quotes are, Senator McGauran. Let us have a look at the costs that we are going to put on our industries. I refer to Macquarie Generation. Macquarie Generation run the Liddell and Bayswater power stations, as I am sure Senator Forshaw is familiar with. In the first year, at $10 a tonne—and we know the government has fixed the price at $10 a tonne because it is going to go a lot higher—Macquarie Generation will have to buy 25 million permits. That is $250 million for Macquarie Generation. The only one who is going to be jubilant about that will be the bank. What industry—especially a government owned facility in New South Wales—would have a spare $250 million in their hip pocket? No, they will have to go borrow that and pass the cost on to consumers. In the second year, if carbon is at $25 a tonne Macquarie Generation will have to buy $625 million worth of permits. The federal government will welcome the money. That will be great—money in the kick for the feds—but look at the cost to the people of New South Wales.

The question will be what it will do. The answer is that it will not do anything at all. The reason is that Australia produces 1.4 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases. I will give some facts. If the rest of the world’s emissions remain the same till the year 2020 and we reduce ours by 20 per cent, instead of producing 1.4 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases it will produce 1.12 per cent. To hope the rest of the world, including China, India and those growing countries, will stay the same is being very optimistic in itself, but when we reduce ours by 20 per cent at a cost of $120 billion or $200 billion—whatever the cost is, depending on the price of carbon by the year 2020—what we are going to do is reduce the carbon dioxide levels around the globe from 380 parts per million to 379 parts per million. One part per million is what the $200 billion tax is going to mean for the whole global atmosphere.

One part per million—how can I describe that? Imagine if we had a huge tub out on the floor down there and that big tub had one million $1 coins in it and we took one coin out of it: that is the difference it is going to make—absolutely nothing. But it is going to cost a swag of jobs, it is going to cost industry a fortune and it is going to cost the Australian people a tremendous amount of money. We all know that; it is going to cost high interest rates and put a cost through our economy that we simply cannot afford, especially at this time of the economic cycle. And we are going to take one $1 coin out of that tub of one million coins. To me that is just plain stupidity, but this is the proposal coming up.

This is why the National Party have opposed this from day 1. We know that regional Australia will cop the most. Even though agriculture is excluded, we know regional Australia will cop the biggest one because agriculture will still have to pay for the extra costs on electricity, fertiliser, chemicals, freight and transport. Even though they are being excluded on the debit side as far as greenhouse gases with the ruminants go, it is still going to cost agriculture a fortune—and to achieve what? If we were serious about looking after our environment, we would be looking at carbon sequestration in the soil, building our soil better. I wish people could go out to Northparkes Mine and see the job that Geoff McCallum has done there.

If we were serious we would start managing our national parks and get grazing in there. The best way to reduce the fire fuel levels is by stock grazing those national parks. But, no, we will not do that. It is just amazing that for every bushfire there is around 200 tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare, so what did it cost us in the 450,000 hectares of the terrible fires on Black Saturday? About nine million tonnes of carbon dioxide, about double what Australia produces in a year just in the bushfires of those days, not to mention the Canberra bushfires. If the government were serious they would get serious about managing the environment.

There is a lot about this whole plan that has been put forward that I find quite amazing. The government’s chief adviser, Professor Garnaut, is not a scientist; he is an economist. Why would you rely on someone who is an economist to give you all this information and detail on a scientific issue? That is simply unbelievable.

I move the second reading amendment standing in my name on sheet 6016:

At the end of the motion, add:

and further consideration of the bills, which will impose the single largest structural change to the Australian economy, be made an order of the day for the first sitting day after:

        (a)    the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit has concluded; and

        (b)    the United States Senate has clarified its position by finally voting on the American Clean Energy and Security Act (the Waxman-Markey bill).

We think that this is just a way for the government to collect money. This is not about global climate change; it is about global taxation and global control. That is why we will never support it. I thank the Senate for its time.