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

Aha! My colleague Senator Boswell has mentioned the word ‘election’. It is because the government know for sure that they can have an election prior to Australia’s commencement of pain—when people start to suffer the costs, when people’s jobs will be threatened et cetera. So I question how committed the government are to acting now when they have gone into delay tactics.

Let me talk about the science. We hear of the scientists who say that the globe is definitely warming as a result of more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We are well aware that there is more carbon dioxide—280 parts per million in the year 1750 having now risen to 380 parts per million in the year 2009. There is no question about that. Ice samples certainly prove it. The question is: are those extra levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causing the globe to warm? That is the question here. I want to refer to one of the leading German scientists, a Professor Latif, who is one of the leading climate modellers in the world. He is a recipient of several international climate study prizes and a lead author of the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change. He has contributed significantly to the IPCC’s last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are causing the planet to warm dangerously. But in Geneva in September this year at the UN’s world climate conference, an annual gathering of the so-called scientific consensus on man-made climate change, Professor Latif conceded that the earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering into one or two decades during which the temperatures will cool, so he is flip-flopping all over the place. This is one of the leading scientists, one of the advisors to the IPCC, and he is saying that the climate has not warmed for around a decade and that we are going to have 10 to 20 years of cooling.

I find that quite amazing when we look back at other scientific facts and real issues, such as the River Thames freezing in the mini ice age. From the 1400s to the late 1800s in the 19th century it was not uncommon for the River Thames in London to freeze over. So why, at the start of the 1900s, did the Thames stop freezing? To me that is quite a logical, sensible question to ask. Why did the Thames stop freezing at the start of the 1900s? We know that there were not coal fired power generators. There were not Boeing 747 jets. There were not V8 Falcons and V12 Jags with members of the London population in them chucking donuts around Trafalgar Square or anything like that—this was the early 1900s. So why did the climate warm and why did the Thames stop freezing over when the CO2 levels were obviously not rising? The reason is climate change—climate change that we have had for millions of years. And, no matter what we do, we will never change, alter, prevent or do anything to stop nature running its course. That is the fact of the matter.

We have the argument about sea levels. It is quite amazing how at the centre of Australia you can find seashells. Obviously at some stage that land was under water. Yet we know that thousands of years ago the sea levels were so low that the Indigenous people travelled from Indonesia to the mainland of Australia and to Tasmania. That is a variation that we know of over thousands and thousands of years. But do not worry about it; it is going to rise by a couple of metres by the end of the century, according to the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Mr Garrett, and he will control it. What people are saying is just outrageous. He will not control it. Nature will run its course and climate change will go on forever.

So what is our solution to this? This is the government’s solution. For a start, they are going to impose a tax on our electricity industry. Everyone in Australia will pay, but the government will compensate some because they will get a fair bit of money from the permits they sell and they can distribute that to the pensioners and low-income earners for the tax they put on our industries. Let us look at some of the taxes we are going to suffer. They include energy, fuel, transport and food processing—costs on virtually everything. As my colleague Senator Joyce has made quite clear to the Australian people over months, Mr Rudd and his tax will be in every part of your life. Whether you are eating at home or travelling around on holidays, no matter where you go you will be taxed.

What is the result of that? We know the threat exists to shift our industries overseas—industries such as cement which will not survive in Australia because of this tax. We know that jobs are going to go. We know coalmines are going to close down. This is a cost that Australians must realise is going to happen if this emissions trading scheme proceeds. I raise a point that I think is vital to this whole debate. We know about inflation. We have heard about the ‘genie in the bottle’. Inflation is a situation where demand exceeds supply. As a result of demand exceeding supply, prices rise, and the amount the prices rise determines the inflation rate. I remember the criticism of Mr Keating when the Howard government had the courage to introduce a goods and services tax to give some proper funding to the states and territories of this nation: it was going to be a ‘monster tax’. In fact, it was a replacement tax.

The funds flowed to the states, but if we want to go the way of spending the money perhaps we could refer to Premier Nathan Rees, if my colleagues would like—we could go down that road with pleasure. But what do we have here? We have a new tax. The price of everything will rise. The price of electricity, the price of food, the price of transport, the price of travel—everything is going to go up. When those figures read into the inflation figures, my question is how much the Reserve Bank will raise interest rates. They run hand in hand: higher price rises and higher inflation rates mean higher interest rates to slow the economy. The last thing that we want in this nation at the moment is another rise in interest rates; we are already getting enough of those because the government will not wind back its spending. There is too much money in the economy, according to the Reserve Bank, and the government is continuing on its borrowing-and-spending spree and is, hence, responsible for the rise we have had so far.

So the emissions trading scheme is going to give us higher inflation rates and, obviously, higher interest rates. Then we go on to the higher Australian dollar, which also runs hand in hand. Every time the dollar goes up a cent it wipes hundreds of millions of dollars off the nation’s income from exports. These are the ramifications that are going to result from this emissions trading scheme. But of course it will save the world. I will get to that in a minute. I just want to point to the serious parts of this emissions trading scheme. The serious parts are the cost to industry, the cost to households, the cost of doing business and remaining competitive in international markets and, of course, the interest rate rises that will put the pain on the battlers—the ones who are having a go—in Australia. They are the ones who suffer the most from higher interest rates.

Then the government propose to have a scheme where the price of carbon will be set on the stock market. It will trade around the world. I just mentioned the Australian dollar. We have the Australian dollar trading around the world, and in the last 12 months we have seen it go from 60c to 93c. That is the dealers trading it up. I had five years trading on the foreign exchange market during a time in my life I wished I had not been in a foreign currency loan. It was in Swiss francs. It is the dealers who trade the exchange rates up with positive sentiment, so we know exactly what the Australian dollar is doing. The dealers are trading it up, because as interest rates go up in Australia the differential between US and Australian interest rates gets wider and, hence, those overseas see an opportunity to make a bit of extra money. The sentiment in the market is positive.

We are going to do this with carbon. We are going to have a situation where the cost of running your household or the cost of running your business will depend on the dealers in stock markets all around the world. To me this is outrageous. Already the exchange rates cost Australia enough when it trades up. Now they are going to give us a double whammy; the cost of doing business in Australia will be determined by the dealers on the stock markets. We have already had reports from National Australia Bank saying the price of carbon could trade as high as $100 a tonne.