Steve Fielding (Victoria, Family First Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is in Hansard. That is a chart that the Australian public want to see. It is a chart that clearly the Rudd government does not want people to see. It shows that carbon dioxide emissions have skyrocketed, yet global temperatures have not increased the way the IPCC predicted. To help people with the chart, imagine the black line is CPI and the red line is your salary. You are going backwards. Quite clearly you would be very unhappy if that was your salary. The government wants to make you believe that the science is conclusive. I think we still need to have this chart further debated. It is based on 15 years of records. The global temperature chart may be an inconvenient fact to those that refuse to have an open mind on climate change, but to many Australians this global temperature chart is helpful and it allows them to engage in a technical debate. For those people watching who find charts hard to understand, as I said, think of the red line as if it was your salary and the black line as if it was CPI.

Even if you put aside the science, the Rudd government does not seem to acknowledge that its CPRS is a multibillion-dollar carbon tax. It is economically reckless to agree to any CPRS before the Copenhagen climate change conference, where the rest of the world will make up its mind on how to deal with climate change. There are some estimates that the government’s carbon reduction tax would be the equivalent of raising the GST by 2½ per cent. But wait—it gets worse. Not only will we be paying more tax; there will be more people without jobs. Frontier Economics predicts 68,000 Australians will not be employed in rural and regional Australia if the government’s plan goes through. Who knows what the proposed amendments will do?

According to the government’s own numbers this new tax amounts to more than $12 billion per year for industry. This is a cost which will be passed on to ordinary Australians. It was reported in the Business Spectator recently that the current legislation would have an $8 billion adverse impact on four Latrobe Valley power generators which is offset by $2 billion in current credits—a net enterprise value reduction of $6 billion. State governments too will face a massive hole in their budgets as a result of the scheme and will be $5.5 billion worse off by 2020. That means less money for schools, less money for hospitals and less money for the social services which so many Australians rely on.

Australian families will also be hard hit under the Rudd government’s proposal. Electricity prices are still forecast—as I heard this morning in Victoria—to double in Victoria. What will that do to households and small businesses in Victoria? Council rates will also be affected and will go up under the current plan. The Rudd government’s ETS has the potential to cripple our economy and send families with their backs already against the wall tipping over the edge.

It is the sheer arrogance of the Rudd government that is driving this debate at the moment; it is not sensible public policy. The Rudd government is playing politics with the lives of millions of Australians by voting again on this issue now and trying maybe to force an early election. Someone needs to tell the Prime Minister that there are no prizes for going first on implementing an emissions trading scheme—only losers! We are not playing a game here. We are talking about a multibillion-dollar tax that will impact on real people’s lives and jobs. There is a lot more at stake than the government seems to realise.

Is the government aware that only a couple of weeks ago the US senate ruled out passing its own emissions trading scheme legislation before Copenhagen and ordered a five-week pause to review the costs of the legislation to the American economy? It is not one day, not two days and not a week; they are asking for a five-week pause. This is why we should come back in February. The world’s biggest economy has voted to put its carbon tax legislation on ice and yet, incredibly, we are still being fed the line that we need to deal with this issue urgently.

This whole CPRS bill is a disgrace and the Senate needs to do the only honourable thing and at least delay the vote till next year. Anything else would put Australian families, small businesses, rural and regional communities and our economy at risk, and that is reckless. The coalition have got to think very carefully about how this will pan out over the next few hours and days and they have to think very carefully about seeing this thing rammed through the Senate. I think that having even a one-week Senate inquiry is still not long enough. The US senate quite clearly believes more time is needed. A multibillion-dollar tax needs time. Let’s not treat the Australian public like mugs. Let’s not treat the Australian Senate like a mug. Let’s give this thing proper and due diligence. Time is important but we have got to get this right, not wrong.