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

With all due respect, the carbon pollution reduction rules are definitely part of this. In fact, they are substantially the premise of this legislation, which is what we are discussing.

We cannot talk about unnatural and natural fires because the person is not here. I find that peculiar in the extreme, seeing it is such a glaringly obvious question. If this thing is going to stack up, you would expect the person to be here—especially when we are in the middle of the bushfire season, for goodness’ sake, and this town that we are sitting in tonight is one that was devastated by a bushfire. It seems an interesting question that should have been able to be answered. It obviously blows an absolutely mammoth hole in the whole carbon accounting process if it is unable to be answered. If you say you are going to leave it out, the whole thing is fallacious. If you say you are going to put it in—boy, haven’t we got a major problem coming our way. I think you should use about $70 billion of your $70.2 billion to invest in the rural bushfire brigade, otherwise we are all going to be broke.

You talked about the depth of action that is currently present in the world and you gave a great endorsement of that, and how we have a premise that nothing is happening but you assure us that something is. From the assertion you gave with that great rendition of all the countries and the things they are doing, can you please now tell me—for whatever time frame you want—what the current global prediction is for parts per million under the current trajectory of all those countries and all the things they are doing; how they are going and where we are going to be—in five years or 10 years time, I will leave that up to you.