Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Madam Chair, maybe I can form my comments to meet with the amendments. Here we are debating how we are going to look after the underdeveloped countries. As we quite often find ourselves in parliament now, we are in a situation where Senator Milne wants to go too far and we want to find out just how far we have got to go. I raise this in the context of 1,200 people losing their jobs. We pay for other people to put an ETS in their countries. What is the point of this? There are 1,200 jobs going to go on the burner—the company is on the line. It was bought out by Clive Palmer about 12 months ago and it was losing money then. He took over, guaranteed the jobs and now we are penalising him so we can provide compensation for foreign countries. Senator Macdonald has a unit in Townsville. There is a series of suburbs along the northern beaches of Townsville. People from the whole of that area work in the nickel refinery, and we are going to close down the whole of North Townsville so Australia can provide finance to underdeveloped countries.

We are getting into the farcical stage. We are closing our industries down because we are penalising them so much. We then have to go and put in $4 million or $8 billion—depending on who you talk to—and you come in here, Minister, and say, ‘Well, I haven’t got a figure.’ Well, you had better get one because in three weeks time you are going to Copenhagen. I find it very difficult to believe that a government with all the public servants at their disposal—and there must be 200 to 300 in that department—are asking us to believe that you are going to Copenhagen without knowing what you are going to put on the table. That defies logic.

I have very rarely agreed with anything you have said. I know you are an intelligent woman and I know you would not go to Copenhagen unprepared. You would have all your i’s dotted and your t’s crossed before you went over there. You are not going over there and pulling out a figure from the back of an envelope. Do not ask us to believe what is impossible to believe. You are a skilled performer but do not try to spin it so much that you do not know what you are doing. You do know what you are doing; you have had a grip on this ETS for 12 or 18 months and you know exactly what is going to happen. I am not going to say you are misleading the Senate, but I believe you know what you are going to put on the table. It is going to be frightening. You are trying to avoid getting it out while the parliament is sitting and before we vote on the ETS.

People are terrified of this and what this is going to do to the economy. You are asking them to finance another country while jobs at Yabulu nickel refinery are going. And that is not the first lot. The first lot was the Rockhampton cement mill. They could have kept going; it would have been hard because they would have had to revamp their machinery. But they would have kept going if there was no ETS. But while there was an ETS there they said, ‘It is not worth doing it.’ That was not a lot of jobs—68—but as I said at the time, it was a canary in the coalmine. Now we are having massive losses.

Townsville cannot afford this and neither can Australia. If you want to push this through—all the Nationals and many of the Liberals do not want it to go through—then be honest with us; do not try and dodge it. Tell the people what they have got to know. You might not carry the people, but do not dodge it. That is what a parliament is for—to expose these issues and to find out what the figures are, and you know it. You know you have got them there, I know you have got them there and everyone in this parliament knows you have got them there.