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

How many permits will be issued? I want to know because this is going to cost around $120 billion by 2010. There is another amount of money that Senator Milne, Senator Nash and I have been trying to extract from the Minister for Climate Change and Water without any success—the money that is going to be required to pay for the underdeveloped countries. I believe the Prime Minister said that we all should kick in $10 billion. I do not know what that is, but let us assume that it is another $4 billion, $5 billion or $10 billion—whatever. What frightens me about this proposition is how you get out of it. Once you have established that the permits have a value and the value becomes a property right, if this emissions trading scheme turns to custard, as it probably will, how do we as a nation extract ourselves from it? Do we have to go in and buy every permit that may be worth $50 or $60? These are considerable amounts of money. No-one has got a crystal ball and knows whether this will work. Many think it will not work and that it should not be done until after an agreement has been reached at Copenhagen. Most people do not see any point in doing it unless the other countries in the world do it.

We are saddling ourselves up as probably the second country in the world, if you take the EU as a collective, that signs up for this. With $120 billion or whatever it is, you have always got to have an escape route if this turns to custard, if it goes bad, if no other nation does it, if the Copenhagen agreement falls over and it is only the EU that have got an ETS. Last week—senators may be able to tell me—I think they ruled out 162 industries, so they have highly qualified their ETS and reduced it by 162 industries. But we are bravely galloping ahead with this. What happens if all these things fail? What happens if no-one else comes in and it is only the EU? They will then have an ETS when you do not have an ETS. What happens if America does not come in? How do we get out of this? How do we escape or do we just say: ‘Gee, wasn’t that a shocking decision; that was a costly one. We’ll let that $120 billion go through to the keeper’?

I and the rest of Australia want to know: if this thing fails, no-one else comes in and we are the only people to do it other than the EU, how do we get out of it? Do we go out and buy all those millions of permits back? Who pays for that? This is why the popularity of this scheme is going down like a brick. A week ago 54 per cent of people did not want it till after Copenhagen and 34 per cent did. This week it is 60 per cent that do not want it and 27 per cent that do. While we are talking, the popularity of this scheme is reducing and reducing. As people understand this more and more, they become more and more frightened. Senator Wong has not been able to sell this. I understand why she has not been able to sell it: it is a dog. You cannot sell it, so you want to get this scheme through as quickly as you can—saddle up the people with $120 billion worth of debt, with another $4 billion or $5 billion for the developing countries—and there is no escape route. Once you put it in there is nowhere to go that I can see. Up at Yabula last Thursday, I think, 1,200 people lost their jobs because of an ETS. Sixty-odd lost their jobs in Rockhampton in a cement factory. That is just, as I said, the canary in the mine. An ETS has not even hit yet, but just the threat of an ETS is costing a lot of people their jobs. Surely you are not going to saddle Australia up with this, with no way to get out of it. I would be very interested in the minister’s reply.