Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I can tell by the way that those former union organisers are trying to prevent me from having my say that what I am saying is a bit close to the mark. I am sorry if I have upset you, colleagues on the other side, so close to Christmas, but the point I am trying to make—and I am appealing to you all—is: why can we not wait? Why don’t we wait a few days until we see what the rest of the world is going to do? Why don’t we have a look at what comes out of Copenhagen? Maybe we will learn something. Maybe we will come out of Copenhagen agreeing with the Greens that we should increase our targets very substantially.

Quite frankly, if all those at Copenhagen with whom we compete—for example, China, Russia, the United States, India, Japan, Indonesia, South Africa and Columbia—came out and said, ‘Yes, we are going to do it and we can guarantee that our legislatures will endorse this,’ then I would be the first one on the side of the argument that said: ‘Yes, Australia, let’s do it. Let’s do the same. Let us give our agricultural industries the same concessions as everybody else is getting. Let us penalise or favour our coal industries exactly the same as everybody else is doing.’ I would say the same about those industries that are very important in my state of Queensland: our aluminium refineries, zinc refineries, copper refineries, cement industries and all of our manufacturing industries. If our competitors are doing this, let us do it. But why are we putting those jobs at risk in order to have this decided in the next couple of days before world leaders meet to determine the world’s approach to this?

We should be part of the world approach but having a position before the rest of the world is, in my view, just untenable. You have only to look at Australia’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Australia emits less than 1.4 per cent of global emissions. Under Mr Rudd’s scheme, even if it were adopted in its entirety in the way it was originally put up, we would be reducing our emissions by 0.2 per cent of total global emissions. Even those who say it is a man-made problem would, I think, acknowledge that the man-made part of emissions is only a very small part of the total carbon emissions in the world. Things like natural calamities, bushfires and volcanoes exude the most carbon. There is nothing we in this chamber can do to stop volcanoes or to stop fires. I am sorry about that. Some on the other side think that we can stop the world, but most of the carbon emissions are certainly naturally occurring.

Accepting for a moment—and I do not necessarily, as I explained before, particularly have the scientific knowledge to make that conclusion—that man is the cause of some of the emissions of greenhouse gas, and looking at the facts that Australia’s total greenhouse emissions are less than 1.4 per cent of global outcome and this legislation will reduce that by 0.2 per cent, it just seems crazy for us to move before the rest of the world.

I do not want to dob people in—no names, no pack drill—but I happen to know two or three Labor senators who agree with me entirely. But are they allowed to cross the floor and have their view? They know what happened to former senator Shayne Murphy when he had a different view. He was expelled the next day. That is the Labor Party. You agree with what Mr Rudd says or you are expelled. In the Liberal Party I am delighted that sometimes it makes us look a little bit messy but we are people with strong views and a passion for what we believe is right for Australia, and we have the inalienable right to cross the floor—something you in the Labor Party will never, ever understand. We are individuals. We believe that we are put here by our constituents to follow their wishes and not just the wishes of one man who many suspect is embarking upon this as part of his push to become Secretary-General of the United Nations.

I have gone on a little longer than I expected, because we want to get these things to a vote. But, as I mentioned before, it seems the Labor Party are bringing in the cheer squad. As I have highlighted that, I see some of the cheer squad have left, so perhaps they did not like the exposition of the fact that they were going to start talking just for the sake of talking. I know I speak for all on this side when I say that we would like to have a vote on this particular motion before the chamber at the present time. We do not agree with it but we think that the Senate should vote on the Greens amendments so that we can get on to the next amendment. It is a very important one which, I am delighted to say, we have always championed, dealing with agriculture. Congratulations to Minister Wong. She has agreed that we should be treating our agriculture in the way other nations are treating theirs. Let us get on to that debate. Let us have that debate and hopefully get that amendment passed as soon as possible. But I would urge senators at this stage to deal with these amendments. I think we have had a lot of discussion on them and it would be useful to have the vote at this time and move on to the next amendment.