Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Labor’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge that direct action on climate change can be achieved without the need for a clunky, bureaucratic and ineffective massive new tax on everything reflects the choice available to the Australian people at the next election. On the one hand, with the coalition Australia has been given a plan which is cost-effective and practical and which provides a direct pathway to reducing our carbon emissions. Under Labor, Australians get a cocktail of unsurpassed, complicated verbiage and a massive tax that will impact everything and everyone, but Labor’s approach lacks two vital ingredients: that of being effective and that of being practical.

What we have learnt from Labor after two long years in office is that Mr Rudd has no practical or effective solution for anything. We have learnt that long, nonsensical sentences do not translate into practical policy solutions. Remember his war on petrol prices? Remember his war on grocery prices? Remember his war on housing affordability? Remember his war on whaling? Mr Rudd’s war on everything has led to no changes, let alone changes for the better.

And so it is with climate change. According to Mr Rudd in 2007, climate change was the greatest moral challenge of our time. It needed to be rushed through the parliament and implemented to start at the beginning of this year—we would all be doomed otherwise; a double dissolution would be called. Now, all of a sudden this great moral challenge of our time has become either less great or less moral, I am not quite sure which. Labor itself delayed the introduction of its proposals until 2011 and talk of a double dissolution seems to have fallen off the agenda. This greatest moral challenge of our time, surprisingly, was not even referred to anymore in the Prime Minister’s Australia Day addresses as he was increasing his own carbon footprint flying around the country.

Mr Rudd and Labor fail to recognise that Australians are rejecting his new massive tax on everything because it is neither practical nor effective, but it is hugely expensive and hugely bureaucratic. Indeed, in question time today the Prime Minister’s own representative in this place could not answer the most basic of questions about costs and compensation under Labor’s scheme. If Labor do not understand their own scheme than Labor should not be blaming their fellow Australians, who also do not understand the scheme and are therefore quite rightly rejecting it. Given the fiasco of Copenhagen—not my words but the words of Labor’s own climate change guru, Robert Garnaut—you would have thought Labor would have at least—