Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Finance and Debt Reduction) Share this | Hansard source

It is interesting to rise today to find out, as my colleague Senator Bob Brown says, that we are on the cusp of extinction. It is unfortunate. I hope it is not the case and it does seem slightly alarmist. However, that seems to be the metaphor that has driven this debate. We have also heard from Senator McLucas of the impending collapse of the Great Barrier Reef, which is also unfortunate. Professor Peter Ridd, who is the oceanographer at James Cook University and one of the most eminent people in that field, does not agree with her. He lives in North Queensland, so she probably has not met him.

It is vital that we understand the fear factor that has driven this debate. What the Labor Party put forward was a broker’s bonanza. They had something that every banker in Sydney would have absolutely loved. They had a program where they just creamed the money in with commissions. We had the environmentally conscious merchant banks with their hand on their heart saying, ‘This is all about the environment.’ But it was not. It was about them making a bucket load of money out of Australian working families because Australian working families had no choice but to pay. The Labor Party program is a broad based consumption tax that is delivered to you by the power point in your house. Every time you turn something on you are paying something to the Australian Labor Party institution of government. That is what they desire. They said that they were out to help the working family, but what choice do they have? We have had this argument about their market based system.

It was very interesting to get an email from a person—I will not mention him but he was very prominent around here in the past—who said that when governments want to reduce engine emissions and get clean the engines in cars, buses and trucks they mostly resort to direct action. That is how you deal with it, that is how you bring it down, rather than with price mechanisms. I surmise three likely reasons for this: it was the fastest and most effective way to get change; it meant that the whole industry changed, not just the most responsive part of it; and a price rise would have had to be so high to change consumers’ behaviour that it was unlikely to be possible. Who put forward that submission to me? I will tell you who it was: Andrew Murray. He said that direct action is how you deal with an issue.

If we go down the market based mechanism, so they like to call it over there, all that happens is you push up prices on the vital components in the cost of living of working families, pensioners and everybody else. But they do not have an alternative, they have got nowhere to go, and so they just pay the higher prices. It is not as if when you turn on your fridge it will start running on gas; it will not. It will run on electricity, but it will just cost you more. It will not be like you have the opportunity to say, ‘Sorry, tonight we will turn on half the light globe.’ You do not have that opportunity; you just pay more for it. Or you are going to say, ‘Sorry, we are only going to iron half the uniforms and not bother washing the socks.’ You have to do all of that, but you just pay more for it. Under the Labor Party’s program, you pay until you are poor. What the coalition has put forward is direct action.