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

Senator Abetz is very, very kind about how the Australian people view the ETS. It has been one of the greatest political debacles of all time, the major plank of Labor Party policy and the moral issue of our time, apparently. We see now the sort of logic, acumen and diligence that goes into these Labor Party plans, and it is no better personified than by the ceiling insulation program. If these people cannot get fluffy stuff into the ceiling without creating a national crisis, how on earth can we trust them to completely rejig the Australian economy? The question comes before us as to why we would have an inquiry. I have a few ideas; Copenhagen is one of them. Copenhagen is a slight change of events and something that should be examined.

The Labor Party under their own admission, through such people as Lindsay Tanner, the Minister for Finance and Administration, said of the last program that they had to rush it out and they did not have the time to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. That was his quote on Sky News. Why wouldn’t that make us want to make sure that if they are not prepared to dot the i’s and cross the t’s then maybe we should do it for them? Because they have brought back this piece of legislation, we must have a full and transparent inquiry to once more engage the Australian people on how ultimately farcical this whole plan is.

Everybody in the Labor Party is deserting it like rats deserting the sinking ship. They will not be running in here today to stand at the back and holler and scream. No, there will be dead silence over there today. Even their leader, Kevin Rudd, has gone quiet on this. He has tried the idea of walking both sides of the fence but it has turned into something that is quite anatomically difficult for him. We go back once more to Mr Keating and the clear idea that, if you do not understand this massive new tax, do not vote for it. If you do understand it you would never vote for it. Most importantly, there is his retort that it is your choice that you want to make this your battleground, so we are going to do you and we are going to do you slowly.

This ETS is nothing more than a program that was never, ever going to change the climate. It was never, ever going to make the globe cooler. What it was going to do was rip tens of billions of dollars, in excess of $100 billion, out of the consumer by way of credits that would be passed on, but for whose benefit? The climate was not going to change. Who was the benefactor of this? Stockbrokers and bankers made their commissions on the way through. They became very environmentally conscious once they started seeing the billions of dollars that were going to land on their boardroom tables.

To be honest, I think the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, became very environmentally conscious when he looked at the debt racing through the roof and was trying to apply a mechanism to see how he could get the government’s hands on some of that money to prop up the parlous state of finances that the Labor Party had placed this nation’s budget in. These are the people who all of a sudden became environmentally conscious, so these are the people who also have to be questioned. What was this all about? We see in the Wall Street Journal that Yvo de Boer has resigned and that the IPCC is floundering and falling to pieces. These are not my statements; these are statements in articles today by Gordon Crovitz. We have to start bringing these issues forward and discussing them.

It is only proper that the Australian people took the Labor Party on trust and thought, ‘You are doing something that is right, so, although we don’t understand it, we will give you the benefit of the doubt.’ But the more they came to understand it, the more they did not like it. The more they came to understand it, the more they came to the position that they were basically being misled. They were being misled and they were being ripped off. The Australian people have a right to a further inquiry. They have a right to a further ventilation of the facts. They have a right to see exactly where Australia sits now that Copenhagen has fallen flat on its face. They have a right to understand what this will do to our economy if we fly solo, as is the intention of the Labor Party and what they wish to do to our nation. They have a right to ask how absolutely, patently absurd it would be if Australia had not dodged the bullet, if Australia had actually, in some sort of pall of insanity, voted for the ETS and it was now in place. Imagine the place we would be living in now! Imagine the peculiarity of where we would be now! Australia would be on its lonesome out there with its own tax on a colourless, odourless gas, apparently on the premise that we are going to cool the planet from a room in Canberra.

It was the Australian people who rose up and basically made the phones melt down in this joint. It was those same people who rang up and lobbied and said, ‘You cannot do this to us.’ They have the right to a further inquiry. They have a further right to have their day in court. They have the right to clearly pin this tail to the Labor Party donkey. This is the ETS tail on the Labor Party donkey and we have to make sure all of Australia sees it. This is what the Labor Party intend to do—wondrous visions, huge costs and bizarre economics, and a complete reconfiguration of our nation’s economy based on a tax on a colourless, odourless gas, as administered from the same government that gave us the ceiling insulation program. If that is not scary enough, have a look at how they are going in the other place.

We have to clearly start to state to people that the whole point of the ETS was to put the price of a product up so that you could not afford it. That is the premise of it. It was going to be a pricing mechanism. It was to make things more expensive so that you could not afford them, so that you would change what you purchased. It was a mechanism to make you poorer, and in making you poorer you could not afford the things that you really should be entitled to.

The premise that you could actually change your buying patterns on such things as electricity is an interesting concept. If we look at what has been happening to electricity prices and the increase in electricity prices—up 25 per cent in some states—have we seen a corresponding reduction in the use of electricity? No, we have not. We have just seen that the people who use electricity are poorer because they do not have as much money. What was the ETS going to do? It was going to put up the price of electricity so that every time you turned on the television you would realise that that was being taxed and you were becoming poorer, because in a room in Canberra they believed they could single-handedly cool the temperature of the globe. Every time you opened the fridge and a little light went on you would be reminded that Mr Rudd was taxing you. Every time you ironed clothes you would be taxed. Every time you cooked the toast, you would be taxed. We have to take it back to this simple analogy.

The Labor Party had this wondrous scheme of approaching nirvana, global peace—and a massive new tax for the Labor Party. And on the way through a lot of very rich and very successful bankers would become even richer and more successful—and good luck to them because when you see a mug you have just got to take them for a ride. And they could see a mug coming. They could see the mug punter, the Australian parliament, about to deliver them an absolute entree into a massive new sector of wealth. Everything that was involved in our nation, whether we liked it or not, would have some interconnection with this tax. It was not an option. You did not have an option whether you paid the tax or not. You just paid it. It is not a case of if you are poor you do not pay it—you just pay it. No matter where you are, you pay it. Then there is the administration of the so-called compensation scheme. That was going to be done with the same diligence, of course, that we saw with the ceiling insulation program. It was a cack-arsed mess.

But the Labor Party want to bring it back. The fact is that the Labor Party said, and the Deputy Prime Minister Gillard came out and said, that the first thing the parliament will do—and this is why we still had the hype going on last year—will be to bring this piece of legislation back. But times have changed and the Australian people have brought a sense of balance and foreboding into the Labor Party. So as the first thing that they want to bring back, they want ever so quietly to sneak it in here and just have a quiet little vote—maybe do it on the voices. The moral issue of our time would be stuck between tabling the report and, while not into the noncontroversial, be put into the section of the red that says: ‘Please deal with this very quickly when we are not on broadcast.’ That is where they would like to have it: ‘Please put us out of our misery where no-one can see it. Please quietly strangle this behind the door. Please take this to a public toilet near you and flush it away. Please get rid of this.’ The Labor Party have to go through the motions but they do not want to fess up to exactly what they were going to do to the Australian economy.

These are the people who have the hide, the gall, to say that they are responsible. These people have the gall to talk about who is a risk to the economy.