Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

In my brief remarks last night, if I recall correctly, I concluded by saying that the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is not, in fact, an environmental bill. The government understands that. It knows the CPRS is going to have zero environmental impact; it is not going to reduce global warming, which has not, of course, occurred since 1995. Even the alarmist IPCC scientist Phil Jones has conceded that point. If we can only get Tony Jones to concede it, what great inroads will have been made. It is not an environmental bill; it is a tax bill. It is a $120 billion, 10-year tax grab by this government, who are desperate to prop up a Treasury bucket that is empty. There is a hole in the bucket. It is haemorrhaging money—taxpayers’ money wasted on so many programs—and this government is desperate to plug that hole by shoving more taxpayers’ cash into it.

I understand perfectly why the government does not want this suite of bills that will change forever the face of the Australian economy to go through any further scrutiny and why they do not want to refer the bills to a Senate committee that will examine their impact on the Australian economy and may even examine whether they will have any effect other than a negative one on the environment. Senator Wong, the Minister for Climate Change and Water, as the minister responsible for this abomination of bills, does not want the legislation to go through any further scrutiny.

Senator Wong is in absolute denial about what has changed from last year, when she was fuelling a pandemic about global warming, and what is happening in 2010. Last year, we did not know about the deceit and the fraud and the rent seeking and the nonsense that was coming out of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which Senator Wong has hung so much of her ministerial star on.

What we do know is that the IPCC has been absolutely discredited by its own actions. To Senator Wong and others who are caught up in this entire catastrophe of trying to foist these bills on the Australian people, I relate an old proverb that says that a frog that lives in a well is not aware of the ocean. Senator Wong is the frog that is living not in a well but in a hole. She has dug a hole with the IPCC, and she needs to poke her head up above that hole and have a look around and see that there is a completely different landscape than the one she has been blinded by. The hole that has been dug by the IPCC is a grave for global warming. Almost every claim that they have made is becoming discredited.