Nick Xenophon (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, I was just making the comment that I thought that some people might find comparing this government to Stalinists overreaching—colourful but overreaching!

This is a very important issue. The question before us is not whether this is a good or bad piece of legislation. I happen to be in the camp that says that this is a bad piece of legislation—I have already outlined why during the debate—and I am relieved that the legislation was defeated at the end of last year. But the debate on the merits or otherwise of the legislation should occur at another time during the second reading stage, the committee stage, of this bill. The fact is that there have been two extensive Senate inquiries on these bills and on the issue of climate policy generally. I sat on both of those inquiries for many, many hours. They were useful inquiries. Reports were produced. The Greens produced a minority report, as did I, outlining alternatives.

A few things have changed. Firstly, the leadership of the Liberal Party has changed. And last year a deal was done between Mr Turnbull and the government, and history shows what occurred with that particular deal. But let us put this in perspective. The bill that is before us is substantially the same as the bill that was put before this parliament previously and debated extensively at an exhaustive committee stage. Many amendments were put up by the coalition, the Greens, me and, I think, Senator Fielding—I am not sure of that, but he certainly played an active role in that debate—and were debated. We went through an exhaustive committee stage where these issues were ventilated.

Whilst there is a difference between the compensation package that was negotiated by Mr Turnbull and Mr Macfarlane with the government and the provisions of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2010, the architecture of the scheme is fundamentally the same. I say again that I consider this scheme to be fundamentally flawed in its current form, that I do not believe it will deliver the requisite cuts to emissions to make a difference and for Australia to have a real leadership role in the region and also that it comes at a very heavy economic cost. So I cannot support these amendments.

In looking at where we go now and whether we agree to this bill being referred to a committee, it is fair to say that these bills have been exhaustively dealt with by the Senate and its committees. The only difference between the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009 [No. 2] and the present one is in the additional levels of compensation—some would say, ‘tinkering around the edges’—offered by what remains a fundamentally flawed scheme. I think that the deal that was struck last year, and I say this with due respect to Mr Turnbull and Mr Macfarlane, made a bad scheme even worse, and the architecture is still the same.

We will have an opportunity for a committee stage to exhaustively go through these bills again if that is what the Senate decides to do, but I cannot in good conscience see the benefit of having another inquiry when we have already had two exhaustive inquiries into this process. That is my fundamental difficulty. In a sense, I do not agree with the process that the opposition has sought to pursue in opposing this bill, but I do think that these bills are so flawed that the government needs to go back to the drawing board. That, to me, is the key issue here.

Given that the architecture is effectively the same and that we have dealt with these extensively in two Senate committees, I cannot in good conscience support this proposal for referral to a committee. I say this, however, in the belief that the debate is finely balanced; it is not a black-and-white issue. But I believe it is not appropriate for these bills to be referred to a committee given the history of the matter’s having been extensively canvassed in two Senate committees.

Frontier Economics, which has been advising me and which for some time advised the coalition, did provide papers which I tabled in relation to the amendments to this bill that were proposed. But, again, the architecture is the same, and I do not think there is any point in going further with this motion for the bill to go to a committee. We should just get on with this bill, and I hope that the Senate will again vote it down because, given its current structure, it will have a negative impact on Australia’s economy and a negligible impact on the environment.