Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister, Ms Julia Gillard, after she was able to scrape in by cobbling together an unholy alliance in the other place, was asked by the media about the carbon tax. This is what she said:

PM: Look, we’ve said we would work through options in good faith at the committee that I have formed involving, of course, the Greens, and it’s my understanding that Mr Windsor will also seek to participate in that committee. We want to work through options, have the discussions at that committee in good faith.

JOURNALIST: So you’re not ruling it out then?

PM: … I just think the rule-in, rule-out games are a little bit silly. …

So before the election she categorically ruled out a carbon tax. Her Treasurer categorically ruled out a carbon tax. Yet after the election, when asked whether she was going to fulfil that ironclad guarantee of there being no carbon tax under a government she leads, she says it is a silly game to her ask that question. Julia Gillard has made it clear that a carbon tax is now on the table. Whatever you want to call it—whether it is a carbon tax, whether it is an emissions trading scheme or whether it is any other mechanism to impose a price on carbon—it will just be another tax. It will be a tax that will push up the cost of living, that will increase the price of electricity and that will hurt working families across Australia.

The New South Wales government, for example, has admitted that a carbon tax would mean a short-term additional 25 per cent increase in electricity prices. That is on top of significant increases already in the cost of electricity over the past few years. I make this observation: when the Prime Minister, the day before the election, can make such a black-and-white statement and give an ironclad guarantee that there will be no carbon tax under her government, only for her to put it on the table immediately after the election, how can anyone trust what this Prime Minister has to say? This is exactly the problem that Mr Kevin Rudd had in his government and it is exactly the reason he got into trouble before the last election. Labor, of course, are using the hung parliament as an excuse for a carbon tax. They talk about political reality, that we have got to face the new paradigm. I would say that Kerry O’Brien was right, though, when he asked Greg Combet on 22 September: ‘But what does that do to the Prime Minister’s credibility after her very clear, unequivocal statement on the eve of the election, “I rule out a carbon tax”?’ A good question. The Australian people are still waiting for an answer; we still have not had it.

We had this absolute fiasco in the lead-up to the election. There were three things that the new Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, was going to fix: the mining tax, the failure to protect our borders and the quagmire that the government got themselves into over climate change. In the lead-up to the election, in order to get herself past the election and neutralise the issue politically, she came up with the proposition of setting up a citizens assembly of 150 people chosen at random to have a bit of a chat about how to address climate change. It was the policy that you have when you don’t have a policy. It was a process to get herself past the election. Immediately after the election, she sets up a committee with a predetermined outcome. Everybody who goes onto that committee has to agree that there should be a carbon tax, whatever way you want to describe it. People who go onto that committee have to agree with a price on carbon, which ultimately, in the absence of an appropriate global agreement among our trade competitors or partners, is just another great big new tax.

For the Labor Party’s electricity tax committee, the third term of reference states that the committee is established on the basis that a carbon price is an economic reform that is required. So there is no open question. They are just going to work out who they are going to whack most. I read in the media that Professor Garnaut was going to be asked to update his report to the government and this particular increased electricity tax committee. While they are at it, I think they should also ask Treasury to review its modelling, because it is now obvious that the Treasury modelling was based on completely flawed assumptions. We now know that the US will not have a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme in place by the end of 2010, as the government had assumed. So the government’s assessment of the impact of a carbon pollution reduction scheme or a carbon tax—or whatever they call it—on jobs, the economy, the budget, the cost of living and the price of electricity was substantially underestimated. That is very clear, and I would suggest that the government knew that at the time. The government had a political objective to make it look as if the impact of a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme was going to be minimal. When I asked Treasury officials during one of our committee hearings about why they had chosen assumptions which lacked complete credibility, the answer I was given was: ‘We chose those assumptions at the direction of the government.’ So it was a political decision. The government had an agenda to make it look as if they could sneak in a price on carbon without hurting anyone.

Senator Cameron over there, who pretends to care about working families, should be really concerned about this. He should be concerned about the impact of a carbon tax on working families across Australia. He should be concerned about what it will do to the cost of living. He should be concerned about what it will do to the price of electricity. He should be concerned that working families across Australia will be asked to make a sacrifice for no proper benefit. Australians care about the environment. We want to make our contribution to help reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. But if we ask people to make a sacrifice it ought to be on the basis that that sacrifice will actually make a difference. The government knows that, in the absence of an appropriately comprehensive global agreement, reducing emissions in Australia in a way that increases emissions by more in other parts of the world does not make a difference, yet the cost of living pressures will be suffered by working families across Australia anyway. That is not an appropriate way to conduct public policy in Australia.

I was very concerned that the Rudd government was very secretive. Despite any suggestions in the lead-up to the election about openness and transparency, the Rudd government was a very secretive government. It was very hard to get any information out of the Rudd government. Indeed, Prime Minister Gillard must agree with that because when she became Prime Minister she said, after the election, that she had learnt her lesson and there was going to be a new era of—guess what?—openness and transparency in government. Operation Sunlight was mentioned. You can guess my surprise when I heard about Operation Sunlight. That was a term that the then finance minister, Lindsay Tanner, used in December 2008. It was all talk and no action then, and it is still all talk and no action. They cannot even change the slogans they use. They used Operation Sunlight then without following through; they still use Operation Sunlight. At least change your names if you want to make it look as if you are now fair dinkum about openness and transparency. This committee which the Prime Minister has set up is going to be a secretive committee: it ‘will ensure that its deliberations and papers remain confidential’. What’s that all about in terms of taking people with you?

I am running out of time but I will just say: there is a better way. There is the direct action way. There is a way to reduce emissions in Australia that does not increase them in other parts of the world, and that is the coalition’s way. That is the way that I commend to the Senate.