Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Boswell for his intelligent contribution to the policy debate. Again, they have got nothing to contribute. We have seen the Liberal Party move to the right on this issue to the point of abandoning any commitment to climate change action and giving up on any attempt to recognise the challenges we face.

It is interesting to see what the current Leader of the Opposition, Mr Abbott, had to say in July 2009 about a carbon tax. It is worth while remembering and illustrating how far the Liberal Party have come. Mr Abbott said:

I also think that if you want to put a price on carbon, why not just do it with a simple tax? Why not ask motorists to pay more? Why not ask electricity consumers to pay more? Then at the end of the year you can take your invoices to the tax office and get a rebate of the carbon tax you paid. It would be burdensome. All taxes are burdensome. But it would certainly change the price of carbon, raise the price of carbon, without increasing in any way the overall tax burden.

I admit that Mr Abbott has many positions on this question, and it is hard to follow, but on that occasion he thought that a carbon tax was a good idea—that was his preferred option. As I say, there have been so many positions that it has been hard to follow. I gather now that we have settled on a position, and that is to say no to anything, to advance no policy prescription, just to say that it is all too hard.

In order to be clear on Mr Abbott’s position, I take the advice on this occasion of his own former leader Malcolm Turnbull, who said Mr Abbott had had every position but no conviction. Mr Turnbull said on the question:

Tony himself has, in just four or five months, publicly advocated the blocking of the ETS, the passing of the ETS, the amending of the ETS and, if the amendments were satisfactory, passing it, and now the blocking of it. His only redeeming virtue in this remarkable lack of conviction is that every time he announced a new position to me he would preface it with, ‘Mate, mate, I know I am a bit of a weather vane on this, but...’

That is Tony Abbott’s position, as summed up by Malcolm Turnbull. The Liberal Party has proved one thing and one thing only. It has no conviction on this. It has no policy, it has no conviction.

We are in a situation now where the coalition seeks to move a censure motion against the government on its position seeking to bring in a price on carbon but it has nothing to say about the public policy debate, just the puerile—