Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you. I was pointing out the fact that we as one of the highest polluters per head in the world shows our economy is predicated on putting a lot of carbon pollution into the atmosphere. There may be some in this chamber who think that that is a good thing and we do not have to worry about it. There are others who ask whether, in five or 10 or 20 years time, we want the same old-fashioned economy that polluted as much as we do today per person or an economy that is far more based on clean energy, on less polluting ways of doing things. Just as the rest of the world is seeking to move to cleaner energy, to less polluting ways of doing business, so too must Australia. If you believe that the world will increasingly put a premium on low-carbon goods and services, if you agree in the long term—as business does—that the world will move to pricing carbon, as it is, then really the question is: how do we move and how do we do it in a cost-effective way? We do not wish to lead the world, but we cannot afford to be left behind on this key economic reform. So the policy question is: how do you do this at the lowest cost?

We are a Labor government and there has been a lot of talk about us not reflecting Labor values in this policy—assertions from those opposite, which I completely reject. We are a Labor government and we will bring Labor values to this policy area as we bring Labor values to all policy areas. You saw that in how we approached this before; you will continue to see it in how we approach this.

As the Prime Minister has said, every cent that is raised through putting a price on carbon will go back to Australians—either households, which will be our first priority, or various other mechanisms—to help move us to a low-pollution economy of the future. That is the reality; that is how we will approach it. What we have seen today from the opposition, as we have seen from them since the announcement and over the last three years, is the same hysteria, fear campaign and bandying around of figures which are not true. They are led by a hollow man and they are hollow people. They are people without a vision for the challenge that is so important to Australia’s future. All they can come up with in the face of a challenge like climate change is a scare campaign. That is all they can do. They have no answer other than a fear campaign and a three-word slogan which has now morphed into something else.

They do, however, seem of late to have had a propensity to look outside of their own party for their policy announcements. It has been quite interesting to observe where they have got some of their savings ideas for the floods package. They appeared to be surprisingly similar to some of the things that we have seen on the One Nation website. We have seen Mr Morrison making a range of comments which sound surprisingly similar to some of the things we have heard in other political circles. I found an interesting quote from Mr Abbott on climate change. He said:

… medieval times they grew crops in Greenland. In the 1700s they had ice fairs on the Thames.

Interestingly, One Nation say on their website:

There have been times when it is a lot warmer than now, when Greenland was ice free and you could grow melons in the open in England … and even in the 1600s when the Thames River in London froze over.

Isn’t it interesting where the opposition are getting their advice? Why the surprising similarity between what Mr Abbott said and what has been said on the One Nation website? The reality is that those on that side have no policy on this area. They have no policy, actually, on very much at all. The only thing that they seem to be able to do is to say no and to say, ‘This is a really bad idea and we are going to campaign against it. We are going to run a scare campaign. We are going to run a fear campaign. This is a great big new tax,’ or some other slogan. That is their only policy position. This is an issue that is central to the nation’s future. It is about the competitiveness of this nation going forward. This is about dealing with an issue that will not go away, and all the opposition can do is oppose. That is all they can do—oppose. They have a leader whose knee-jerk response to any policy proposition that is put forward by the government is to oppose it.

I want to remind the opposition of some of their views previously, because they come in here beating their chests as if this is somehow something they have never agreed with and never wanted to do. In 2007 the then Prime Minister John Howard went to the election with a policy for an emissions trading scheme.