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

No amount of interjecting, Senator Abetz, is going to change that. It was your policy. People like you inside the Liberal Party who have extreme views on this issue did not like it, but it was your policy. It was your policy because it was the most sensible policy response to climate change.

I also remind the opposition of what Mr Abbott is on the record as saying. He said:

I also think that if you want to put a price on carbon why not just do it with a simple tax.

Surprise, surprise! Now the sky is going to fall in because the government is proposing to price carbon when Mr Abbott is on the record as saying he wants a price on carbon through a tax. That is what Tony Abbott said. In July 2009 Mr Abbott went on the record supporting a carbon price through a tax. But, now, if we do price carbon then the sky will fall in. That is Senator Joyce’s position. That is your position, Senator Abetz.

We also heard Mr Turnbull describe Mr Abbott’s straight talking, or not straight talking, most pithily when he said:

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 …”

Mr Abbott has altered his position many times on this issue because each time his judgment has been based only on what he thinks is politically necessary and not on what he thinks is the right thing to do. That is the true reason, Senator Abetz, your party have had so many different positions on this. You have previously advocated an emissions trading scheme. You have previously advocated passing the emissions trading scheme with amendments. You then tore down a leader rather than pass the emissions trading scheme, and now you are running a fear campaign. The reason you have had so many positions on this issue of importance to the nation is that you never judge it by what it means for the future. You only judge it by what it means for your political position today. That is the reason why you have no policy when it comes to climate change.

The world is moving on. We know that business is already recognising the importance of a carbon price. We know from talking to business that it believes a carbon price is coming, and many in the business community want the certainty that a carbon price will provide. When it comes to electricity prices—and I am happy to deal with that directly because Senator Joyce talked about it—what is the primary factor driving increases in electricity prices in this country? It is the need to invest further in the network. That investment is being recovered in part through electricity prices. What is one of the factors that is leading to investment uncertainty? It is the lack of a carbon price. This is something the electricity sector itself has said on a number of occasions, that the lack of certainty is leading to poor investment decisions and that if we want to do something sensible we need to give business that certainty because we know investment is a long-run proposition.

I also make this point about other countries. There continues to be peddled by the opposition this incorrect information—some might even call it a lie—that other countries are not acting. We know that emissions trading schemes are already in operation in 31 European countries and 10 US states. We also know that a recent economic study estimated that the US, the UK and China have implicit carbon prices well in excess of Australia’s. We do not believe we should lead the world but we do not believe we should be left behind as a nation. This nation does need to begin the economic reform, the economic change that is required to move to a lower carbon, cleaner energy economy. The cheapest way to do that is not the way you propose, which is both to say no but also to give polluters billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money. The cheapest way to do that is to price what is currently free, and that is pollution.

In closing I say this. This is a tough debate. This is a hard debate. This is a debate where it is easy for people to score political points today. But I have always been of the view that the climate change debate is a debate that will be best considered if you look at the longer term and, if you think forward, as I said, five or 10 or 20 years from now, what people will say and think about the decisions that were made. I hope that what we will see is people saying that we actually grasped the nettle, we actually faced the future with confidence, we priced carbon and we reformed our economy so today the nation is amongst the most competitive clean energy economies in the world. That is what I hope we do. If we take the path that those opposite demand, what we know is that we will continue to be one of the most highly polluting countries, an old-fashioned economy, and people will look back in 10 or 20 years time and say, ‘That Senate, that parliament, missed the opportunity to do the right thing for the next generations of Australians.’