Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business and Fair Competition) Share this | Hansard source

Here we go again. When the Labor Party are in trouble they pretend they are not the government. They talk as if they are the opposition and they talk about this side of the chamber. All we hear from them are key phrases. It must be depressing on the other side of this chamber to have a different message about the carbon tax almost daily. We have heard different excuses and reasons and now, finally, they have gone back to the Hawke era. We have got the spirit of Bob Hawke, with Ross Garnaut coming out here to give them some momentum in this debate.

The term ‘scare campaign’ is nothing more than a fudge for Labor being in trouble. The truth here is that the Labor Party has broken an explicit promise. There was no qualification and there was no doubt. It was said directly into the camera, as contrived and rehearsed as everything else that comes out of this Prime Minister’s mouth. You know that that broken promise made the difference last year and, just like all the lobotomised state governments that are falling around the country, you hope that the Australian people will forget it. But they will not forget your duplicity and they will not forget your cowardice in refusing to take this to the people the way the coalition did with its tax package in 1998. You are simply hoping against hope that the Australian people will give you a free pass.

I would like to examine some of the arguments put forward by this government—some of the many arguments we have heard over the past few weeks, but we do not know if they will be the same ones we will hear next week. It might take another spirit from the Hawke government to come back to give them that argument. We apparently need to introduce a price on carbon because forcing up the price of electricity and fuel will lead to a substantial decrease in its use. As if the 50 per cent increase in power prices in my home state of Victoria over the past three years was not going to do it, the government wants to chuck on another 40 per cent in the next three years. What sort of economic sense does it make when you do not take into account the evidence that is already out there in the public domain? ‘The stone age did not end because we ran out of stones’ is an old economists’ truth. The other thing is that the stone age did not end because they introduced a stone tax or a stone trading system.

Pushing up the price of electricity by a few hundred dollars for each household is not going to lead to the technological breakthroughs we need if we are going to move to the greater use of renewable or low-emissions energy. This government knows that. This contrived market, this contrived price signal, is nothing more than a tax grab, and there is real concern and fear about this in the community. Only two Saturdays ago I and a number of my colleagues—Senator Fifield and Senator McGauran—were at a rally outside the Prime Minister’s electorate office in Werribee in the western suburbs of Melbourne. Over 500 people turned out that day to protest. As someone who grew up in the western suburbs of Melbourne, I can tell you that these are not people who regularly come to a rally. But there was genuine community anger because there was fear for their jobs, fear for their businesses and fear for their cost of living. They have worn the cost of this federal Labor government over the past three years, they have worn the cost increases by state Labor governments over the past decade, and they know what is coming next. They know that it is only going to get worse.

This government throws around the word ‘reform’ as if reform were somehow a lifeboat from the disaster they are in and the leaking ship that is this government. The ALP yell ‘compensation for the introduction of this new tax’. Let us just sit back and think of that for a second, compared to the history in this country. They are going to introduce a new tax and they are kind enough to give you back half of it, but only to those select Australians they approve of. Yet again the people on the other side of this chamber seek to divide Australia between those who they think are worthy of paying more tax—and having some of it given back to them—and those who they think are not. That is consistent with the divisive approach the Labor Party has always taken. When the coalition introduced the GST—I was not in this chamber at the time—10 taxes were abolished. Tell me: what taxes are going to be abolished when this carbon tax is introduced?