Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I acknowledge Senator Bernardi's somewhat pointless contribution to the climate change debate in this matter of public importance. As a climate change sceptic, he clearly has no imperative to help Australian households, businesses or our climate adapt to a carbon constrained future. Even though sceptics are very much discredited in this debate, he still sees fit to put these views forward. Clearly, as a senator in this chamber, he has the right to do so. What he expresses is certainly not in the national interest. I certainly know that many of his colleagues on that side of the chamber do not agree with him.

Frankly, it makes me very happy to have this timeslot in the MPI debate to yet again open it up to talk about the importance of acting on climate change. I am very happy to stand here and talk about the important work being done to get this policy formulation right before the details are completely announced. There is nothing wrong with working through the detail and taking the time to do that, but there is a lot of important detail already on the table and there is more to come. I make no apology for the import­ance of working through the premises.

We know that the 1,000 largest polluters should be paying every time they pollute under a carbon price. We also know that the government has committed to using every cent raised through putting a price on carbon to get our biggest polluters to pay for providing the household assistance to help with family budgets, protect jobs and businesses as they make the transition to a clean energy economy, tackle climate change and invest in new, clean technology. This stands in stark contrast to the kinds of policies we see the Liberals put in place, including the policies of the Barnett govern­ment in Western Australia. They are cutting the feed-in tariff from 40c to 20c from 1 July. We have also seen massive electricity increases. We have had the fifth price increase in less than three years. There is a five per cent increase hitting now. There has been a total increase of nearly 50 per cent since 2009 in Western Australian electricity bills. But there have been no offsets for those households—there has been no care factor whatsoever—whereas we know that in pricing carbon we need to help households adjust to any price impact, and that is why we will provide generous household assistance to help with family budgets.

We know, for example, that as part of the assistance package the Australian com­munity will get more than 50 per cent of the money collected from big polluters. That will go straight to households. We also know that petrol will be—