Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Nash and Senator Cameron for their earlier contributions. The Greens will be opposing this legislation—the Carbon Tax Plebiscite Bill 2011 [No. 2]—because it entertains a fair degree of silliness as well as a large degree of public expenditure. In fact, when you look at the cost of up to $100 million for a plebiscite, then, based on the argument we have just heard from Senator Nash about imposing on people a cost that is unwarranted, that ought to be at the outset a measure for ruling out the idea. It was no doubt a political move by the Leader of the Opposition that was then introduced into this place by Senator Abetz. Proposed section 6 of this bill, under the heading 'Question to be submitted to electors', says:

The question to be submitted to electors in accordance with section 5 is “Do you support the Government’s plan to introduce a price on carbon to deal with climate change?”.

So at the outset the whole of Senator Nash's contention is demolished because the question has nothing to do with a tax; it is about a price on carbon. I will come back to that in a little while because that is exactly what the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, is proposing to do with his alterna­tive—that is, to put a price on carbon which will be imposed on the people of Australia.

The difference here is that Mr Abbott and Senator Abetz want to have that price paid for in a reverse mechanism—they want to take money off the Australian people and give it to the polluters, with the aim that the polluters will use the money to reduce the pollution in their coal fired power stations and other polluting enterprises. The govern­ment, several Independents and the Greens are moving to reverse that and have the polluters pay through pricing mechanisms—therefore, forcing them to clean up their pollution because they will want to avoid that payment—and then use the money from the permits paid for by the polluters to enable the Australian economy to move to a clean, green basis in the future, creating tens of thousands of jobs and offsetting the cost by paying householders compensation for the flow-on costs of the carbon price in terms of increased prices in particular for energy and very minimal changes then to costs at supermarkets and so on.

So, in a nutshell, Mr Abbott and Senator Abetz are proposing that the Australian people have billions of dollars taken off them and given to the big foreign owned polluting corporations—and most of them are—whereas the Greens, the government and the Independents involved—the Hon. Tony Windsor and the Hon. Rob Oakeshott from the House of Representatives—are in the cabinet subcommittee looking at this matter to ensure that householders are looked after. People are beginning to understand that. There is going to be a change of mood in the electorate because the Leader of the Opposition and the coalition are taking the Australian electorate as being fools, but they are not. The Leader of the Opposition has changed his position and will continue to change his position according to a political tub-thumping approach which has no depth. We heard the Leader of the Opposition saying as recently as Friday, 1 July at a conference of economists:

It may well be, as you say, that most Australian economists think that the carbon tax or emissions trading scheme is the way to go.

Maybe that's a comment on the quality of our economists rather than on the merits of the argument.

We had here the extraordinary claim from the Leader of the Opposition that all the economists in Australia—and I mean all the economists in Australia—are wrong and he is right. Australians looking at that are going to recognise that it is the Leader of the Opposition who is wrong, because he cannot simply make that claim without substantiat­ing it and he has not been able to substantiate it. The Leader of the Opposition, Mr Tony Abbott, has changed his position quite frequently. He said in 2009:

If you want to put a price on carbon why not just do it with a simple tax? ... Why not ask electricity consumers to pay more? And then at the end of the year, you can take your invoices to the tax office and get a rebate ... It would be burdensome, all taxes are burdensome, but it would certainly ... raise the price on carbon without increasing in any way the overall tax burden.

So we had there Tony Abbott endorsing the very argument that he now opposes. We had there Tony Abbott putting forward a proposal supported by economists which he has since reneged on while the economists have gone on with further study to say that the government-Greens-Independents propo­sal is the most economically efficient and therefore is the cheapest for the Australian people to save us from the much greater economic impact of climate change, global warming and the destruction that has not just on our food-producing lands and our coastal cities, towns and properties but on great economic, environmental and job-producing entities like the Great Barrier Reef. In 2009 Mr Abbott said:

I think that the science is far from settled but on the insurance principle you are prepared to take reasonable precautions against significant potential risks, and that's I think why it makes sense to have an ETS.

It is an emissions trading scheme that he is now opposing. The very thing he proposed he is now opposing. You can imagine a referendum campaign in which the people of Australia are exposed to support for the government-Greens-Independent position repeatedly being out of the Leader of the Opposition's own mouth. It would be an exercise in futility and at great expense to the Australian people which would be lost. When we look at the position taken by Mr Abbott and Senator Abetz, which is to take money from the Australian exchequer, from the taxpayers, and give it to the polluters we find that Mr Abbott has said his direct action plan—