Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

Senator McLucas is again trying to mislead the Senate with her interjection. With thanks to Senator Cormann, I quote from Mr Abbott's speech at Parliament House on 4 July. He said:

If the arguments for a carbon tax are as clear and as convincing as members of this government say, let's have a vote. Let's put them to the people.

…   …   …

Let's bring it on …

He said that the government should be prepared to accept the vote of the people, and he has indicated quite clearly that he will as well.

So let us have a plebiscite. What could be fairer? What objection could you have to that? If you do not want a plebiscite, then let us go to the ultimate plebiscite. If Senator Brown is so confident that he will win this debate, perhaps he could move a vote of no confidence in the government and bring the government down. We can go to an election—make it a double dissolution. I know the Labor Party would be petrified of this, because Senator Cameron and Senator Furner would not even make it in a double dissolution, let me tell you. One is from Queensland, the other from New South Wales. Senator Sterle, from Western Australia, would not make it either. I can confidently predict that in Queensland and Western Australia Labor not only would Labor lose every lower house seat on this particular issue but also, I suspect, there would be very few senators elected from those states.

So let us have the vote if Senator Brown is confident that all Australians want this carbon tax—that all Australians want to increase their cost of living and want to be burdened. If many Australians want to lose their jobs, particularly up in Central Queens­land and North Queensland, where I come from—if he is so confident that that is what they want—let us have a vote. This is a democracy. What could be fairer than having a vote?

But will the Greens-Labor government that rules this country be interested in that? Are they at all interested in what the people of Australia might say? Of course not. What we have had so far from the Greens and the Labor Party—and this will ramp up incredibly with $12 million of taxpayers' money, which the Labor-Greens alliance is going to be using to run a political campaign to try to retrieve their electoral fortunes—is this dishonest campaign by the government.

The facts of the carbon tax are continually misrepresented by the Labor Party. Actually, in the last few years, the world's temperature has fallen, yet Senator Furner quoted some figures suggesting the opposite. I have pointed out before a CSIRO graph that shows that 140,000 years ago the sea levels were about where they are today. The graph also shows that over these 140,000 years the sea levels fell, until about 20,000 years ago, when they rose overnight to almost where they are now. I am not sure that industry and man's behaviour caused that rise in sea levels 20,000 years ago. I am only a simple person; I am not a scientist.