Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to endorse Senator Birmingham's comments. Senator Birmingham hit the nail on the head. This is a government that does not think things through. This is a government that has to pursue policy on the run because it does not think things through and it chops and changes, breaks promises and does not know what it is doing. This is a sensible amend­ment, but why is it an amendment? Why did the government not include this provision in the bill right upfront? Senator Birmingham very eloquently made the point that this is not a new issue as this is an issue that was raised by stakeholders all the way through. This government is so blinded by ideology, is so incompetent and is so incapable of actually properly considering the issues that are raised with it legitimately by stake­holders that on occasions it has to mop up. To give the government credit, at least here it is trying to mop up its mistakes and it is trying to sort something out given that clearly there is a major deficiency in the legislation as introduced by the government.

Of course, land access for agricultural production should be one of the criteria that are considered and Senator Birmingham is quite right to be suspicious of this govern­ment given that it is pursuing this policy on the run and so there is no detail in the regulations that have been put forward by the minister. Clearly, it still does not quite know how to deal with this. And this is not an isolated incident. This is not an isolated case. Again and again this government does not think things through, is driven by ideology and is cutting corners and, ultimately, is forced to chop and change and pursue policy on the run when the error of its ways become too obvious. If only the government were prepared to see the error of its ways in relation to the carbon tax, which is part of the broader policy agenda that the Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Bill 2011 is part of.

We are here looking at the excluded offsets projects and what criteria should be considered in deciding whether to recommend to the Governor-General that regulations should be made to specify a particular kind of project 'that the minister must have regard to', as I am reading in the bill, and whether there is a significant risk that kind of project will have a significant adverse impact 'on one or more of the following'. One of the criteria to be part of the excluded offsets projects, according to this amendment, will be land access for agricultural production. But there was another process that the government went through in the context of the carbon tax whereby they made decisions on the run to exclude certain things—or so we were told. You might remember that there was a thing called the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee. Before the last election we were promised that there would be a citizens assembly with 150 people—which we all thought was the House of Representatives! But, no, the Prime Minister had a different view. The Prime Minister thought there was going to be a citizens assembly which was going to build a consensus around the nation on climate change. The Prime Minister was not going to pursue a price on carbon until and unless there was a consensus across the Australian community to put a price on carbon. Chair, I put it to you that this country is more divided than it ever has been. This Prime Minister is a divisive Prime Minister. The way this Prime Minister has pursued this process through this so-called Multi-Party Climate Change Committee has divided our nation. We have got the broken promise, the promise given five days before the last election, that there will be 'no carbon tax under the government I lead'. There was a promise that she would do what she could as the leader of this nation to build a community consensus. Of course, none of this has happened. What we have had though—and I am looking at it now—is a press release put out by one of the members of the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee on, the federal member for New England, Tony Windsor. I will quote from the press release that he put out on 10 July 2011. He said that fuel would be 'excluded from the carbon tax'. So there is another exclusion. There are a couple of other quotes that I think are quite worthwhile sharing with the chamber, such as:

The decision to exclude fuel from the carbon tax has been welcomed by the Independent member for New England, Tony Windsor.

Further:

Several months ago I stated publicly that I wouldn't support a carbon tax if it allied applied to transport fuels.

And then:

A price of $23 per tonne of carbon, if applied to fuel, would equate to a price rise of around 6 cents a litre.

That is right. It is actually 6.21c a litre. And this is the absolutely critical one:

That's why I decided I wouldn't support a carbon tax if it applied to fuel.

The news flash is: the carbon tax does apply to fuel. And it does not only apply to fuel from 1 July 2014, the carbon tax will also apply to fuel from 1 July 2012. Don't take my word for it. That is the evidence that the Secretary of the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency put to the Senate Select Committee on the Scrutiny of New Taxes last Wednesday.

Again, it is worthwhile going through some of the Hansard record in relation to that. I asked the secretary:

I would like to refer you to the exposure draft of the Fuel Tax Legislation Amendment (Clean Energy) Bill 2011—

which is another one of these bills that relates to the broader action on climate change agenda put forward by this government, in a very bad way in our view—

and specifically clause 43(8). This is a clause to impose a carbon price on fuel through a reduction in the fuel tax credit, correct?

Mr Comley: This is on page 5?

CHAIR: That is right.

Then he said he had the bill in front of him, which is good.

CHAIR: I am looking at the exposure draft, page 5, 43(8), 'working out the amount of carbon reduction'. This clause effectively imposes a carbon price on fuel through a reduction in the fuel tax credit, does it not?

Mr Comley : That is correct.

So the government is actually imposing a price on carbon, what we would call a carbon tax, from 1 July 2012 on fuel. When Mr Windsor in his press release on 10 July said that he has decided he would not support a carbon tax if it applied to fuel, the coalition calls on him to be true to his word, because there will be carbon tax on fuel from 1 July 2012. Who knows? This might be another occasion, as with this amendment that we are discussing now, where the government might make policy on the run and might decide that, yes, it did make a commitment to the member for New England to exclude the carbon tax on fuel. If that is so, then that particular provision is no doubt going to disappear from that legislation as well—the same way the government is adding an amendment here to the Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Bill 2011. No doubt there will be an amendment to the carbon tax. I certainly, along with Senator Williams, who is on the scrutiny of new taxes committee, am very keen to see Tony Windsor, the member for New England, call on the government to amend its carbon tax legislation to ensure that all fuel is excluded, because he said he would not vote for it unless all fuel was excluded. So we will see whether that is happening.

Just to conclude the evidence that was quite relevant from Mr Comley, the Secretary of the Department Climate Change and Energy Efficiency. I asked him:

Doesn't this mean that recipients of the fuel tax rebate are paying a carbon price from the word go by the wording of your own legislation?

Mr Comley: It certainly means that they are having a reduction in their credit linked to the carbon price, yes.

CHAIR: From day 1, as of 1 July 2012 under your exposure draft?

Mr Comley: Yes, that is correct.

So there are no ifs, no buts, no question marks: the government is planning to impose a carbon tax on fuel from 1 July 2012 and on all transport fuels from 1 July 2014. However much anybody wants to wriggle around it and say, 'By then the government will have lost the election and a new Abbott coalition government won't allow that to happen anyway,' the current government has $510 million in their forward estimates, courtesy of revenue to be collected from truckies around Australia.

The government's whole approach to climate change is a farce. It is a complete fraud. They are wanting to make people believe that they can actually do something about reducing global greenhouse gas emissions when they are not even trying. Before the government's most recent modelling came out, I actually thought that they would be able to reduce emissions domestically but I thought they were reducing emissions domestically in a way that would then increase emissions by more in other parts of the world. What has turned out to be the case is that they are not even trying to reduce emissions domestically. This government is not even in a position through their carbon tax, which will push up the cost of everything, which will make Australia less competitive internationally, which will cost jobs, which will hurt small business, to reduce emissions domestically, with emissions, according to the government's own figures, expected to go up from about 578 million tonnes of CO2 in 2009-10 to about 621 million tonnes of CO2 in 2020.

The government then says: 'You can't look at it that way. Emissions are going to go up, sure, but you have got to compare them to the business-as-usual scenario. They're going to be lower than what they would have been.' Okay. So, even though they are going up, you are saying they are going down because they are going to be lower than what they would have been. What about jobs? Jobs are going up but, hang on, jobs are going to be lower than they would have been. So, according to your logic, jobs are going down. If you say emissions are going down because they are lower than they would have been, then, if jobs are going to be lower than they would have been, presumably jobs are going down. But no, jobs are going up. So why are jobs going up? Because if you compare where we are today to where we are going to be in 2020, there are going to be more jobs in 2020 than there are in 2011. Sure, the population will continue to grow so it will be very sad if we did not have more people in employment in 2020. But, here you are, you have a government that wants to have it both ways.

It wants us to look at what the situation would have been in relation to emissions, but it wants us to compare where we start now and where we will be in 2020 in the job situation. The truth of the matter is that the carbon tax will cost jobs and it will put downward pressure on wages. It will result in lower real wages.

I talked about China yesterday and I did not quite get to the end of what I was trying to get across. Just in the last three years, Treasury's expectations as to what would happen—