Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Senator Cormann—community consensus. This government has just given the Australian people about five days for that community consensus; five days for the people of this country to make a submission to the inquiry—and there are three days left, mind you. That is absolutely appalling. Not only did the Prime Minister lie, saying there was not going to be a carbon tax, but she did not even go for option B and allow community consensus. How can the Australian people trust anything this government says?

Interestingly, according to the Productivity Commission, there is not another country that has what we are about to introduce or is going to have it. That is not me. That is not my colleagues on this side. That is not scaremongering, which Senator Sterle likes to refer to. That is a fact. Going through this 1,100 pages of legislation, we can see that the impact on the hip pockets of average Australian people, every single Australian, is going to be huge, and—this is the crux of the whole matter—for what? Nothing. It is not going to change the climate one little bit. Even the most rusted-on global warming believers out there are smart enough to figure out that the carbon tax is not going to change the climate. So why are we putting this country at risk for this government's frolic and tax grab through this carbon tax? It is not going to change the climate one little bit. That is why we should not be going down this road.

What the government are putting forward is simply not going to achieve what they say they are trying to achieve. We only have to look at the regional impacts to see that. The government likes to say that we are scaremongering. I like to say, 'We are not. We are simply informing the Australian people of the truth.' You only have to look at some of the examples, particularly in regional Australia, to see the impact that this is going to have. Senators on the other side might be completely in denial, but this is going to have an enormous impact. We know that the Murray-Goulburn Co-operative is going to incur carbon costs of over $5,000 per farm. Guess where that is going to be paid from? It is the farmers at the bottom of the food chain who have absolutely no ability to pass any of these costs on. It is simply wrong. Rice farmers' costs on average are going to go up $10,000 a year per farm. This is not scaremongering; this is fact. The list goes on and on. One of the real kickers is in the transport industry. In 2014-15 it is going to have a cost of half a billion dollars a year. Regional communities will bear the brunt of that.

This is a government that has lied to the Australian people. It told the Australian people there would be no carbon tax and is now bringing in a carbon tax—with the support of the Greens and the Independents, I might add—that is not going to change the climate one little bit. If that is not the definition of stupidity, I do not know what is.