Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Materiel) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Finance and Deregulation (Senator Wong) to questions without notice asked by Senators Birmingham and Cormann today relating to a proposed carbon tax.

As we rush into the Labor Party kitchen, we see so many pots boiling over on the stove it is hard to know which one to turn to first. I suggest that the urgency of the carbon tax issue needs to be addressed, because it is the issue that will confront the Joint Select Committee on Australia's Clean Energy Future Legislation tomorrow. As the question from Senator Birmingham today demonstrated, vital information for that inquiry is not yet available. Here we have the government's own cooked-up process of rushing its carbon tax through the parliament, and we have an inquiry set up—albeit at great haste and in the most unorthodox style—with a committee chaired by a Labor MP—