Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) 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 today.

This week is a very sad week for our nation. It is a nation that went to an election and was given a warrant by the highest elected office holder in the land at that time that there would be no carbon tax under the government she led. Now we are apparently going to go down that path. Unfortunately, we will have no government under the carbon tax she leads. It is sad that at this point in time, with all the precarious things that are happening on the global economic front, we would be foolish enough to go down this path, ignoring the fallout that is happening in Europe as we speak.

We are on the edge of a precipice. This government is just completely and utterly self-indulgent. It also shows the power in our nation that the Australian Greens have now. The Labor Party is obviously tied in the most intricate form in its policy structure to what was in the past a peripheral party. The Greens' desire for Australia is one in which there is no coalmining. The Greens do not believe in a coalmining industry for Australia, they do not believe in live cattle exports, they do not believe in the irrigation industry of the Murray-Darling Basin—they do not believe in so much of what is fundamentally important to keeping our nation strong.

They say all these mystical things. They talk about compensation. You only need compensation if you have been hurt. No one ever pays compensation to somebody who has not been afflicted. That in itself is an admission of the sorts of problems we are going to have. They talk about the compensation package for the steel industry. Quite obviously they recognise that the steel industry will get smashed. They talk about the compensation package for pensioners, and of course that is a recognition that the pensioners are going to get smashed. They talk about giving people back some of their own money, and they expect people to say thank you for it. It is just an absurd kafkaesque policy.

The whole point of a carbon tax is a pricing mechanism to make things dearer. That is how it works. If that does not happen, there is no point to it. If it does work, then it is totally dangerous and we should not be doing it. Power is not currently free. There is a very high price for power. Many people struggle with the price of power as it is and they do not need any more incentive not to use power. We are seeing in the United States the highest levels of poverty since 1964, and we see similar things in Europe. We should be doing everything we can in our nation to draw the wagons into a circle, to make our nation strong.

It is absurd that we are going down this path right now. When I last checked our debt was $211,392 billion. We borrowed in excess of $2 billion just last week. Jeffrey Sachs says that $3 billion would be the annual cost of curing malaria in Africa. We borrowed that in 1½ weeks. We have to pay this money back. If we do not pay this money back, our nation will be in so much strife and so much trouble. How do we pay the money back? We put ourselves in a strong position. We accentuate the areas where we are strong. We are strong in the export of minerals and in the production of agriculture. What on earth are we doing putting a tax on these things? One of the greatest fundamentals we ever delivered to this nation was a fair standard of living. This is a direct attack on our Australian standard of living.

The question at the essence of this tax that those opposite never answer is how much will this tax that they are about to impose on Australia cool the temperature of the globe? The answer is that it will do absolutely nothing to the temperature of the globe. It is merely a gesture. We are inflicting the privations of poverty on people who cannot afford it, all for a gesture. And this has come from the Labor Party. They used to represent the people who are doing it tough, but now they are not—they have been hijacked by a very particular group in Australia, the Australian Greens, and this will destroy our nation and it will destroy the Australian Labor Party.