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

Thank you very much, Senator Cormann. That sounds about right. So when you say one thing and then you do entirely the opposite, having promised people you will behave a certain way, to me that is a lie. That may be my own personal view, it may be my own understanding of how these things work, but to me it is a lie. Those people out in the streets across this country know that the Prime Minister told them a lie when she said that there was not going to be a carbon tax under the government she led. They know because today it has gone through the House of Representatives. What a very sad, dark day this is for the Australian people. I do not know, as I said in some remarks I made this morning, whether to be furiously angry or incredibly sad that this country is facing having to deal with this piece of legislation—this carbon tax. It is just simply wrong.

Everywhere I go, down every street, in every business, talking to people right across the country, particularly in regional communities, they are saying: 'Why are we doing this? We know it is going to hurt. We know financially we are going to be worse off. We know that electricity prices are going to rise. We know fuel costs are going to rise. We know transport costs are going to rise.' On that very fact alone, Madam Acting Deputy President, as you or anybody in this chamber would know, regional Australia suffers most because of the cost of transport. When those costs of transport go up, as they are going to do when this change comes in for the transport industry not very far down the track—it is going to cost the transport industry $500 million in the first year—they will be passed on to regional people. Those people that I speak to out in regional communities and in the cities keep saying to me, 'Why?' The very point about this, colleagues, is that it is not going to change the climate one little bit.

My colleague Senator Cormann pointed out earlier—and he is absolutely right—that the whole point of this legislation is to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. So the simple question is: does the legislation actually do that? The answer is no. Colleagues, let us have a look. For those listening who cannot actually see what I am doing, I am holding up my copy of the legislation which is about six inches thick. Does the Clean Energy (Household Assistance Amendments) Bill 2011 change the climate? No. Does the Clean Energy Bill 2011 change the climate? No. Does the Clean Energy (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2011 change the climate? No. In the rest of this six-inch pile of legislation, does any single piece of paper or any single written word change the climate? No, it does not. That is why the Australian people are so furious with this Labor government bringing this carbon tax in. It does not do what the government intends the legislation to do. It does not change the climate.

As my good colleague Senator Joyce often says, the government thinks it can sit down here in Canberra and flick a switch and change the temperature of the globe. It is simply nonsensical because we are the only country doing this. Those on the other side like to continually point out that other countries are doing this and we are just getting on board. The Productivity Commission—not Senator Nash or any of my Senate colleagues—says that no other country is doing or is about to do what we are about to bring in. That is a simple fact. So what do we have then, colleagues? We have vanity legislation from the Prime Minister—nothing more, nothing less. This is vanity legislation from the Prime Minister so she can go to South Africa at the end of the year and say on the world stage, 'I have brought clean energy legislation into Australia; I am the queen of the world.'

The point is that it is not going to change the climate one little bit and the Prime Minister is somewhat misguided if she thinks bringing in this legislation is going to make her look good, because it is not. Quite frankly, I do not think anything at this stage can make the Prime Minister look good with the succession of bad policy decisions that this Prime Minister continues to make. What is extraordinary is the ineptness—if that is a word—the inept nature, of the way the Prime Minister is running this country. She thinks: 'This is a great idea. Let's lead the world. We have to lead the way.' Why do we have to lead the way when we emit only 1.4 per cent of the world's emissions? It is hard to understand, but 1.4 per cent of the world's emissions is Australia's contribution. Yet we have a Prime Minister and a government pushed by the Greens to bring in a carbon tax that is going to put a huge financial impost on this country. It is going to reconfigure our economy, it is going to put money into the pockets of the paper-pushers who are going to get to trade this stuff, but it is not going to change the climate one little bit. I do not know about you, colleagues, but to me that is just stupidity. It is absolute stupidity to place in front of this country legislation of this nature that is going to have the impact it will have, yet the intended outcome of the legislation—to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions—is not going to happen. So what is the point? This is why people around the country are so furious about the government bringing in this carbon tax. It is interesting that when we look at what the government says—and you cannot trust them, really, with everything we have seen from them—