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

Across both electorates, 10,000 surveys in relation to the carbon tax were returned. The question that was asked was whether people were in favour of or against the carbon tax. Nearly 90 per cent of people in those electorates who returned the survey were opposed to the carbon tax. I get distracted because I get upset—and I understand why my friends in the National Party get upset—when I see two members representing rural areas treating their electorates and the wishes of their electorates with such complete disregard, knowing that the carbon tax will have a particularly bad impact on regional Australia.

So here we are. We have a government which before the last election promised that there would be no carbon tax. Then, of course, in order to hold onto government the Prime Minister had to give in to the pressure and the cajoling of the Greens. She signed on the dotted line an alliance deal which sold out working families across Australia, which sold out people who will face increased costs of living while there will be fewer jobs and lower real wages.

When the obvious outcry across Australia came around, when people across Australia said, 'Hang on; that's not what we were promised,' what did the Prime Minister say? The Prime Minister, standing in her courtyard with 'Deputy Prime Minister' Senator Bob Brown standing by her side, said: 'Don't you worry. You might not like it now, but once we have put out the detail people will like it. People will like it once we've put out the information on compensation, on transitional assistance, on the money-go-round. People will like it.' You know what? The detail is out and people still do not like it. In fact, people like it less, because people understand that they are being asked to make a sacrifice which will make absolutely no difference to the environment.

People across Australia are not fools. They understand that if you impose a cost on businesses in Australia by imposing a carbon price—a cost which is not faced by businesses in other parts of the world—if you make higher emitting businesses in other parts of the world more competitive than lower emitting businesses in Australia, if you just help higher emitting businesses in other parts of the world take market share away from even the most environmentally efficient equivalent businesses in Australia, then all you are doing is shifting emissions to other parts of the world, where the emissions for the same amount of economic output will actually be higher. So global emissions are actually going to go up.

We know that the government's own modelling expects that emissions in Australia will continue to go up. We know that the government's own modelling expects that emissions in China will go up from about 10.3 million tonnes now to 17.9 million tonnes in 2020. Let me pause a moment here and reflect on that 17.9 million figure, because I thought: gee, that's rather high; that's a pretty significant increase—a 7.6 million-tonne CO2 emissions increase out of China. That sounds more than what we were told only three years ago. And my suspicions were right, because when I checked the Treasury modelling in 2008, do you know what Treasury told us about Chinese emissions in 2008? They told us that CO2 emissions out of china in 2020 would be 16.1 million tonnes. So 16.1 million tonnes of CO2 emissions out of China in 2020 was what Treasury told us three years ago. Now they tell us it is going to be 17.9 million tonnes in 2020. That is an increase in the expected emissions out of China in 2020 of 1.8 million tonnes. The margin of error between the Treasury modelling in 2008 and the Treasury modelling in 2011 is more than three times the emissions across the whole of Australia in a whole year! And we think that to push up the cost of living and to reduce Australia's international competitiveness and put jobs at risk is actually going to do something to reduce global emissions. It won't.

And of course the government knows this: the government knows that its policy does not hang together. The government knows that people across Australia understand that this is bad policy, the premise of which is of course based on a broken promise made five days before the last election. This is why the government wants to minimise the level of scrutiny of this legislation in this parliament.

And of course we had the sham, absolutely sham, joint select committee inquiry, which was chaired by a member of the government, deputy-chaired by another member of the government—in Greens Senator Christine Milne—and which gave one week for submissions, one week for hearings and one week to finalise the report! Senator Milne yesterday in this chamber was having a go at the Senate carbon tax inquiry, saying it was a coalition committee. Well, no, it was not a coalition committee, actually; it was and is a committee of the Senate. It is the Senate Select Committee on the Scrutiny of New Taxes, which has on it three Liberal senators, one National Party senator, two Labor senators—and, of course, one of those Labor senators, consistent with convention, being the deputy chair of the committee. So there is an opposition chair, a government deputy chair and there have been previous Labor deputy chairs—the then Senator Hutchins; and for a week Senator Matt Thistlethwaite, until the factional powerbrokers told him that he had to resign to let Senator Cameron come in as deputy chair. But, be that as it may, consistent with convention there was an opposition chair and a government deputy chair, which of course is not what was done in the joint select committee sponsored by the government. Against any past convention, government committee members were both the chair and the deputy chair of that committee, with the member for Chisholm as the chair and Senator Milne as the deputy chair.

And of course our committee went through a very comprehensive process over a 12-month period, listening to evidence from a wide range of witnesses, travelling the length and breadth of Australia—instead of staying here, totally limited to the eastern-state-centric triangle of Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney. But if you only have a week to hold hearings, you cannot make it all the way to Western Australia to listen to the views, the issue, the challenges and the aspirations of the people of Western Australia. It is way too hard to talk to people in Western Australia about the implication of the carbon tax on them—way too far to go.

But there happen to be some pretty specific issues for the great state of Western Australia when it comes to the carbon tax—because, as senators would well understand, the carbon tax creates some significant issues for the electricity generation industry. Out of the 500 so-called biggest polluters, as the Prime Minister describes them—where the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency has a more neutral description; it actually refers to them as the '500 biggest emitters', but in the Orwellian spin language that we have become accustomed to from this government, the government calls them the 500 biggest polluters—most of the top 20 are major energy generators. So there are significant issues for the electricity generation industry that flow from the carbon tax. But the issues in Western Australia are very different from the issues faced in the eastern states, and that is because the eastern states are part of what is erroneously described as the National Electricity Market. The National Electricity Market, which is a spot market, which has particular dynamics, is not really a national electricity market at all. It is an eastern states, including South Australia, market. Western Australia is not part of what is wrongly described as the National Electricity Market. Western Australia is an energy island. Western Australia has to be energy self-sufficient.

There are two major energy providers in Western Australia: Verve Energy, a state owned energy operator; and Griffin Energy. Verve Energy will pay about $250 million a year in carbon tax, because they put out 8½ million tonnes of CO2 emissions, times 23 and moving forward. It will average out over the next however many years, to about $250 million a year, with all of the bits and pieces. The more polluting energy generators in Victoria, like the brown coal generators, get transitional assistance. The Western Australian energy generators do not. Why? Because they are too clean! But these are the sorts of issues that we need to debate, and this government is not prepared to debate them. So Western Australian electricity generators, because they are less polluting than energy generators in other parts of Australia, will get zero dollars transitional assistance. And I cannot believe that Senator Glenn Sterle and Senator Mark Bishop and Senator Chris Evans and Senator Louise Pratt have done nothing to stand up for Western Australia when it come to the implications of the carbon tax for Western Australia. There they are, doing the bidding of this most eastern-state-centric, most arrogant, most Canberra-centric government we have had in the history of Federation, a government which gives Western Australia the raw end of the stick whenever it gets the opportunity, a government which sponsored an inquiry into the carbon tax which was not even prepared to go and listen to any of the people, any of the stakeholders, any of the businesses, any of the organisations that are going to be severely impacted by the carbon tax. This is no doubt why the government wants to gag debate on the carbon tax but is quite happy to have a lengthy debate on the proposal that we have an exemption for the Business Names Registration Bill 2011 and various other bills from the provisions of standing order 111(5) to (8), because people like Senator Sterle and Senator Bishop and Senator Evans and Senator Pratt are embarrassed about the fact that they have let down the people of Western Australia by supporting this carbon tax, which will hurt West Australian families, which will hurt West Australian energy providers, without actually doing anything to help reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. Senator Sterle, who is here in the chamber, knows that the longer we talk about this the more upset people in Western Australia will become about his lack of advocacy and his lack of representation here in this chamber for the great state of Western Australia.

The carbon tax which the Labor Party and the Greens political party want to impose on the Australian people will impose a lot of economic pain for no environmental gain. A Senate inquiry commissioned by the Senate to look into the carbon tax has found that it will cost the Australian economy more than $1 trillion between now and 2050. No wonder that the government does not want to talk about this. The government is clearly embarrassed about this. The government does not want the people of Australia to be exposed to the sort of evidence discovered by the Senate carbon tax inquiry. A loss of $1 trillion out of the economy over the next 40 years—in today's dollars, I hasten to add—effectively means that Australians will have to work for a whole year for nothing. That $1 trillion is just about Australia's GDP for a whole year, so between now and 2050 Australians, as a result of the carbon tax, effectively will have to work for nothing for a whole year to pay for the impact of the carbon tax.

Minister Combet came out and pulled the usual spin trick. He said, 'The economy is going to continue to grow, the GDP will more than double, it will increase by $2.3 trillion.' The fact that something increases does not mean that you are not losing money. No wonder these guys cannot manage our public finances. Let me give you a lesson in maths, a lesson in economics. If something grows more slowly, if there is lower growth, it costs you money. If you put money away in your superannuation account and you have it there for 40 years and it grows by 2.8 per cent less than it otherwise would have, it costs you real money. If you have money in your superannuation account for 40 years and the return is 2.8 per cent less, you are going to end up with less money in retirement than you otherwise would have. And the Treasury modelling indicates that by 2050 the GDP will be 2.8 per cent lower than it otherwise would be, costing $100 billion in today's dollars in 2050 alone. Cumulatively between now and 2050 it will— (Time expired)

Question agreed to.