Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

You say that, Senator Macdonald, but quite frankly I do not think you would know. You are running this scare campaign. You are part of the overall opposition strategy to be absolutely negative on this. This debate has been going on for many, many years and the Liberal Party have had several different positions on it. At the present time they have a very hardline position of denying that climate change is happening. That was not their position some time ago. In fact they went to the 2007 election with a policy of an emissions trading scheme. John Howard finally came to the conclusion, because of all the modelling that was done and all the research that was done, that we need to act and we need to act now. So that is the reality. We know that what we have now introduced will reduce our annual emissions by at least 159 million tonnes from where they otherwise would have been by 2020. That is equivalent to taking around 45 million cars off the road. People talk about the cost of it, but the coalition's policy simply says that the big polluters can continue to pollute for nothing, and we will give them taxpayers' dollars to subsidise them to maybe do something to reduce their emissions. Instead of letting the market drive that, they are just going to give a taxpayers' gift to these polluters. That is going to cost many, many times more than anything our price on pollution will be.

All the money collected through the price on carbon will go back to offsetting the flow-on costs, back to households. It will go towards helping businesses cope and make the adjustment and the investments in new clean energy technologies. It is actually saying, 'Let's put a price on carbon and let's use that price to help the economy adjust and drive the change we need to achieve.' The alternative is that we simply wait and do nothing. That would be so easy. We could do nothing and wait for the next generation to have to clean up and pay for it. Not only would they have to pay for it but they would have to pay so much more. Every year we wait, the costs of making the changes we need to make to address human-induced climate change go up.

I am very proud of what this government has done. We have not finished it yet. We have to get it through this Senate, and we are going to have some serious debate over this over the coming weeks. I am voting for this because I actually believe that climate change is real and that it is caused by human activity. I believe we have an absolute responsibility to do something about it. That is why I am going to be supporting this carbon price and that is why I am going to continue to argue for it. Again, we do not want to be in a position where we simply abrogate our responsibility to the future generations of this country.

The opposition really needs to grow up, accept the science and accept that something needs to be done. It is something they did accept at one time, but because of political opportunism they now reject the science. They reject the opportunity to be responsible.