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

Instead of actually trying to engage in the debate, Senator Boswell has simply reinforced that they do not believe that anything is happening, so they do not believe that we should do anything about it. We can engage in as many reports as we like but it will not change their vote. This report that has been handed down by Senator Cormann is simply part of the coalition's strategy of building up a case that supports doing nothing. You cannot make strawberry jam out of something that cannot be made into strawberry jam, and that is what you are trying to do.

I am not going to stand here knowing what we need to do, knowing there is a problem, knowing we have the capacity to address these issues and not take responsibility for doing something. I am not going to do it for me, because I will probably be gone before the serious effects of climate change really kick in. I am going to do it for my kids and my grandkids and for everyone else's kids. I do not want to be condemned by future generations when our generation—which has probably consumed more of the earth's resources than any other generation—knew what we had to do and what needed to be done and then failed to live up to our responsibility and left it to the next generations to clean up the mess. What we do know and what the Liberal Party used to know—what John Howard knew and what Peter Shergold knew—is that the sooner we act to mitigate the effects of climate change the cheaper it will be. The longer we wait the more expensive it will be. That is irresponsible to the next generation.

The model that we have put in place has been modelled over a long time. This is a culmination of a debate that has been going on for many years, going right back to the Howard government. Modelling was done. The Howard government commissioned Peter Shergold to come up with a process and they said that an emissions trading scheme was the way to go.

What all these systems have in common is that they actually put a price on pollution. That is the important aspect of this. That is what the coalition does not want to do. They believe that the big polluters in this country should be able to pollute our environment for nothing. They should simply be able to pollute our environment and there should be no costs involved in that. We say that there should be a cost because that pollution is damaging the environment. If you put a cost on that damage, people will seek to avoid that cost. It will drive innovation, it will drive engineering—