Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As I move around doing my duties as a senator throughout South Australia, going to various country regional centres and attending street corner meetings, we always encourage the voter—or the attendees at those meetings—to engage in the carbon tax debate. We need to raise it in certain areas. Far from being an issue at the forefront of a lot of voters' minds, they are not frightened and they are not buying the scare campaign of the opposition. There is a growing body of people who want to leave a better Australia for their children and grandchildren. They understand that coal fired electricity power stations are not the cleanest way into our future. In my own state of South Australia, we are leading the way in clean energy options. There is, as I say, a continual fear campaign. Mr Abbott says no to everything. He fails to engage in any legitimate debate on clean energy options and simply tries to scare the electorate through a well-coordinated, well-repeated, incessant fear campaign about destroying jobs. The Treasury modelling shows that the economy will still grow and that average incomes will continue to grow and that carbon pollution will fall, which I suppose is the achievable outcome we are seeking for our Australian environment. We will see investment of about $100 billion in renewable energy and hopefully South Australia will continue to lead the way in that renewable energy. Under former Premier Mike Rann's leadership we have led the way. We have certainly led the way in renewable energy with wind farms, geothermal and the like. These things have really been at the heart of our leadership in South Australia, where we produce something like 50 per cent of the renewable energy of our great nation.

Senator Boswell is looking for a model in which he can put his economic data, a tame economic professional to put his details in and produce some trillions of dollars worth of results. These things are simply not going to happen. We are going to rely on the Treasury modelling. They proved through the GST that they could do it and they have proved that they will continue to do it.