Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Ms Gina Rinehart. She and I recently exchanged books. If you do the assessment on that single mining endeavour and the exports overseas, you see that the burning of that coal overseas is equivalent to the whole of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions plus 12 per cent. I think that Senator Macdonald is quite right that there is something remiss in legislation that does not pick up on those emissions being made overseas from a product that is dug out of the ground here in Australia—on this occasion, unusually enough, by an Australian company; most of the industry being overseas owned. I wonder if in the course of the deliberations that have led to this legislation the government did look at the inherent suggestion from Senator Macdonald that in coal exports—and maybe this should apply to gas as well—an assessment ought not to have been made of the greenhouse gas emissions going to countries where there is not a trading scheme or a price placed. Perhaps they followed through the logic from Senator Macdonald that in fact, for fairness, they ought to be assessed and an impost put on, at the point of exit, equivalent to the price of the greenhouse gas—