Alan Eggleston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, as did my colleague Senator Cormann, rise to take note of answers given by all government ministers today, focusing particularly on those given by Senator Wong, who answers questions on the carbon tax, climate change and matters like that. Senator Wong was speaking about the need to compensate householders, Australian taxpayers—the people who are going to be disadvantaged by the carbon tax when they have to pay higher electricity prices, which will lead to higher prices for consumer goods across the board and to higher costs for households in general. She was saying the government would be providing compensation for these people.

That of course assumes that it is worthwhile having this carbon tax and that the carbon tax itself will achieve something. But there is a report in the Australian today about the Swiss bank, UBS, who said that the sale of carbon permits in Europe had cost $210 billion over the years the European emissions trading scheme had been in place but that it had had very little effect at all on European emissions. In fact they said that it had had zero impact, which is very little effect indeed. Given that the European emissions trading scheme is held up by the Labor Party as an icon and that they say they are following it, one must really wonder, if this great European scheme has had zero impact, whether the Australian carbon tax is going to have any impact at all. One also has to wonder whether the compensation Senator Wong was saying would be offered to Australian taxpayers for price increases—which, by implication, she acknowledges will occur—is really worthwhile. If the carbon schemes in operation in New Zealand and the European Union are ineffective, surely it is just nonsense for us to be walking down that pathway, as we now are under the Gillard government, having put in place a carbon tax. We are told that in 2015 this carbon tax will transmute into an emissions trading scheme. That is very interesting because that will, of course, cost billions and billions of dollars. A lot of money will be spent on carbon credits and, as I have said in this place many times before, none of our major trading partners—China, Korea, Japan, India or the United States—are going to have emissions trading schemes. So the question arises as to whether or not there will be anyone for us to trade with and the answer is really no, there will not be.

The poor old Australian taxpayer will see the price of almost everything go up, from electricity to food and consumer goods. We will find that our industries will be adversely impacted. These great companies—in the mining industry in particular—are international and do not have to put up with a situation where they face a double whammy of the carbon tax and the increased costs that will impose on them, plus the costs imposed on them by this mining tax, which went through the House of Representatives early this morning. That double negative for Australian industry, which is going to adversely affect our economy and impact adversely on the lives of Australians, shows a great deal of naivete on the part of this government in blindly walking down the pathway which the Europeans have followed in setting up an emissions trading scheme and have found to be totally unsuccessful. If that money had been put into reducing emissions from power plants, according to the article in the Australian Europe would have a very low carbon profile at the moment. When it comes to the mining tax, the threshold $75 million profit sounds like a lot of money, but when you are talking billions, as they do in the mining industry, it is very little. This tax, too, will have a very adverse impact on the Australian economy.