Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business and Fair Competition) Share this | Hansard source

I will take that interjection, Senator McLucas. Labor has just got better at hiding its intention. You do not use the term 'hit list' anymore; you use a term like 'capacity to pay' hidden amongst pages and pages. The point is that the term 'capacity to pay' apparently only matters when we are talking about people at nongovernment schools. That means that those in nongovernment primary schools in particular could face massive increases in their fees. This is because nongovernment primary schools, particularly the Catholic sector, are often at a much lower fee level. So if we are going to start looking at the capacity of parents to pay regardless of what the fees are at the moment, that can only be a vehicle for Labor to force the parents of people sending their children to nongovernment schools—in this case, Catholic primary schools—to pay higher fees. Again it is continuing its statist approach because there is nothing better than a state-run monopoly.

They have done it with tax. The carbon tax is nothing but an internal tariff on our economy. I was interested in the first speech of the foreign minister, Senator Carr, earlier today. He talked about George Reid being a Free Trader. I think he slurred the great Alfred Deakin a bit much. I would like to point out that both of them were implacable opponents of the Labor Party. Both of them might have fought over the Federation of Australia, but it was the Labor Party that opposed the Federation of Australia. It was Liberals, Free Traders and Protectionists who fought for the Federation of Australia. Labor has always had a chip on its shoulder about that. But the foreign minister lauded Mr Reid for his opposition to customs duties and tariffs because they impact on the poorest. We know they are regressive in their effect. We know that tariffs on everything from textiles, clothing and footwear to everything else that Australia had built up by the mid-1980s were highly regressive in their impact. We know, as Senator Carr outlined, that they made the cost of living higher than it needed to be.

What is the carbon tax? The carbon tax is nothing but an internal tariff. If I purchase a television made overseas, there is no carbon tax on that regardless of the myths propagated by those opposite. This is the highest and broadest based carbon tax in the world. If I buy a television from overseas, there is no carbon tax component of that. If I bought one in Australia—if there were to be one made in Australia—then, quite frankly, there would be. You might say, 'There are no TVs made in Australia,' Senator McLucas. Let's go to cars, where the cost of building a car in Australia will be $500 more expensive because of the carbon tax. How on earth are we to take seriously the government's complaint about wanting to maintain a car industry in Australia when they increase the cost of production here that is not faced by all the Mazdas and Volkswagens rolling off the ships in the Port of Melbourne?

It is nothing short of ludicrous, but it does go to the core of the ideal Labor and Greens economy. We see that in this budget, because what they want is patronage and the ability to tax and to hand out favours.

I will go through a few of the things that are off budget which have a substantial impact on the financial state of the Commonwealth, even though they are not technically in the budget papers. We have $50 billion for the NBN, which I have no doubt will in decades to come be still quoted in this place as one of the greatest misconceived ideas. I have little doubt that in the coming years it will be seen, a bit like the Victorian desalination plant, as a great boondoggle for Labor's favoured mates and particular trade unions.

We have the $10 billion clean energy fund. The price of the Greens to get the carbon tax was $10 billion. The clean energy fund precludes certain technology regardless of whether it is clean. It cannot do anything about coal because coal is inherently evil. It cannot be touched even if someone did make it clean in a way that would satisfy the Greens. Coal is the problem. This is a $10 billion fund that is basically picking losers, because this is for commercial proposals that cannot get private sector funding and that are not viable under the mandatory renewable energy target or many of the other programs that are in place. So we are going to hand over $10 billion for these projects, even though they fail those first two hurdles.

I come from Victoria. My generation is still scarred from Tricontinental and the Victorian Economic Development Corpora­tion of John Cain and Rob Jolly and, subsequently, the Kirner government. It is nothing more than picking losers, but the government has hidden it off the budget. The government has not committed to any of the funding requirements in the Gonski review, which parents should rightly be afraid about. The government are now talking about how apparently the mining tax—which this place debated late last week and early this week—is going to somehow deliver increased superannuation.

I turn to the area of small business because there is a great myth—and the government has tried to conflate the two topics intentionally—that somehow the mining tax will pay for superannuation. Every employer in this country, small and large, knows that the mining tax does not pay a cent of superannuation. That is going to come out of workers' pockets and in the short term it is going to come out of employers' pockets. Mind you, these are employers, particularly in small business, who are already facing the highest costs of doing business in a decade. Today we saw the report, based on more recent data than the government likes to admit, that Australia is one of the most expensive places in the world for electricity.

I note that my home state of Victoria is the fifth most expensive place in the world for electricity out of the 70-odd markets surveyed. This is a state where Sir John Monash built the State Electricity Commission, based on technology from Europe, with our massive deposits of brown coal. I heard my friend the Minister for Energy and Resources in Victoria say today on AM that Victoria has more energy stored in its brown coal reserves than the entire North West Shelf. That is how much brown coal we have—enough for hundreds of years. It used to be cheap to have electricity in Victoria. It was something we aspired to. I think it is something we still should aspire to. But the government seeks to use a carbon tax to force up the cost even higher.

The Minister for Finance and Deregulation, Senator Wong, in answering questions always tries to dodge this key point. The carbon tax is intended to force up the cost of electricity. I do not know about you, Mr Acting Deputy President, but I do not want my grandmother and other people's grandmothers who grew up in a different generation and who value a dollar because of their life experiences—we all know stories of people not turning the heat on in winter and not turning the air conditioner on in summer because they do not want to worry about the power bill—thinking that they should skimp on turning on the air conditioner on a 42-degree Melbourne February day or turning on the heater on a four-degree Melbourne July night. Whether it was Sir John Monash or Henry Bolte or people previously—and I dare say even the Labor Party previously—cheap energy was considered to be something this country should be proud of. It was a competitive advantage, but now we have this delusion that somehow by making energy more expensive we are going to transform our economy. Economics 101: if you make an input cost like energy more expensive, you are going to suffer an economic welfare loss. There is no other way about it.

The delusional Greens in the corner somehow think that simply forcing up the price of electricity that you and I and our parents, friends and relatives pay in our houses to turn on a light will miraculously bring about a new technology. That is flawed logic. There is an old economist saying: the Stone Age did not end because they ran out of stones. I hasten to add that it did not end because they introduced a stone tax either. The Stone Age ended because someone invented bronze. There is no lack of incentive for anyone around the world at the moment to be exploring new technologies. It is the story of humanity. Only a Labor-Greens government suffers from the conceit that somehow a new tax will lead to a new technology—somewhere someone is coming up with a way to make the windmill and the solar panel work better because of a new tax. Does anyone here seriously think that those efforts will be stronger on 2 July this year than they are on 29 June?

That is absolutely untrue. The government says the economy is still going to grow. Of course, it is going to grow, but the truth that this government will not admit is that it will grow by a lot less if only we did not have a carbon tax. The true cost is in the difference between the growth curves, but this government and their Greens allies like to pretend that by forcing up the cost of energy we are miraculously going to transform ourselves into a new economy. We may transform ourselves into a new economy because no-one in the world is doing what we do. We may transform ourselves from what was once a shining beacon of the world with low government debt, high productivity growth and high economic growth to be something like Europe.

Labor and the Greens through budgets like this are doing nothing less than seeking to Europeanise Australia. I notice Senator Ludlam smiling. They are trying to create a highly regulated state, where the government determines how people go about their business by forcing up energy costs and increasing regulation everywhere from the workplace to occupational health and safety. I am reminded of the story about Napoleon dismissing the English before the Battle of Waterloo as nothing but a nation of shopkeepers. What he did not understand was that it was because they were shopkeepers that they won. It was the free market economy of post Scottish enlightenment Britain, the start of the Industrial Revolution. It was the high-street shops and businesses that drove innovation. It was that market that was so important. What we are seeing in budgets like this is nothing less than an attempt to reregulate our economy in a way that we have not seen since the 1960s. It is going to lead to an economic welfare loss for every Australian as their costs go up. We are seeing GDP growth per capita of less than one per cent. That is why people are feeling the pinch.

It makes no sense to force up the cost of doing business, to force up the cost of buying everyday household goods and—