Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Universities and Research) Share this | Hansard source

They do! They argue that there are other countries that are imposing a tax of this extent right throughout the world. And they hide behind the coat-tails, of course, of Nicholas Stern—now Lord Stern—who last week was quoted in the Australian as saying:

… there was evidence the Australian carbon price—$23 a tonne from July 1—was not excessive compared with prices in Norway, Britain and Switzerland.

That is right: Norway, Britain and Switzerland. You can imagine the sort of resource powerhouses that Norway, Britain and Switzerland are. You can imagine the carbon emissions from the chocolate, or the cuckoo clocks, or the watches, or the yodelling coming from Switzerland! They are missing the point, as is Lord Stern: the only thing that matters is what our competitor countries are doing—what are the other comparable economies doing; what are the other energy-rich, open, exposed economies doing? Well, who are they? What are the Chinese doing? The Scientific American, that famous scientific journal, says that, other than understating their carbon emissions, they are doing very little. Russia: very little. India: very little. Canada: very, very little. Also the United States. They are the comparable competitor countries that, just like Australia, want to sell resources, coal and gas overseas. They are not suffering. Their governments are not so stupid as to unilaterally place a carbon tax on their most efficient industries. This government does that. But the Russians, the Indians, the Chinese, the Americans and the Canadians are not that stupid. What happens in Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein or Monaco does not really matter. So the government saying that there are other comparable countries doing this is absolute and utter rubbish.

I have often spoken in this parliament about the great lie. My friends often talk about it being the lie of the Prime Minister when she said that there would not be a carbon tax under the government she led. That is not the greatest lie. The greatest lie is that this tax, the unilateral imposition of a carbon tax on an economy like Australia's, is in our national interest. The greatest lie this government has ever perpetrated in its five years in government is to stand up before the Australian people and say, 'It is in your interest that we pay this tax,' when the Canadians, the Americans, the Indians, the Russians and the Chinese will not do it.

Our economy is more exposed than that of any other country on earth. In two weeks time our economy will start to suffer; it will start to suffer from the word go. We now know following question time what the government's result will be at the end of all this—that is, how much our emissions will go down—

Opposition senators interjecting—They will go up!

They will actually go up. They will rise slowly. They will apparently rise more slowly than they otherwise would. This, in the end, is social democratic churn dressed up as environmentalism. It is pathetic. (Time expired)