Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Indeed, Senator Abetz, I will, because you have asked. In the most recent budget, the 2012-13 budget, which Senator Wong herself apparently put together—no-one can believe for a moment that Wayne Swan could cobble together a budget—Senator Wong applied all the skills and credibility which she developed and built up in selling the carbon tax and the emissions trading scheme. For this next 12 months Treasury has apparently revised its estimates of the green jobs because the carbon tax is actually coming in. Sadly, it has revised it downwards to 300,000 new jobs. That is probably 300,000 bicycle repairmen, oil industry lobbyists and professors of ecology or whatever they want to call it in some of the universities out there. It is 300,000 invisible jobs. They are jobs that are not going to exist. Go to a wind farm and see how many industrious, busy workers there are strolling around. The people you will see are the protesters who do not want it and who realise it is giving them expensive electricity and that it has been put forward and sold by a government that is as fake and disingenuous as any we have seen in this country.

The great tragedy is that it is going to be 12 or 18 months before the damage that is done by this government can begin to be redressed. It will take 10 years to undo this mindless, spendthrift government's impact on the Australian economy.