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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Finance and Deregulation (Senator Wong) to questions without notice asked by Opposition senators today relating to the carbon tax.

I put to Senator Wong a very direct and straightforward question. It was about the definition of green jobs and whether the government could say exactly what a green job is. It is clear from her garbled, tangled, mangled and disingenuous response that she does not have a clue about what a green job is. Indeed, she invited me to contact the President of the United States, Barack Obama, to see what his definition of a green job is. And yet I had given it to her. I had provided it and I asked a very straightforward question. I asked, 'Will your definition of green jobs include such things as college professors teaching classes on environmental studies, oil industry lobbyists engaged in advocacy related to environmental issues or the humble clerk at the bicycle repair shop who is apparently assisting in renewable transport?'

The broader public knows that it is the most misleading and deceptive definition of a green job anywhere. It is not the myths peddled by people like Tim Flannery and the spruikers paid by this government, including Senator Wong herself. The simple fact is that Senator Wong would not rule out that jobs such as those would be categorised as green jobs. That shows me and says to the Australian people that this government is all about sophistry. It is all about putting anything out there into the public domain in the hope that some people will believe anything they are told.

This government is increasingly discredited amongst the public because they know that what it says cannot be believed. It starts at the top with Ms Gillard, but it continues right down. We had almost three years of Senator Wong, when she was peddling the climate change alarmist propaganda, repeatedly telling us all sorts of bunkum and nonsense, regurgitating the lines that she had been force-fed by Mr Rudd and his crew. They were all discredited, all found to be alarmist and all found to be deceptive and disingenuous, and yet she still has the hide to stand up there and peddle them today and say that we are the catastrophists. The government has been peddling catastrophic climate change to scare and alarm the people into a radical change of our economy. Senator Wong hid behind Treasury estimates and figures about jobs and growth going forward. She hid behind them as if it were some sort of plea to authority that would sway the Australian people that what she was telling us was true.

Let me spell out a couple of inconvenient truths for Senator Wong and those who have bought into her propaganda. The Treasury modelling in the budget of 2011-12 said that 500,000 new jobs would be created. We were told that Treasury was right and that Treasury would guide us into the future and that we could bank on its blessings and endorsements until 2050 or thereabouts. It will come as no surprise that Treasury was not quite accurate in that figure of 500,000 jobs.