Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Materiel) Share this | Hansard source

Government senators have risen in this place on this matter of public importance to defend the most conspicuous failures of the Gillard Labor government. It seems to me that they would be more intent on defining the problem and talking about the issue that the government is trying to confront than actually defending the government's solutions to those problems. They know as well as anybody else in Australia at the moment, observing these issues, that the very issues on which the Prime Minister defined the success or failure of her prime ministership are the very issues on which the government is most seriously failing.

On the issue of border protection, on the issue of new taxes, on the issue of climate change, confidence in the government's solutions to these problems is at rock bottom. There has never been less confidence in this government's capacity to handle any one of those three issues than there is today. That speaks volumes about how poorly this government has handled each of those issues.

Senator Carol Brown tells us we are running a scare campaign. Let us talk about the facts. Firstly, no country currently imposes an economy-wide tax on greenhouse emissions or has in place an economy-wide ETS. The United States, Canada, India, China, Japan and many others have all made it clear they will not be moving to the kind of broad based carbon tax that Australia is picking up. We are alone in taking this extraordinarily punitive approach to dealing with this problem, punitive to the ordinary men and women of Australia. Senator Brown said only the biggest polluters will pay the carbon price. Really? If that is the case why is compensation, such as it is, being directed to ordinary households.