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

Indeed, they will, Senator Williams—they will pay as well. This is a measure of the extraordinary hole that the government has dug for itself, that they are running these kinds of ridiculous lines—'Only the top 500 polluters will pay'—but it is not the polluters who are getting the compensation; it is the households. Why are householders getting compensation? Because they are the ones who will pay at the end of the day with this extraordinarily stupid new tax.

We are told the carbon tax will not affect ordinary Australians, but already the dominos are falling. In my home of Canberra, Brindabella Airlines announced that they would cancel regular flights between Canberra and Albury and Canberra and Armidale. Why? Because the cost of the carbon tax has made it uneconomic to run routes of that kind. They estimate that the extra cost on the fuel that those routes entail caused by the carbon tax advent will contribute something like $1,000 a day to the cost of running the airline. It is the equivalent of $10 for every fare paid on that airline each day of the week, and that is why they have had to close those routes. That is a fact. They have had to make that decision. The decision has been made and the routes have gone. That is not scaremongering; it is fact.

The cost of the carbon tax to people living in this territory will be particularly severe because it is a cold city, as members opposite do not need to be reminded at the moment. It is a cold city and people here have higher than average earnings, which means that—again, these are not my figures; they are the figures of the ACT Labor government—60 per cent of Canberra households will be undercompensated for the carbon tax and 22 per cent of households in the ACT will receive no compensation whatsoever. If those opposite—and I am sure Senator Lundy would not be so foolish—think that 22 per cent of Canberrans are rich, are 'fat cats' who do not need compensation, clearly something is wrong with this badly flawed carbon tax.

The border protection policies of this government have failed. We only need to look at the many iterations of its policy to work out how badly it is floundering around, looking for new solutions every few months. This Prime Minister said she would fix the issue of border protection, of arrivals by boat, which had dogged the Rudd government. So she announced there would be a new solution. We would send our asylum seekers to be processed in East Timor, but the East Timorese had other ideas. They said no, you are not bringing refugees to be processed in East Timor. Then the government said they would go to a regional solution: 'We will have a regional solution that signs up other countries in our region to sort this problem out collectively.' How many countries today are signed up to the Labor government's regional solution, announced more than two years ago? The answer is, at best, one, if you want to count the bilateral arrangement with Malaysia as a regional solution. It is not a regional solution; it is one country. It is a special deal done for one country—a deal which is extraordinarily ill-advised which entails sending 800 refugees to Malaysia and having 4,000 come back to Australia. It is an extraordinarily badly designed arrangement and one which entails putting asylum seekers into a setting where they have been and will be caned. That is a completely unacceptable option. Do not take my word for it; ask the people on Labor's backbench who cannot live with that solution. I hope some of those present today also cannot live with it.

It is a completely unacceptable option and represents the complete and abject failure of this government, and no doubt sometime in the next few days there will be another solution, a different solution to this problem. All of this is taking place against a backdrop of knowing that there is a solution—a solution which worked, a solution which operated effectively to slow the arrival of boats to a trickle under the previous government. In fact, there were some years when there were no boat arrivals at all. It worked, and we are told that somehow this is unacceptable. What stands in its way is pride, particularly the pride of this Prime Minister, who promised to fix this problem who said that she would be the one to solve the problem that so dogged the Rudd government, and still the boats come—thousands and thousands of people arriving on our shores, with a huge jump in the cost of managing those asylum seekers. The cost used to be about $85 million a year under the Howard government and has now climbed to $1.2 billion a year.

I ask senators opposite to put aside the question about what is humane and what is fair to asylum seekers and ask themselves this: if somehow we could return to a policy which greatly reduced how much we have to spend dealing with unauthorised arrivals on our northern shores, how much benefit could we confer on the refugees of the world if we were to direct that $1 billion to assist people in refugee camps around the world? We do not admit any more refugees to this country under humanitarian settlement programs because we have to spend this money dealing with unauthorised arrivals on our shores. We still accept 13,500 people a year—the number is the same, it is just that more of them come on boats and fewer of them come through planned humanitarian resettlement programs. It is an extraordinary waste of money and it represents a huge immoral toll on the lives of people who are caught up in the tragedies we have seen in recent days. How extraordinary it is that this government should allow itself to get into this position.

Government senators have risen today to tell us what winners these policies are—how great the carbon tax is, how beneficial the mining tax will be to Australians, how effective its border protection policies are. Despite the evidence that these policies are anvils, which are dragging the government and its credibility to the bottom of the sea, government senators defend them and the Prime Minister, who was the architect of these policies in each case. I warn senators to be careful because the day is fast approaching when each of these senators will be faced with the question: do I dump this Prime Minister or do I leave her in place? When that question comes, if they answer, 'Yes, it is time to change the Prime Minister, again,' they will then have to answer the question: 'On what basis are we dumping the Prime Minister?' If it is not the questions of border protection, the mining tax and the carbon tax, what will be the basis for their decision? (Time expired)