Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, not violently, where I am not going to walk over there and hit Senator Peter Whish-Wilson! Of course I am not. But I am violently opposed to what a carbon tax does. With the Greens, I could almost quote the Bible: 'Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.' Because what they are doing is not putting jobs at risk but burning jobs. They are burning jobs. Job after job after job is going.

Because I ran a business for 20 years and I know the costs and I know how slim the margins are, when the carbon tax was first presented I thought, 'Hang on. This doesn't ring true to me; there's something wrong with this. This is going to cause problems.' So, on 26 August 2008, I asked the first question about the carbon tax and then I made the first speech on it. I belled the cat and I am very pleased that I did. The proposition was ridiculous—that we would reduce our carbon emissions to five per cent of 2000 levels by 2020. So, to quote my former Senate colleague Barnaby Joyce, from a room in this parliament we are going to control the temperature of the world. Now, we have 1.3 per cent or 1.4 per cent, depending on whose figures you use, of the world's carbon emissions. It does not matter what we do; we are going to make very little difference to it.

But look at what has happened—and I am not saying it is totally due to the carbon tax but it has certainly played a very, very significant role; and I know you, Mr Acting Deputy President Sterle, are very concerned about this because you have always represented the blue-collar worker. These are indisputable figures. The carbon tax and the RET have turned our manufacturing sector into a killing field. Under Labor's five years of government, over 140,000 manufacturing jobs were lost. So did we reduce our carbon emissions? No. We sent our manufacturing across to China, across to India, across to Indonesia, where they do not have the clean-air controls that our factories have. We have exported our carbon emissions. We have made other countries take on the role of our manufacturers.

When the leader of the Labor Party in the eighties said, 'We're going to get rid of tariffs,' I thought, 'This is big, brave stuff,' and because I worked in manufacturing—I was a manufacturer's agent—I knew a bit about it, and my thoughts went out to the blue-collar workers who do not have great experience, who grab a bucket from the way and put it in a hot dip and pull it out the other side. There were 300 of these people in one factory I represented for Queensland and probably 250 in the other. One was a paintbrush factory; the other was in metal. I thought to myself, 'How are these people going to get jobs?' I really had doubts. I must admit I was a doubting Thomas about it. And then the mining industry came along and everyone got a job. People got jobs in other areas. I have to admit that the Labor Party at that time were right. They removed tariffs. They created a better standard of living. Instead of going and buying a pair of shoes for $300, you could go and buy a pair of shoes for $80 and you had another $200-odd to spend down at the shops. It created employment and it created activity. That works. That works, as long as you can employ people. What we had was very low-cost energy, high-cost labour and good conditions.

In manufacturing, there are three things: the cost of labour, the cost of energy and the cost of raw materials. The cost of raw materials is set by a world price and you cannot shift it very much either way. The cost of energy and the cost of labour are set by the government. Paul Howes today—and I commend this to anyone in the Labor Party—is virtually saying the same thing as Maurice Newman, the Prime Minister's adviser; David Goodwin, from the Chamber of Commerce and Industry; and Brendan Pearson, from the Minerals Council: 'Have cheap energy, reasonable conditions and good wages, but don't trade away what you have got as cheap energy.' That is what has happened with this carbon tax. You do not have to be Robinson Crusoe. You do not have to be Einstein. It is happening before your eyes. But somehow the Labor Party do not seem to be able to see it. Paul Howes, David Goodwin, Brendan Pearson and the National Farmers' Federation are all singing off the one hymn sheet: 'Give us reliable, cheap energy and we can have decent conditions, pay a little bit more.' As Paul Howes rightly points out, we are a wealthy country and we are never going to be able to mix it with the cheaper, Bangladesh-type workers, and we do not want to.

What is happening is that renewable energy and the carbon tax are just destroying our industries. I do not want to claim that the carbon tax is doing it solely. The high dollar does represent problems, and unfortunately it is coming back as a problem. But just look at what has happened in the last six months: McCain's processing plant in Penola, South Australia, 59 employees sacked; Simplot, 110 jobs going over to New Zealand. They do not have a carbon tax over there. Well, they do, but it is about the equivalent of a Mars bar, about $1, a tonne. It is all going over there. Simplot is downsizing its Bathurst plant operation, and 110 jobs have gone to New Zealand. Golden Circle have gone to New Zealand. I have got a special interest in Golden Circle because it was my father-in-law who, with a number of other farmers, established the cooperative of Golden Circle. My wife says that she can remember the days when she was eight or nine and her big day was going down to Golden Circle for dinner in the boardroom. At Downer EDI, 100 employees have gone. At Electrolux, 500 jobs have gone. Caterpillar announced that 200 jobs in Burnie have gone to Thailand. Kellogg's announced that 100 jobs have gone from the New South Wales Central Coast.

Then we get to the big ones: Holden, 2,900 jobs; Toyota, 3,000 jobs; and Ford, probably the same. But why? On every Ford, every Toyota, every Holden, there is a $400 carbon tax. That is at the factory level. Then you put your margin onto the selling agents and it increases. Then on top of the $400 you have got a $200 renewable energy tax. That is a huge handicap for those people in the manufacturing industry to overcome. In fact, they cannot overcome it. So what have they done? They have gone. With our carbon tax and our renewable energy tax, household electricity prices have increased by 110 per cent in the past five years. Australian business, which accounts for 70 per cent of the total electricity use in Australia, has experienced almost an 80 per cent increase in prices since 2009. The causes are not hard to find. The carbon tax accounted for 16 per cent of the electricity bill for a typical large industrial user in New South Wales. The carbon tax added $6.4 billion to the nation's tax bill. We can say, 'Everyone else is doing it.' Well, I am sorry; no-one else is doing it. We have the dearest carbon tax in the world, and it is going to go up. We are out there showing the way. We are out there like Sister Anna carrying the banner, with someone else behind beating a drum. But no-one is following our stupidity.

You can argue that the science says this and the science says that. I will tell you, for every scientist that says the world is being overwhelmed by CO2 and temperatures are rising, you can find another 10 scientists that say that it is not.