Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment) Share this | Hansard source

The question that Mr Butler has failed to answer and that you, Senator Carr and Senator Dastyari, have failed to answer is: how are you going to have an ETS without auctions? You are supporting us in cancelling the auctions that would provide for the floating price of the carbon tax that you supported and implemented. Yet you state that you remain committed to a floating carbon tax. How on earth does that stack up as policy logic? It does not stack up at all. It shows that Labor's position in relation to this policy area is inherently confused. It shows that Labor really do not know what they are doing or where they are standing in relation to this matter. I welcome their support for the cancellation of the auctions, but if those opposite are willing to cancel the auctions they should be willing to cancel the carbon tax. If they are willing to support the government on this motion they should be willing to support the government on all the motions relevant to the axing of the carbon tax.

Senator Milne has essentially belled the cat on Labor, in that through this vote they are half-heartedly waving a white flag on their position on the carbon tax, they are demonstrating extreme inconsistency in relation to their position and they are setting themselves up in a situation where they say, 'We are for a floating carbon price, but we are against auctions of carbon permits.' It just does not make sense. That is because Labor are going weak at the knees when it comes to their opposition to the carbon tax. When presented with this issue by the government, when Minister Hunt issued this regulation and the Labor shadow cabinet sat down to discuss their position, they were not game to have yet another fight on this topic. They did not want to be the ones to have to force business to have to go into an auction period. If you do not want to force business to go into an auction period, that must mean you do not want businesses to have to comply with the carbon tax or to have to pay the carbon tax, fixed or floating—because you cannot have a floating carbon tax without having auctions. By supporting the government on this motion the Labor Party, be in no doubt, is indeed supporting the abolition of the transition to a floating carbon tax. That is what Labor is supporting today. It goes directly against what Senator Carr claimed in here as being the Labor Party's policy and goes directly against what Mr Butler claimed as being the Labor Party policy. However, I say welcome Labor comrades to opposition to the carbon tax. I welcome you, in your opposition to this one step. But, having taken a tiny step it is now time for you to take the full step. The Labor party should take the full step by realising that the carbon tax has been a failure in terms of its impact on emissions. For $7.6 billion of revenue stripped out of Australian companies we have only seen an emissions adjustment of 0.1 per cent—0.1 per cent for $7.6 billion. Of course, that is because the carbon tax the Labor Party created with the Greens is so poorly targeted—so poorly targeted that it does not focus on emissions reduction activities or on abatement activities of the like that the coalition have proposed.

We will focus on the ways in which we can get emissions down. That is what our policies do. Labor and the Greens simply created a tax giant that has taxed some 76,000 Australian businesses—many more than they have claimed—and generated some $7.6 billion in revenue. Given the imminence of question time and the fact that I am eager to have these matters dealt with by the chamber I will not detain the chamber for any longer, aside from saying welcome and thank you to the Labor Party for their support on this matter. We hope it is an indication that they are awakening to the position of the Australian people in their support for the coalition on the total repeal of the carbon tax.