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

I thought the filibuster was going to continue there and I have little doubt that it will. I was going to respond to the amendment, previously moved by Senator Collins, so I will touch on that amendment now.

The amendment before the committee stage of the chamber really demonstrates the lie of the Labor Party's position on the carbon tax and the lie they took to the last election. One lie is: what they are now proposing through this legislation is what they claimed to have done at the time of the last election.

The Labor Party ran around Australia at the last election, saying, 'We have abolished the carbon tax.' But they never brought legislation, reflecting the amendments they seek to introduce today, into this parliament. It was a complete and utter lie that they took to the election.

That is but a small point in the general debate around the carbon tax. Labor are attempting to play semantics with the Australian public and attempting to pull the wool over the electorate's eyes. Frankly, they cannot, have not and will not succeed on this. People know full well that the carbon tax is exactly what Labor put in place. It was a scheme that ran well out into the future. It does not matter that they might be proposing and might have come up with, under Mr Rudd, some crafty little scheme to tweak—and that is all this amendment does—by one year what they had put in place, because the Australian people voted emphatically and deliberately against the carbon tax.

This amendment does not get rid of the carbon tax. It changes the terms of its application by one year. It changes the legislation that the Labor government brought in under a lie at the 2010 election, when they promised not to have a carbon tax. It brings in one year's worth of changes. That is all it does.

There will still be a carbon tax if this amendment were to carry through and become law. There would still have been a carbon tax if the Labor Party had got their way at the last election. Our government went to the last election with a very clear position, crystal clear: that we would repeal the carbon tax lock, stock and barrel, fixed or floating. No ifs, no buts—we would repeal the whole show. That is exactly what the legislation before the Senate does and exactly what the Labor Party promised or tried to make the Australian people believe that they would do. It shows that that was a lie and that they were only ever interested in tweaking it. It also shows that they remain committed to having a carbon tax forever into the future.

In the future—in Western Australia shortly—at the next general election and beyond, the Labor Party will have to explain yet again why it is that they still stand by this policy of a carbon tax. More than 1½ million Australians voted for the coalition than the Labor Party at last year's election. That should have sent a very clear message to those opposite. But, clearly, it did not.

Rather than accepting that the prime focus of the coalition's campaign, the abolition of the carbon tax, was overwhelmingly accepted, they instead slink into this chamber and propose these tricky little amendments that do not repeal the carbon tax but just simply seek to rebadge it.