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

We are not into word games; we are into doing what we were elected to do and what we promised we would do. And what we promised we would do is abolish the carbon tax lock, stock and barrel.

The amazing thing about these amendments is that they are not even complete. The amendments before the Senate do not even deal with all aspects of the fixed-price period of the carbon tax. So whilst Labor proposes taking the fixed-price component away for some parts of the carbon tax application, these amendments in fact do not deal with the impact on synthetic greenhouse gases. They do not terminate the carbon tax in fuels and synthetic greenhouse gases. If Labor's amendments were carried through to become law, we would have an even more perverse circumstance where some parts of the economy would have a floating or variable carbon tax and other parts of the economy would have, after 1 July this year, a fixed $25.40 per tonne carbon tax equivalent. That is how much thought and work Labor have put into the policies which they went to the last election on, claiming they had already enacted. They cannot now even bring in amendments that make sense or apply consistently.

What is more, by shifting to the variable price and claiming, as Senator Collins does, that this is all about putting a legislative cap in place, Labor come into the Senate without even proposing what that cap would be. So they expect to have a capped emissions trading scheme carbon tax in place on 1 July this year, under their legislation, but they do not have the guts or the courage to tell the Australian people, Australian businesses or Australian industries just what that cap would be. It is shoddy legislation that the opposition is proposing. These are shoddily drafted amendments, and of course they do nothing about getting rid of the carbon tax. They are simply a sneaky, tricky way of attempting to rename it. That is not what this government will accept. We know that only through abolishing the carbon tax will we be able to remove the impost on Australians, on Australian businesses and on Australia's competitiveness overseas. In terms of revenue for this financial year, about $7.6 billion is generated through the sale of permits, through the tax on aviation and non-transport fuels and through all of the different aspects of the carbon tax that are applied to around 75,000 Australian businesses. That $7.6 billion is stripped out of their business competitiveness and passed on to Australian households to have to foot the bill.

Labor want to pretend that they can end all of that pain through these amendments, that they can end all of that pain by going to a variable carbon price. But that is just not true, because the Treasury modelling undertaken by the government—when the Labor Party were in power—demonstrated that the carbon tax under Labor's model of a variable price would grow not just to $25, as the fixed price is forecast to go to next year, but all the way to $38 per tonne by 2020. So the lie that Labor have proposed tonight is that, if this amendment were to succeed and become law, they would not be scrapping the carbon tax; they would simply have a scheme in place whereby the carbon tax would be even higher by 2020 than it is today. The carbon tax would be $38 per tonne by 2020 compared with where it is today.

Senator Collins comes in here with her tricky little amendment, which she pretends is getting rid of the carbon tax. But, in reality, if this amendment were to go through, the carbon tax would keep going up and up and up, just as it was forecast to do under the government which Senator Collins was a member of. Ultimately, we will see far more than that $7.6 billion per annum paid by Australian businesses. We will instead see $8 billion, $9 billion or $10 billion. It will keep going up and up by a billion dollars every single year and it will be paid for by Australian businesses. It would be irresponsible for this chamber to do; and it would be irresponsible for a government like ours, which campaigned very clearly to get rid of the carbon tax, to do.

This is also a remarkable act of inconsistency by the Labor Party. In the last week of the previous sitting, the Labor Party came in here and supported the government in abolishing scheduled auctions in relation to the carbon tax. There were future auctions scheduled for the floating-price period of the carbon tax. The Labor Party supported us in abolishing those auctions. Yet, tonight, in the following sitting week, they come in and propose amendments to try to have a floating carbon tax that would require auctions. What are you? Are you for auctions or against auctions? You voted against them a couple of weeks ago, and tonight you are moving amendments to keep them—and you are not even moving complete amendments in that regard.

The government rejects these amendments outright. During the committee stage we will not be playing the Labor Party's game of having speaker after speaker on this matter. I can see them all lined up over there. They will all read, as we saw Senator Urquhart do just before, a 15-minute prepared statement. It will be like another second reading stage that will go on and on, as long as the Labor Party choose to play this little game. We will not play it. I will not be having much more to say in this debate, and I am sure that other members of the government will not either, because we want to get on with repealing the carbon tax as we promised to do, as the electorate voted for and as the Australian people endorsed us to do at the last election. I invite those opposite to have the courage to actually let this matter come to a vote some time soon.