Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I am really quite disappointed that the modern Labor Party under Mr Shorten's leadership is so pessimistic about the ingenuity, creativity and energy of the Australian people. We happen to believe that things do not stand still. We do not happen to believe that there is such a thing as a status quo, and we believe that you provide incentives to people. The Labor Party understands all about penalising people and going after people because they have been too successful. We actually believe in providing positive incentives and encouraging people to deploy all of their creative juices and all of their creative energy to doing things better, more cheaply and more efficiently to achieve better outcomes with fewer resources. We are extremely confident that the Australian people and the businesses across Australia will rise to the challenge and that the investment that we are proposing to make through this market based mechanism will absolutely ensure that we will be able to achieve the five per cent domestic emissions reduction target by 2020.