Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

If any ordinary Australian had the misfortune of tuning into Senate radio over the course of the last 10 minutes, they will have heard the worst of Australian politics. It's contemptible really what the Australian public has been served up by the Greens political party and by the National Party, in terms of the future of the country's approach. If we are serious about dealing with emissions, you wouldn't go anywhere near this lot and this bloke. They are as bad as each other. Both are completely internally focused. Both are unable to deal with the theory of change and a policy or political pathway to reduce emissions, to increase jobs and to lower costs. They are incapable of doing it—they always have been. They won't get any better. Over the course of the next couple of years, Australians will see through the internally focused rabid politics of the National Party and the Greens political party.

Senator Canavan is capable of only negative slogans and weird claims. He deliberately and dishonestly conflates costs to the budget and costs to the economy. Even his friends, his former friends, in the National Farmers' Federation, disavow his rabid and weird approach to this set of issues.

If we are honest about this debate, we must be serious about the costs of inaction on climate change. What are the costs going to be if global temperatures rise by one degree, by two degrees, by three degrees, or by more than three degrees? We would take that lot seriously if they had a pathway to fix it. But what is the cost going to be to the economy? We know that the cost to the economy of the drought was 0.2 per cent of GDP in one quarter, thousands of homes gone and lives lost. On the economy, which Senator Canavan pretends to care about, let's look at what has happened in the drought to employment in just one sector: people employed in sheep, beef and grain, rural labourers—the kind of people that he drivels on about in the Weatherboard and Iron podcasts, which I urge you to ignore.