Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate the opportunity to respond to this false claim that there was an invitation to sit down and work through bad policy. I've said it already in this debate: you can't improve the unimprovable. We said before the last election that it was all about technology, not taxes, and the best way to work with the big emitters, the 215 facilities caught under the safeguard mechanism, was to work with them to incentivise investment in R&D, technology, to find ways to minimise their emissions. That is a good way to go.

The minister herself has said through this debate that a number of entities caught under the safeguard mechanism had in place plans to meet targets. That's an acknowledgement that working with them to incentivise investments in R&D and better ways to do what they do to minimise the impact on the environment, namely reduce carbon emissions, is a good way to do it. Taxing the life out of business is not a good way to do it. I've run through the impacts that that will have. I note, in answer to my question, which was: 'Can the government guarantee that not a single job will be lost as a result of taxing the life out of these entities caught under the safeguard mechanism?' no guarantee was given. So in Australia, in addition to not knowing how much more train tickets are going to cost in Victoria, in addition to not knowing how much higher power prices are going to be, in addition to not knowing whether cement manufacturing is going to be a viable industry in this country, we don't know whether people are going to lose their jobs over this. But I have a hunch, a little suspicion, that they will, that we're going to make ourselves uncompetitive through this bloody minded approach to driving down emissions through tax, not technology, and working against business, not with them.

All of the quotes that the minister has read out talk about businesses being willing to work with government. I'm not so sure the feelings they have today about this brave new world we live in, where Labor and the Greens collude in a smoke-filled backroom of this parliament to cook up schemes that are going to be disastrous for business, disastrous for jobs and, in fact, bizarrely, bad for the environment with more trucks on the road, less trains on the tracks and power prices going up. And, of course, as I said before, we have this global responsibility to countries across this world to help them reduce their emissions. It's something this government have talked about a lot, but instead what we're doing is we're sending our emissions over to those countries to get in the products that we depend on. I don't understand why this government thinks that this is a good way to go.

I appreciate this repeated invitation for us to be a part of the solution and to work with this government. But, I will tell you what, the baseline, the red-line issue, for this government is, 'You can come and work with us provided you agree with taxing business more.' We promised at the last election that there would be no taxes of this nature being brought in. You didn't. You did also promise that power prices would go down, and $275 a pop was promised. I note there's no reference to that anywhere in this debate, apart from coalition senators and those who've made contributions to this debate who highlighted them.