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

I agree with the comment made by Senator Hughes; it is akin to fairy dust. But the point is this bill is damaging. It is destructive, and it will not have the environmental outcome that the Greens would lead us to believe.

I listened carefully to what Senator the Hanson-Young had to say because Senator the Hanson-Young has strong views on this and has put a lot of work in on it. I'm looking forward to the committee inquiry into this bill and indeed the committee stage on this bill too. I have a lot of questions for the mover of this bill, and I'm looking forward to getting answers to them. There's this fundamental problem I have with carbon legislation in this country, and that is what it does for us in an international setting. When we make it more expensive to do business here by applying punitive regimes to businesses that are emissions intensive, rather than working with them to reduce their emissions, it drives up the cost of doing business here.

These so-called nasty businesses that get those dirty profits, of course, while generating all this economic activity and creating thousands—tens of thousands—of jobs for Australians, make decisions around what is economically and financially sensible for them. Many of these organisations—again, nasty though they are—are international, so owned by overseas companies, but they're providing economic activity for Australian households, subcontractors, other parts of the community, many of them in regional Australia. They will make decisions about business in this country based on how expensive and easy it is to do business here. This is why we opposed Labor's safeguard mechanism. You get glib comments from government senators about being the 'no-alition'. I'll tell you what: we proudly oppose that legislation because I guarantee you it will do what we said it would over time, and that is make this country uncompetitive when it comes to doing business here. It will make it harder for those businesses that provide so much economic input into this country to continue to operate. The net result will be, as their profits decline, as the return on investment evaporates, that those businesses will decrease their footprint here, and perhaps, sadly, eventually, shut up shop.

Of course, they won't stop doing business here. They won't completely disappear from the planet because global demand for the products that these businesses create, like aluminium, steel, cement, all of these inputs into our growing economy and growing population centres—and let's not forget about Labor's plan to borrow a stack of cash at the taxpayers expense to build 30,000 homes, and many of the inputs are going to come from these emissions intensive industries—will mean those business will still be catering to that demand, but they just won't be doing it here. They'll be doing it in countries where they do not care about the environment—where there are no safeguards, where there are no protections for the environment or plans to reduce emissions—because it's cheaper to do it there and the laws are weak.

And so here we are offshoring jobs, Australian jobs, at a time when we're in a cost-of-living crisis, again something the Australian Labor Party and their bedfellows the Greens refuse to acknowledge, but we're also offshoring this environmental issue. It's not like for like either. It's making it much, much worse. Again, our environmental standards, while there's always room for improvement, are better than most of the rest of the world. Our decision-making process, our regulatory frameworks around businesses, primary industries, extractive industries is better than most of the rest of the world. And we should be proud of that. We shouldn't be buying into the spin that we are somehow pillaging our nation and leaving behind us a trail of destruction. That is not fact, not in any of our extractive or primary industries.

The reality is, with legislation like this, with legislation like the Australian Labor Party's safeguard mechanism, there will be more environmental destruction globally, more emissions globally, than there would be if we allowed these businesses to continue to operate here and worked with them and incentivised an arrangement whereby they were able to minimise their emissions and environmental impact. That's what the coalition was doing. You only have to look at the numbers between 2013 and 2021, emissions were reduced by just over 560 million tonnes, down to 488 million tonnes by the time we left government. And we did all of that without legislating a target, this magic wand that Labor have waved to reduce emissions, or taxing the life out of businesses and making it an uncompetitive environment.

There will be terrible outcomes from their legislation, and that is why we opposed it. It is why we oppose this bill, because this bill will take what is a bad situation and make it a thousand times worse—not just for us here today and for our future generations, but for the planet. As I said before, it will be generating worse environmental outcomes across the globe, in countries where there are huge vulnerable populations, endangered species. We are going to be sending businesses that do have an impact on the environment to those places because no-one wants to see it happen here. We'll just send it to those developing countries that need the economic activity.

This is the madness of the Labor narrative at the moment. They've been in government for 15 months and they reckon by being able to—