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

What a delight it is to be able to make a contribution to a debate which has been made on the books of this chamber now for five months around the Albanese government and their broken promises. For the purpose of completeness, I will read out that motion in the time available to me. It says:

That the Senate notes the Albanese Government's broken promises to deliver cheaper power prices, cheaper mortgages, to not make any changes to super, as well as broken promises on medicines, country doctors, Medicare and mental health.

That was moved by our good friend and colleague Senator Ruston on 9 March this year. Often in this place, motions put down on one day lose their relevance down the track. In politics, as they say, a lot happens in a week. One week in politics is a long time. After five months, not only is this still relevant; it is more relevant, because there are more broken promises. The Australian people have been let down more than they were on 9 March this year, and that's why it is great to be able to make a contribution to this debate. It's those promises, quite clearly and succinctly outlined in this motion, that we should be focused on.

I'll give credit where credit is due, and I am pleased that Senator Farrell was able to outline the good work that he's done in the time that he's been trade minister. I will reject the characterisation that he applied to the way things were when he picked up. Anyone who thinks that a government can just wave a magic wand and suddenly have a free trade deal has to be kidding themselves. It's much same for anyone who thinks that the Albanese government, in the 15 months they have been in power, have been able to wave their magic wand and fix the Great Barrier Reef.

While we're on amazing embellishments and exaggerations and taking credit for things that have nothing to do with the government, it was amazing earlier this week to see the environment minister and the Prime Minister standing out there in the PM's courtyard saying, 'We've saved the reef,' after 15 months in this place. Just to put it on the record, I will remind this chamber that it was during the last time Labor were in power, in the year 2013, that the reef was about to go on the 'endangered' list. At that point in time, there was extreme underinvestment and, according to the Australian Institute of Marine Science, record low coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef. That was Labor's legacy back in 2013. It was then coalition government that invested, over the course of the next nine years, $3 billion in reef projects and activity to restore the reef. There was a range of legislative measures and regulatory arrangements to help land users minimise their impacts on the reef. We then found out from the same institute that told the world, shockingly, that reef coral cover was at a record low in 2012 under Labor, in the August 2022 that in it's 36 years of record keeping, the coral cover on the reef had never been higher. Guess who'd just left office? We had! But let's forget those facts. Let's forget the history and the context against which things like FTAs, reef health and coral cover originate, and let's just make it up and pretend the government has a magic wand.

If they did have this magic wand that I've been looking and that they've been talking about, then they would have been able to bring down power prices. I do want to talk about that promise that was made 97 times before the last election, and I believe 27 times after Russia invaded Ukraine illegally. That's 27 times after what they now claim is stopping them from bringing power prices down—they still made the promise—and it's only been referenced once since the election, by Senator Tim Ayres. I was grateful for him one day in this place to repeat the promise they'd made. But no-one else has done it. I look forward to the next government speaker, to see whether they will double-down and back in that promise about bringing down power prices by $275. Senator Sterle, the invitation is there, because there is a big difference between bringing down power prices by actually reducing the cost of electricity, whatever form of generation it comes from, and using taxpayers' money to help you pay your bill, which is exactly what's happening. We're using taxpayers' money to offset higher power bills. That is not lower power bills; that is taxpayers paying, through the government, their power bills. They're still high. None of the Labor policies that they've brought in since the election will go anywhere near reducing the cost of electricity.

It was great to hear the Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Farrell, in amongst the other things he talked about, talk about the safeguard mechanism, something we opposed because we knew it would do nothing to assist this government to deliver on its promises. We're all about helping the government deliver on its promises. The safeguard mechanism will stop them from delivering on their promise. The safeguard mechanism will not bring down power prices, will not actually deliver on economic growth, will not help country towns, will not keep jobs here, and I will come to housing policy bit later on, because I'm really interested in the benchmarks in the modelling around the HAFF, which I think we'll have a lot of time to talk about next week. But on the safeguard, and I acknowledge in the chamber probably one of my more patient Labor colleagues, Senator McAllister, who sat here very late into the night and early the next morning to take my questions and listen to the very well thought-through contributions of coalition senators on that abhorrent piece of legislation, which was rammed through this place in partnership with the biggest economic vandals in this nation, the Australian Greens. The Australian Greens are the party who the Australian Labor Party rely on for preferences to get elected right across this country, make no mistake. They protest so loudly. They say, 'You're partners.' Occasionally, they will identify, like we will, bad legislation that is bad for Australian families, bad for Australian businesses, and I tell you what, the HAFF is bad, and we'll come back to that.

But on the safeguard, cheaper transport? Couldn't be promised. People in Victoria didn't know if they were going to be paying more for train tickets as a result of the safeguard. The V/Line in Victoria was one of the big emitters caught up in the safeguard. Any concessions for users of transport under that arrangement? No. We went through a list of businesses that are going to be impacted. I met with one yesterday, in my office. In fact, it was representatives of a South Korean company, and they expressed in no uncertain terms their displeasure and their concern around what the Australian government has done with the safeguard mechanism. They saw it as a broken promise because it created sovereign risk, because Australia is now becoming an unattractive place to invest. If we don't have investment of that nature unlocking resources, creating jobs in regional communities, then, of course, we are going to see a reduction in economic activity and productivity. That drives up the cost of everything. When these businesses are faced with punitive measures and punitive regulatory arrangements, higher taxes in effect, as the safeguard mechanism is for the businesses that can't comply with Labor's arbitrary punitive safeguard mechanism, they will send their businesses offshore.

They talk about decarbonising. It's great language, but it doesn't help people pay their power bills. It never has and never will. They talk about the renewable transition. That's not going to help people pay their power bills. We need cheap, reliable, dispatchable baseload power. None of that is coming online. It's another broken promise.

The safeguard mechanism is driving us down this mad pathway to strangle our economy, and the upshot is that those businesses that provide economic activity, those sources of energy generation that Australian households and businesses rely on to be able to keep their houses warm in winter and their lights on at night and that hospitals use to keep the machines they operate with ticking over, aren't going to be able to compete here economically. We are pricing ourselves out of the market, and that is only going to be bad for our country—for jobs, for households and for their ability to deal with the cost-of-living crisis that the Australian Labor Party, along with their bedfellows, the Australian Greens, seem to be totally oblivious to.

I want to turn to something else, and that is the matter of forestry. A promise was made, and it's not referenced in this motion, but it is a broken promise nonetheless. In my home state of Tasmania we have a proud history of doing forestry well. I am disappointed that Senator Rice has left the chamber; I don't think she agrees with me on this point, but I still believe I'm right. In Australia, we do forestry better than anywhere else in the world. I have challenged the Australian Greens and members of the Labor Environment Action Network to tell me where in the world they do forestry better, and no-one has ever been able to tell me a single jurisdiction around the world where they do forestry better, be that native or plantation. And we've got to remember that the forestry industry isn't just the people who plant and manage the plantation or the native estate; it's also the contractors who go in and harvest it, the haulage contractors, who have massive financial commitments on their rigs. They're the people who depend on this sustainable, world-leading, science-based industry.

The Prime Minister made a promise during the election campaign about protecting native forestry—indeed, Labor's forestry policies largely mirrored ours—but the forest policy that they took to the last election was silent on what would happen in Victoria and what would happen in Western Australia. I think they had a sneaking suspicion that their Western Australian and Victorian counterparts would do what they ultimately did, which was to shut down these vibrant, sustainable industries—again, an attack on regional communities. And it removes a sovereign capability from our nation. I say to those people who defend that ridiculous set of decisions from those two governments: where do we get the timber from?