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

On the issue of guillotine, I'm happy to sit here for as long as it takes to get the answers to these questions that are being asked with such good intentions. So, no, no guillotine from the coalition's point of view, as far as I'm aware. We'll see what comes forth from the government down the track. I share Senator Pocock's disappointment that there is a Labor government! He had a few extra points around why he was disappointed, but I'm just generally disappointed in that fact.

There were a couple of references in the last contribution, and I want to go through a couple of them. The first one was 'a stitch-up'. I think looking at the history of how we got to this point is incredibly important. The context around this debate and this legislation is an important thing to bear in mind as we cast our votes and decide whether to support this legislation or not. The minister and others in this debate have referred to the safeguard mechanism. We proudly opposed that piece of legislation, because it was bad legislation, but it passed—in a stitch-up with that far end of the chamber, in cahoots with the government. We outlined our opposition to that. I will make it very clear—based on the gestures from the Leader of Pauline Hanson's One Nation—that, Senator Hanson, you opposed the legislation as well, because it was bad legislation for a range of reasons.

Let me make sure those listening understand what this legislation did. It set an arbitrary target around emissions reductions for the largest emitters in this country to meet by a certain point in time, and if they couldn't meet those emissions reduction targets they would then have to pay a penalty for doing so—if they, on the way through, couldn't obtain credits to offset those emissions that they were generating. That sledgehammer to deal with this issue—not to work with industry but to force them to a point and tax the life out of them if they didn't comply—meant that we were going to face cost-of-living increases.

This is the backdrop against which we are operating at this point in time. The stitch up that was done at that point in time under that legislation, the backdrop against which we are now debating this legislation—and I accept some of the points that are being made—is about making a terrible situation better. You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't sit there and say: 'You know what? We're going to turn the tap off and really tighten the business conditions for these immense economic contributors in our nation, the energy generators and manufacturers, but then we're going to make sure they have no capacity in any way whatsoever to, under the safeguard mechanism, comply with these obligations. We're going to head them off at every pass and make sure they can't do business here.' We are living in a cost-of-living crisis which gets worse day by day. Just yesterday we saw interest rates head through the roof again.

You sit down at the end of the chamber and heckle away as if these things don't matter. Well they do when you go out into the real world and understand how people are struggling to pay their mortgages. Every month it is getting harder and harder. It's the same with their power bills too. The cost of insurance and the cost of groceries gets worse and worse, yet we wave through legislation like the safeguard mechanism and then we don't do a damn thing to assist those businesses that employ thousands of Australians to create immense economic opportunities and keep our country's economy ticking over. We want to head that off at the pass now. There are no solutions and no way forward. This mess is of the government's own making. We wouldn't be here needing to do these things if the safeguard didn't pass and we'd found a better, more meaningful way to deal with carbon emissions, rather than jamming these businesses into the situation they were forced into.

Senator Pocock also mentioned how there's a lack of detail in this legislation. The minister hasn't been able to answer questions. I share Senator Pocock and Senator Whish-Wilson's frustrations, because I remember standing in this very spot when we debated the safeguard mechanism, something those senators I just mentioned happily supported to pass through this place, with all the disastrous consequences that will now flow. There was no detail then. I remember standing here for hours on end asking about particular situations: whether a ticket on a V/Line train in Victoria was going to go up as a result—couldn't tell us that. Whether certain refineries would be able to continue to do work at the same level of cost inputs—couldn't guarantee that. Whether a single job would be lost overseas because of the offshoring of carbon emissions as a result of us pricing ourselves out of the market—couldn't guarantee that, either. That detail was missing, but we were happy to vote for it then. Suddenly we must have the detail we're looking for before we vote for it.

This is about finding solutions to a terrible situation this government has put us in. Dealing with carbon emissions is a priority, sure, but there is no answer from many making contributions to this debate on the cost-of-living crisis that has been inflicted upon us by government mismanagement and bad legislation. There will not be a guillotine, and I'm looking forward to listening to the rest of this debate. I think it's important to remember how we got here and why we got here: the safeguard, bad legislation and the cost-of-living crisis getting worse and worse because of a Labor-Green stitch up.