Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a mess. There are no words for such stupidity. We know that the world's CO2 emissions are projected to rise by around 32 per cent to 45 billion tonnes by 2020. That is a compounding rate of three per cent a year. We know that the experts have said that these increases will not change this decade. This is supposed to be an environmental measure. Ross Garnaut said in his 2011 emissions update that there would be a 2.8 per cent annual rise. So Australia's five per cent reduction will reduce that rise by 0.03 billion tonnes. In fact, under Labor's carbon plan, Australia's emissions will increase in the period 2012 to 2020 from 578 million tonnes to 621 million tonnes. We know the government's adviser and chief climate commissioner, Professor Tim Flannery, said:

If the world as a whole cut all the emissions tomorrow … the average temperature of the planet's not going to drop for several hundred years, perhaps over 1000 years.

We should be having a practical adaptation debate, like we do in our policy, instead of what is a load of hot air but a tragedy and a travesty for Australian business, Australian industry, Australian families and Australian competitiveness.

This whole carbon tax debacle—and it is a debacle—is best summed up by Alan Moran, from the Institute of Public Affairs, who said:

… it must be unique for a nation to deliberately sabotage its own competitiveness by shackling the industries that represent the highest value in terms of productivity: coal and electricity.

That is exactly what this government is doing. We know that Treasury estimates that with Labor's carbon tax Australian companies will be paying $57 billion a year, every year, by 2050. And the economic cost, on Treasury's own figures—I am not making this up, these are Treasury's own figures—will be $1 trillion by 2050. That is what it is going to cost.

This is sheer, unmitigated madness. Here we have come from being one of the most competitive trading nations in the world and yet—two hands tied behind the back—

Mr Entsch interjecting—

The member has just mentioned the dairy industry. Let me tell you that dairy farmers are price takers, as the member for Paterson said. There are at least nine billion litres of milk cooled on-farm by the farmers who have to pay the carbon tax on that extra cooling, and I would suggest that not one of them is going to be able to pass that cost on and that they will not be paid one cent extra for their product. Yet those things do not seem to matter to this government. What a tragedy and a travesty for every small business person and every farmer in this country.

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