Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I want to go through it again with Senator Collins so she can understand it. If you are to go to this flexible pricing on 1 July this year, you must have legislated a cap. It must be put in by regulation. 31 May is indeed the date by which Senator Collins and the Labor Party amendment say the regulations are to be put in. My point is this: what regulation are you putting in? If you are putting up a thing which says, 'We want to go to flexible pricing on 1 July this year,' then you are obliged to tell people what cap you are putting in that legislation. Otherwise, the assumption is that it is the default five per cent. You could make no other assessment because the legislation is written such that if another cap is not put in by the government of the day then automatically the cap is set at a default of five per cent.

All we have heard from the Labor Party is that there is a process and the department will do it. No, the department will not do it. Labor's amendment is basically saying, 'The government has to put in the cap.' We know that this is a nonsense amendment anyway because the government is not going to do it. But, if Labor were the government, what would the cap be and what would the regulation be that sets that cap? It is not in here. Basically Labor have been hoist on their own petard. This whole thing has come about because former Prime Minister Gillard went on television and conceded that carbon pricing, in her view, was a tax. That is where she went wrong. She should never have said that because it is not a tax; it is an emissions trading scheme. But once she said it she was stuck with it and it allowed the 'great big new tax' lie of the Abbott opposition at that time to take effect.

Then, in order to overcome the political fix that they got themselves into, Labor went to the election saying, 'We will get rid of the tax.' We have never had a tax. We have an emissions trading scheme and it is the law. Contrary to what Senator Collins is saying, the Greens want to uphold the law, not put up some pretence that by voting for this amendment you would somehow get something. You would not. You would not get anything because Labor are not the government. They are not going to do it. But what we have at the moment is the law—that is, we will be going to flexible pricing on 1 July next year unless the current law is repealed. I am going to do absolutely everything in my power to make sure it is not repealed.

But this nonsense that we are going through now, this pretence from the Labor Party, is just that. When the legislation was written, the point was that Labor and the Greens could not agree on the cap. We set up the Climate Change Authority. They were to report in February 2014 to recommend to the government of the day what the cap should be. They have made their recommendation. It is 15 plus four per cent—that is, 19 per cent—by 2020 and a 40 per cent to 60 per cent reduction trajectory by 2030. That is what they have recommended. My question to Labor which still has not been answered is: do they accept the Climate Change Authority's recommendation that that should be the cap? Yes or no? Clearly, they do not. So all this subterfuge that is going on is basically saying, 'We want to go through the pretence that we can do something, and we are going to have a five per cent default cap.' The Climate Change Authority has reported, as it was designed to. It reported in February for the government of the day to accept or otherwise the recommendations. If no cap is put in, the flexible pricing starts on 1 July 2015 with a five per cent default cap. That is the way it is written and legislated so that there cannot be a period where there is no cap. You cannot have a flexible pricing scheme without a cap.

Therein lies the complete mess that Labor have got themselves into. When the election campaign promise was made by the Prime Minister of the day, Kevin Rudd, to get rid of the carbon price, he did not expect that these amendments would be being debated after the Climate Change Authority had recommended its target. Now that it has, Labor cannot escape and hide behind an election promise of last year. The key question people want to know the answer to is: if we were go to flexible pricing on 1 July this year, what would be the cap? That is clearly not being answered. It shows why these amendments are fanciful. What we have now is the law, and I most certainly do not want to see the law repealed in order to have this fantasy view being put up by the opposition which has zero chance of passing. Why would you trade a law that is in place for a fantasy that will not come to any kind of fruition and is disingenuous anyway because they are refusing to name the cap? That is why the Greens will not be supporting Labor's amendments here. It is because they are not genuine amendments. They have no chance of being implemented in law. That is why we need to retain the law as is.

Secondly, Labor have already voted with the coalition to get rid of the auctions leading up to the flexible pricing phase in 2015 on the basis that they would bring in the regulations that would support these amendments. But they are not the government. There will be no bringing in of these regulations by anybody, because the coalition have said they have no intention of doing it. So we have this ridiculous situation where we have no capacity to deliver the auctions that are required by 2015 under the law—and we will have to reinstate those when we succeed in retaining the carbon price, in spite of what the government of the day might say.

Question negatived.