Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

The first is that it does not work and the reason it does not work, as the member for Sturt knows by his embarrassed interjection, is that the Leader of the Opposition puts no cap on carbon; he puts no cap on carbon pollution. On the one hand you say you are going to reduce carbon pollution but on the other hand you say, ‘I’m putting forward a plan which doesn’t actually put a cap on how much carbon pollution you allow out into the atmosphere,’—failure No. 1. Failure No. 2 is this: what he does through this plan is leave the big polluters alone and slug taxpayers instead. Not only does it cost more than the government’s scheme; he leaves the big polluters to one side and says, ‘You’re okay, don’t worry about that,’ and then goes on to say, ‘For you taxpayers who will be copping extra taxation as a result of this and possibly extra prices as well, we will work that through.’ Those individual taxpayers and consumers will not get one dollar of compensation. That is problem No. 2—in other words, let the big polluters go free and slug Australian working families as taxpayers. That is the second problem. The third problem with this plan, this proposal, this climate con job is this: it is totally unfunded. We have been waiting for this alternative plan for—how long? They costed it at $10 billion but cannot even summon the collective honesty to put forward how they would offset that in their own budget numberings.

This is the absolute core set of problems with what those opposite have advanced in terms of their alternative climate change plan. It does not work, it puts no cap on carbon, it lets all the big polluters go absolutely free, it slugs taxpayers and working families as a result and it does not even bother to attempt to fund the policy. That is the core of what has been put forward today. It all comes off the back of a Leader of the Opposition who does not believe any of this in the first place. If you go out there and publicly say that climate change is absolute crap, what do you think people conclude when you put out a piece of paper saying that you are actually serious about it? That is why people do not trust the Leader of the Opposition on climate change: because he does not believe that it is actually happening.

If you look at the evolution of his positions on this, he supported an emissions trading scheme when he was a member of the Howard government. He said then that climate change was absolute crap. He said that the Liberals should support the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme unamended. He then said they should support the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme amended. He then said he totally opposed the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. On top of all that, he said to the former Leader of the Opposition, ‘Don’t worry about me, Malcolm, I am just a political weathervane when it comes to climate change.’ The Leader of the Opposition has changed his position on the emissions trading scheme probably more often than he has changed his undies. It has gone on and on and on. One day after another we have a different position. Can I just say to the Leader of the Opposition: if you are going to come up with a policy, fund it, cost it, make it environmentally credible against these three most basic tests—fail, fail and fail.

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