Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, for the third time, I move:

That this House calls on the Prime Minister to be upfront with the Australian people and small business about the impact of his great big new tax by:

(a)

Accepting the challenge of the Leader of the Opposition to debate the so called “greatest moral challenge of our times”, namely the impact of climate change and the benefits of the Opposition’s policy of direct action on climate change rather than the Governments great big new tax on everything as envisaged by its Emissions Trading Scheme; and

(b)

Allowing the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition to be allocated thirty minutes each a total of one hour, to have that debate immediately in the House of Representatives.

14:59:32This is the motion that I move, and I am grateful for the government giving leave for it to be so moved. If this really is the greatest moral challenge of our time, why won’t the Prime Minister stand on his feet in this House—not tomorrow, not next week, but now—and defend his policy for 30 minutes?

Let there be no mistake about exactly what this government wants to do. What this government wants to do is to impose on the Australian people the greatest single policy induced change in Australia’s history. It is the greatest single policy induced change in Australian history, and this Prime Minister consistently squibs debate. He squibbed debate back in December on the grounds that the opposition allegedly had no policy. We now have a policy. It is a very good policy. It is a better policy than the government’s because it is a simpler, cheaper and more effective way of addressing this issue than anything this government can do.

But this Prime Minister will not debate the issue. Instead, he is into defaming people about what they may or may not have said—distorting what they said—at public meetings many months ago. I call on this Prime Minister to stop defaming people and to start governing. I call on this Prime Minister to stop quoting from 20-year-old masters theses and to start debating and defending a policy. I say to this Prime Minister, in the immortal words of his predecessor, Paul Keating: ‘If you don’t understand it, don’t vote for it, and if you do understand it, you would never vote for it.’ That is the spectre that is haunting this Prime Minister now.

All he had in his manifesto at the last election was about six lines on this subject. He is now demanding modelling, costing and chapter and verse from the opposition. And we are giving it to him. But what we gave him today was 30 pages more than he gave to the Australian people before the last election. It seemed so easy then—everyone appeared to be in favour of an emissions trading scheme. But do you know what happened? Copenhagen happened. That is the one thing that this Prime Minister cannot accept. The rest of the world has moved on and the coalition has moved on, but this Prime Minister is stuck in the pre-Copenhagen past. He is stuck with imposing on the necessities of life of the Australian people a great big tax that the rest of the world does not want and will never impose. What we on this side of the House are trying to do in this fortnight is to do again what we did so magnificently in December last year. We are trying to save the Australian people from the Prime Minister’s great big new tax—a tax that we do not need and that will not work.

As I said, this is the biggest policy induced change in Australian history. It is the biggest change in Australian history because it raises the cost of energy, it raises the cost of power, it raises the cost of transport and, because it does all those things, it raises the cost of life. You cannot have modern life—the way of life that Australians have become used to—without energy, without power, without transport. The Australian public do not deserve this massive whack on their cost of living without the fullest possible explanation from this Prime Minister, and the reason he is so reluctant to give us the explanation is that he knows no-one will be convinced by it once it has been offered.

We all saw the Prime Minister floundering in this parliament a few moments ago when he was asked to explain the impact of his great big new tax on the price of milk. He just cannot do it. We all saw the Prime Minister floundering on the Today program this morning when he was asked the impact of his great big new tax on the price of bread. A Prime Minister who does not know the price of milk, who does not know the price of bread and who cannot explain the impact of his policies on the price of milk and the price of bread is no fit person to be the Prime Minister of this country. A policy that this government want to foist on the Australian people before they explain to them its impact on the necessities of life is not a policy that we should have to accept.

I think the Australian people are sick of being treated like mugs by the Rudd government. The Australian people are good people, idealistic people, people who want to do the right thing by the environment, but you cannot ask them to accept a policy that they do not understand and that its proponents cannot explain.

Today we heard the Prime Minister say that the cost of his policy on families would be $660. That might be the cost for some families, but the briefing which the government provided to the Daily Telegraph on 24 November last year said that the cost for middle-income families would be $1,100. That was published on the front page of the biggest-selling newspaper in New South Wales and there were no denials from the government. Silence is agreement. They know that their policies will cost $1,100—a $1,100 hit on the pockets of middle-income families in Sydney.

This is just the start: $660 now for some families and $1,100 now for other families. Imagine what the cost will be if it is not a five per cent reduction by 2020 but a 10 or 20 per cent reduction by 2020. If it is $1,100 for a five per cent reduction, imagine what it would be to give us a 60 per cent reduction by 2050. And this would be a 60 per cent reduction not for 21 million people but for the 36 million people whom this Prime Minister wants to welcome to our country without putting the preparations in place to keep it the country that we know and love and that we want to be sustainable far into the future.

The Prime Minister talked about our policy allegedly costing more than his. This is a Prime Minister who is pretty loose when it comes to going public with big figures about cost. This is the Prime Minister who went on national television on Sunday and made airy claims about something costing $100 billion. It is not a green faced Mr Rudd but a red faced Mr Rudd, because he does not understand figures and he does not know his own figures. Let us be absolutely upfront with the Australian people: yes, the coalition’s strong and effective climate change policy will cost $3.2 billion over the forward estimates period, as opposed to the $40 billion money-go-round envisaged by the Prime Minister’s great big new tax on everything. If we look forward to 2020, yes, our policy will cost a little over $10 billion. It is a lot of money. It is an enormous amount of money, but it pales into insignificance compared to the $114 billion churnaround which this Prime Minister wants to hit the Australian public with.

I want to make two points. The first point is that I accept that $3.2 billion is a lot of money and that it is going to require a big effort from my distinguished colleagues the shadow Treasurer and the shadow minister for finance to find the savings to generate that kind of spending. The shadow Treasurer has broad shoulders, he is a very capable person and he is up for the job. I want to pay tribute to the shadow Treasurer, the member for North Sydney, for the diligence with which he approaches this task. But I tell you what: when you are faced with a government that spends $17 billion on school halls and wants to spend $43 billion on a national broadband network white elephant without even a business plan, surely it is not too much to spend $3.2 billion on the greatest moral challenge of our time, and that is what we will do. We will spend $3.2 billion on the greatest moral challenge of our time, in the Prime Minister’s words, and we will find that money out of the budget. It is incumbent upon the government to explain what its policies will do to the Australian public.

We heard today from the Leader of the National Party that modelling shows that the Rudd government’s emissions trading tax will impose $9,000 on the costs of the average dairy farm. Those costs do not just disappear into the ether. Let us say I am a dairy farmer. I am under a lot of pressure from the bank. I am under a lot of pressure from the unions, who want to impose modern awards on me, with penalty rates for Saturday work and Sunday work. Then I get an extra $9,000 cost imposed on me courtesy of the Prime Minister’s great big new tax. What am I going to do? I am going to pass those costs on to the Australian consumer with higher prices for milk. You ought to be able to explain it, Prime Minister. You cannot just hide behind a whole lot of waffle about 2050. The Australian people want to know the impact of your policies this year, not your intentions, good or otherwise, for 2050.

The Prime Minister said in answer to the first question that I put to him this afternoon that the biggest polluters are let off scot-free in the coalition’s policy. Let us just think about who those evil villains are that the Prime Minister so lightly dismisses as the biggest polluters who are being let off scot-free. They are the power generators who give us the necessities of life. They are the power generators who keep the lights on in this parliament and in the great cities of Australia. He wants to whack on them a great big tax that will put up their prices, that will put up our prices, that will reduce their maintenance budgets and that quite possibly will render some of them financially insolvent. What will it do to the people of Melbourne if the great power companies that are supplying that city are no longer solvent? That is the risk that the Prime Minister’s policy imposes on the Australian people. By contrast, our policy directly tackles emissions without imposing new costs on business and consumers or presenting a new threat to Australian jobs. That is why our policy makes sense and his policy does not.

Let me, for the benefit of the Prime Minister, explain the essence of our policy. It is a very good policy and it is a policy that does not require legislation to get it through the parliament. It is a policy that the Prime Minister could introduce tomorrow if he wanted to. It is a policy which means we actually have a policy now—unlike the Prime Minister’s policy, which is dependent on legislation getting through the parliament, which he cannot guarantee.

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