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

I notice, in response to the Leader of the Opposition’s question about $1,100, that after he was challenged on that figure by myself and other spokesmen of the government in recent times he suddenly went silent. The reason he went silent is that the figure is without foundation. The honourable member would be familiar with the fact that the impact on the average family is $624 per year—$12 per week. The honourable member knows that what he did in order to support his fear campaign in the community was simply double it up. What we need is a bit of transparency and honesty in this debate, and it would start in terms of the actual impact of climate change policies—this government’s and the opposition’s—on working families.

The government has put forward through the Treasury modelling the impact of its emissions trading scheme. The opposition leader today said: ‘Here is a policy. I think this is how much it costs, but don’t ask me how I’m going to fund it.’ The answer to that is that, if you are going to have an unfunded policy, it flows through to taxpayers paying the price for an opposition’s policy which is not properly costed and not properly funded. Ultimately, working families pay one way or the other; what the Leader of the Opposition has sought to do is try to be very quiet about the way in which working families would be slugged by the proposal which he has put forward today.

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