Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I can hear the member opposite deride me for saying this, but a carbon tax should really be renamed an ‘electricity tax’, because that is what it is. It is just going to push the price of electricity up. I was most interested at the luncheon yesterday for the Mongolian Prime Minister, Sukhbaatar Batbold, who mentioned in his speech that he had visited the Hunter Valley coalmines, the same coalmines that this Labor government with the Greens tinge so desperately want to stop operating. They do not want coalmines; it is not in their interests. All they want to do is have a carbon tax foisted upon the families, the businesses and the people of Australia.

This government always say and maintain that they are there for a fair go for the battlers, but they are proving anything of the sort. How can they say that they are there to give everyone a fair go when all they are doing is increasing debt? They are borrowing $100 million every day, and we are going to be left saddled with that debt—our grandchildren are going to be left saddled with that debt, particularly with the rollout of the NBN. A National Broadband Network, I might add, is not going to be available for towns with fewer than 1,000 premises—and there are many of those in my electorate of Riverina; there are many of those right across regional Australia.

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