Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

You can talk about serving the national interest, you can talk about doing the right thing for the environment, but now I talk about the reality and the truth. The truth is that, in relation to this tax, the Productivity Commission, commissioned by the government, asked to return their findings early because they had not much to discover. What they did discover was that there is no country in the whole world that is going to introduce a tax like this—not one country in the whole world: read the Productivity Commission report. It was not a positive report for the tax. It did not put Australia in a good light. It did not say that we should be leading the world. It did not say that we should be putting our workers at disadvantage; we should not be trading green jobs overseas. The member for Hunter knows exactly what I am talking about. There will be green jobs, all right. Do you know where they will be? They will be in China, India and Indonesia. They will not be here for our workers. Is that understood? There will be green jobs. Perhaps the truck drivers across the nation now are hearing this: you will not be carting the stuff that you are carting today, because it will be carted around in China, where the pollution will be greater than in this country.

What I am putting to you is that there is a very strong argument against this tax, whatever the politics of it are. But I will come back and say to those members of parliament who are sitting in this place today, who have a desire for the betterment of the nation, who are concerned about their kids, who are concerned about their future, whose husbands would like to have a job, whose wives would like to have a job, whose kids want a job, whose partners want a job, that we have a nation led by a leader that says, 'I am prepared to trade off those jobs and those opportunities in this country and trade them into another country,' for heaven's sake. I thought the first responsibility of a Prime Minister of this nation was for the health and wellbeing of its people, its economy and its defence.

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