Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is always a pleasure to follow the member for Paterson, and I will return to him a little later. I am almost disappointed to be following the member for McMillan—I like him, he is a good bloke, generally speaking he makes a sensible contribution to public policy debate and he takes a pragmatic approach—but after his contribution I must attack him on this occasion. The first thing I would say to him is that it is not about you, mate. It is not about me, either, and it is not about the member for McEwen—it is about the national interest. While the member for McMillan takes some comfort in the fact that his losses were never his fault, what we need to be doing in this place is putting the national interest ahead of our own interests. That is exactly what the government is doing with the introduction of this very important public policy reform.

I start by reminding people of what this debate is and what it is not. What it is not is a debate about the science of climate change. The Leader of the Opposition and members on the other side generally have accepted that we must tackle climate change and that human beings make a contribution to the warming of the planet. That is why the Leader of the Opposition and all those who sit opposite have their own policy. Indeed, as the member for Paterson reminded us, they have the same targets on carbon reduction as the government. This is really only a debate about the relative policies of the major parties—what we intend to do and what they intend to do in response to this pressing environmental challenge.

On this side, of course, we are prop­osing—and the details will be announced on Sunday—an emissions trading scheme; a charge on the big polluters who on a daily basis emit their greenhouse gases into the atmosphere free of charge. Have a think about that in economic terms. This represents a big economic distortion. Small businesses who generate waste have to take their waste to the dump—they pay. Large chemical businesses have an expensive process for disposing of their waste, and they pay. You and I, Mr Deputy Speaker, when we do our additional gardening at home, for example, go to the garbage dump—we compost as much as we can, of course—and we pay to dump our waste.

When you have these inconsistencies you have economic distortions, and those distort­ions affect investment decisions. People ask me why we are charging the polluters and compensating them, the people, as consum­ers. Unfortunately businesses, where they can, will pass some of those additional and new business costs onto consumers, and we will protect those consumers. We are not so much seeking to change the behaviour of consumers, considerable merit though that may have; we are trying to change the habits, first, of investors who with a level playing field after the introduction of an ETS will be more likely to invest in renewable tech­nologies, and, second, we are trying to change the behaviour of the polluters themselves, giving them the incentive to invest in new technology, in innovation, to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions. We are using a market mechanism to get there. Many of those who spoke on the other side have referred to the Productivity Commission's report, and I thank them because what that report showed more clearly than anything else was that the most efficient and the cheapest way to address greenhouse gas emissions is with a market-based mechanism, which is exactly what the Prime Minister will be announcing on Sunday.

By contrast, the Leader of the Opposition and all those who sit behind him, including the member for Paterson and the member for McMillan, want to tax people more—they want tax increases in this country to the tune of tens of billions of dollars—and transfer that wealth to the big polluters. They are going to tax people more, hand that money to the polluters and say, 'We are going to help you introduce those new technologies; we will help you get your emissions down.' There are no guarantees; no contracts—they will hand all that money over to the big polluters in the hope they will do the right thing and invest in technologies and reduce their carbon emissions. Let there be no mistake: this is not a debate about the science of climate change; it is not a debate about whether we should do something about climate change—it is only a debate about how we address climate change in this country.

Let me deal with some of the other myths, given that there is such a fondness on the other side for the Productivity Commission's report—something that shocks me. The first myth is that no-one else is acting. The Productivity Commission looked at a number of countries—the UK, the US, Germany, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand. What do those opposite think the Productivity Commission was looking at? What do they think the Productivity Commission would have been studying in those countries if those countries had not taken action on climate change? Of course they have taken action, and they are taking very substantial action. Australia is being left behind. We can get a good illustration of how we are being left behind by reflecting on the fact that the former Prime Minister, John Howard, went to the 2007 election, four years ago, promising to introduce an emissions trading scheme. Here we are, still debating it mid-2011, notwithstanding the fact that, at the time, most members on the other side—including I think the Leader of the Opposition but certainly the former Leader of the Opposition and the former former Leader of the Opposition, Mr Nelson—supported Mr Howard's policy.

The second myth is that this is going to put downward pressure on employment, that jobs are going to be lost in industries like coalmining. That is absolute rubbish. Even the coal industry's own modelling did not show a loss of jobs in the coalmining industry, as some people have suggested. It did suggest—I am not saying I agree with it, because modelling is modelling as we all know—that there would be potentially a growth in jobs if this system were introduced. So let us not have these misrepresentations. I am certainly not concerned about job losses in coalmining in my electorate. I can assure you, thanks to heavy demand in Asia for our resources, that jobs in coalmining in my electorate will continue to grow—and the investment pipeline is already in place. The third myth is that the sky will fall. The sky did not fall in New Zealand, the sky did not fall in California and the sky has not fallen anywhere where carbon abatement has become a serious government policy. The member for Paterson predictably spent a little bit of time zeroing in on my electorate and Hunter region more generally. It just goes to show how totally out of touch he is with community sentiment in the Hunter Valley, where the overwhelming majority of people are now concerned about the environment and the cumulative impacts of industries like coalmining. We have huge land use conflicts. People are saying in increasing numbers that they want to ensure that the coalmining industry—as important as it has been to us but which will maybe last for 30 years—does not impact on sustainable industries such as agriculture, thoroughbred breeding and viticulture. These are industries that have supported us and provided us with an income for many decades and will hopefully sustain us into the next century and beyond.

By applying the true costs of doing business on these businesses we will get a real measure of the negative externalities on local communities and I think that will become an important part of the equation. People working in coalmines in my elect­orate are not fearful that the ETS is going to cost them their job. They have not been fooled by the scare campaign of the opposition, as much as I hate to disappoint the member for McMillan. They want bal­ance and through the minerals resource rent tax they want to get their fair share of the product that comes out of the ground locally. They want to ensure that the environment is protected and that the true cost of the coalmines is reflected in government policy, and that those sustainable industries are not destroyed by the coalmining industry. There is a balance there.

Following the announcement on Sunday, this policy will dominate the media and public debate in the coming months. I hope and pray that the debate is dominated by the facts of this policy, but I feel very pessimistic, given the contributions from those opposite today.

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