Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to support the amendment moved by the Leader of the Opposition. Even if you think that this carbon tax is the best thing since sliced bread; even if you swallow hook, line and sinker that this carbon tax is going to cool the planet or that it will hold back the rise of the oceans; even if you believe that unless you pay this carbon tax the reef will be gone, the polar bears are going to die and we will all be doomed; even if you are one of those individuals who love big government; even if you are one of those who are aboard the carbon tax gravy train—a gravy train to be funded by families and small business through higher electricity prices; and even if you are one of those foreign carbon traders who will be enriched by this scheme, I ask you to stop, to pause and to think of the damage that passing this legislation will do to our democratic system without this amendment.

We all remember that in the dying days before the last election, with the polls locked, the Prime Minister stared down the lens of the camera and pledged to the nation that there would be 'no carbon tax under the government that I lead'. That is the promise that everyone sitting on the other side of the chamber was elected on. But earlier today the very same government led by the Prime Minister—the Prime Minister for the mean time, anyway—voted to impose the world's biggest carbon tax upon our nation. What an outright betrayal of our democratic principles. And here it is: 19 pieces of legislation, 1,129 pages, over one-quarter of a million words. Is there anyone sitting over there on that side of the chamber who can honestly say that they have read all this legislation and understood it? I bet not. This is the most radical piece of legislation in the last decade. It is being rammed through parliament in an underhanded and undemocratic way.

The guiding principle in our democracy—one that you may well laugh about and one that our forefathers sacrificed their lives to safeguard—is that we here in parliament are agents of the people. The power of this parliament is vested in the freely expressed will of the people. That is something that you lot should never forget. But this carbon tax is not the freely expressed will of the people. Despite millions spent on propaganda to manipulate public opinion, despite the scare campaigns and the gross distortions, the electorate remains overwhelmingly opposed to this tax. While those that bleat like mindless sheep—

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