Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Families, Housing and Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

This bells the cat, as my honourable colleague says. The reality is that urgent relief is being provided because of the carbon tax. If you have been listening to the radio or watching the television you could hardly not have noticed the ads about the household assistance package. Let me read the transcript: 'Soon millions of Australians receiving government payments will get additional help with their everyday expenses. An initial payment will automatically appear on your bank account from May 2012. It is the first part of the Australian government's household assistance package. This extra assistance will become a regular part of your government payment between March next year and early 2014. For more information …' Why is this required? If the imposition of this tax is only on 500 companies, why is urgent assistance needed for Australian families? If that were the case, it would not be needed. As I said, this is the lie at the heart of this policy proposal.

Everybody knows that when a tax is imposed upon a company, that company will seek to pass on that tax to the purchasers of goods and services from that company. Where they can do it, they will pass on that tax. Where they cannot do it, they will have to try and downsize or cut their costs in other ways. One of the consequences of that would be a loss of jobs in this country, and we are seeing that already. Where those companies are in an internationally competitive position, competing with other companies producing goods or services in overseas countries that do not have this tax, then something has to give so far as the companies are concerned. Anyone with a modicum of knowledge about business, anybody who knows the faintest thing about how taxation works, anybody who has had to balance their own family books, let alone the books of a small business, knows that when there is an additional imposition by way of an additional cost for the business—which this tax is—that has to be passed on in some way, otherwise something has to give within the business.

Do you think that this government will come out and honesty admit to that truth? No, they will not. This increasingly dysfunctional government, led by the chaotic Prime Minister and her office, will not come clean with the Australian people. If they honestly believe that they need a carbon tax, they should say, 'Yes, we need a carbon tax and it is going to cost you.' Why don't they have the guts, the courage, to come forward to the Australian people and say that to them? No, they will not. They want to walk both sides of the street: on the one hand this is a tax applied only to 500 companies and on the other hand we need urgent financial assistance for every family in Australia. The reality is those two things do not add up, and anybody who spends a moment thinking about it can see, as I have described it, the lie at the heart of this policy. Yet day after day after day we get the Prime Minister in here pretending that somehow these realities do not work.

Not only that, this tax is so toxic that they cannot mention it in the advertisements on television and on radio. In Senate estimates it was revealed that the focus groups put together to test the best lines in order to present this to the Australian people found that the toxicity of the carbon tax was such that they did not even bother to put it to the focus groups, knowing what the reaction would be. We know that because of reports coming from government backbenchers, they are afraid to doorknock in their own electorates because people will tell them directly what they think about this carbon tax. If my experience is true, they will also say that they want to get rid of this government as quickly as they can. That is the reality so far as this matter is concerned.

We have two worlds here. We have this unreal world of Treasury modelling—we had the honourable member for Chifley telling us about Treasury modelling and the impact of prices—and then we have the real world in which ordinary Australians live. Let me tell you something about the real world in which Australians live. From the December quarter of 2007 to the December quarter of 2011, four years, what has happened in the real world of Australians? Their electricity prices have gone up by 61per cent. That is even without a carbon tax.

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