Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

On a day when we get the news that Australia's international economic competitiveness has declined 10 places from fifth to 15th place in the world, we have a government in denial about the further damage to our competitiveness that will be inflicted on the workers and the businesses of this country by the world's biggest carbon tax. This is a government in denial. So much is this government in denial that we had the sad and dispiriting spectacle of the Minister for Climate Change coming into this parliament at question time and singing a song. He mocked the plight of the workers of this country, who are threatened by a carbon tax, by coming into this parliament and singing a song. I wonder whether he sang that song to the workers at Kurri Kurri who are losing their jobs, in part, because of the impact of carbon tax. I wonder whether members opposite would have laughed as uproariously under those circumstances as they did in this parliament today.

This is a shameful government. It is a shameful parliament to be in denial about the impact of this carbon tax on the jobs of the people that it claims to represent. What we saw in parliament today was a shameful and embarrassing attempt by this government, including by the Prime Minister, to deny the obvious. We even had the Prime Minister today trying to claim, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary including a report by the respected Productivity Commission, that somewhere out there, somewhere in the world there was a place with a higher carbon tax than the one she is about to impose on the families, workers and businesses of Australia. She finally came up with British Columbia. I have news for the Prime Minister: British Columbia is not a country. I do not know what planet she is on but it is not a country; it is a province. I remind the Prime Minister of what the finance minister of British Columbia said earlier this year in his budget speech:

This is a good time to pause and examine how the carbon tax is affecting our economic competitiveness. To that end, we will carry out a comprehensive review, examining the tax's impact—both positive and negative—on every economic sector.

I am afraid that this Prime Minister is in total denial about the impact of the carbon tax on Australia's competitiveness and in total denial about the impact of the carbon tax on families cost of living and jobs.

But that is not all we have seen this week from this government when it comes to an assault on the economic competitiveness of our country. Last Friday there was an announcement that the Roy Hill Project should go ahead. This was unambiguous good news for our country: $10 billion worth of new investment, 50 years of production that would be exported to the benefit of our country and of the wider world, and 8,000 new jobs. But it takes a special genius unique to this government and this Prime Minister to turn a good news story like 8,000 new jobs into political disaster, but that is what this Prime Minister did. She turned 8,000 new jobs into another story about sovereign risk issues which now dog investment in this country because of this Prime Minister and this government. Yet again, it was another illustration of how this Prime Minister completely lacks judgment and another demonstration of how this is a government that is deeply ambivalent about business in general and particularly ambivalent about the role of the mining sector in this country.

What we saw in the wake of that announcement was an ugly brawl between the minister for immigration and the minister for resources on the one hand and the born-again socialists inside the caucus. And it was no surprise whose side the Prime Minister turned out to be on. What we saw last week was, first of all, the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, in an interesting development, tip off the unions about the enterprise migration agreement that they all knew was coming. The unions spooked the Prime Minister, the caucus rolled the cabinet, and now the issue of sovereign risk is yet again front and centre for the people who we need to invest in this country. No-one quite knows what this new caucus oversight committee is going to do. But one thing we can be certain of is that enterprise migration agreements will henceforth be harder to negotiate, they will be more onerous and they will make it much harder for investment to take place and jobs to be created in this country.

This week we have seen again and again a Prime Minister shifty and evasive with this parliament, incapable of telling the complete truth. Again and again this week we have seen a desperate government trying to claw its way back into political relevance with an advertising blitz the like of which this country has never seen. They spent $36 million on a carbon tax which they will not even name—$36 million advertising that which dare not speak its name: the carbon tax. They spent $20 million advertising the National Broadband Network and they spent $12 million advertising the education cash splash. They are even sending letters to millions of Australians: 'Extra cash for you. You have just received some extra money from the Australian government. This advance is just the start. There is more to come. From the middle of next year you will get extra cash. Don't worry, you don't need to make a new claim. This assistance will come automatically just like the cash you have just had. PS: This is just part of the extra help the government is giving.' And they never mentioned the carbon tax! The last communication most people got like that was from the Nigerian lottery scammers!

It is all borrowed money. How dare this government come into this parliament and boast about Australia's economic performance when that sort of thing is taking place, all with borrowed money. This is a government which is in full retreat from the market capitalism which has been the basis of Australia's economic prosperity. If we look at the World Competitiveness Yearbook, which has just been released, Australia's overall economic competitiveness, in just two years, has fallen from fifth to 15th. But it gets worse. Our economic performance, in just two years, has fallen from seventh to 23rd. And this is a government that wants to boast about how brilliant its economic management is! We are being beaten by Qatar. But it is okay. We are still one place ahead of the United Arab Emirates!

Is it any wonder that further investments vital to the economic health of our country and the prosperity of Australians, like the Olympic Dam investment, are now at risk. This is a government which has damaged our productivity by, amongst other things, abolishing the Australian Building and Construction Commission. It has jeopardised our fiscal strength by blowing the hard-won surplus that Peter Costello and John Howard achieved. And now it has unleashed a class war, but it cannot even get that right. This mob are so hopeless they cannot even organise a class war properly. They cannot decide whether they are against 'bad Gina Rinehart', who opposes the mining tax, or in favour of 'good Gina Rinehart', who is creating 1,000 jobs for the long-term benefit of our country. This government just never understands, it just does not get it. You cannot have wealth distribution unless you have wealth creation first. That is what this government simply does not understand.

We had the enterprise migration agreements, which everyone opposite supported until the Prime Minister was spooked by the union movement. We have got a consistent preference for government over market, for government enterprise over private enterprise, from members opposite. There is the 'green bank'—$10 billion of borrowed money that is going to go out there and pick losers, pick businesses that could not make money. We have got the National Broadband Network, $50 billion worth of spending to dig up the roads to 93 per cent of the houses in this country—whether or not people need it, want it or can afford to pay three times the price for their broadband services—even though the private sector can give us much better broadband much more quickly and much more affordably than this government telecommunications monopoly ever will.

Bizarrely, and perhaps the worst decision of all, in just the last few months they have chosen a government owned and operated freight intermodal hub at Moorebank over a private sector proposal that was vastly cheaper, vastly quicker to build and vastly more affordable. They always choose government, they always choose nationalisation, over the private businesses of this country. That is the problem with the born-again socialists of this country.

There is the mining tax, which, especially if increased, is going to kill the goose that has laid the golden egg for this country. And then of course there is the carbon tax—that wrecking ball that is about to swing right through the Australian economy from 1 July because this Prime Minister broke her solemn commitment: 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' There was the Prime Minister in question time today, shrilly demanding that I stand up and guarantee that I might do this and guarantee that I might do that. Well, I tell you what, at least my guarantees count. At least my guarantees can be trusted, unlike those of this Prime Minister, who never again can make a solemn pledge to the Australian people because of her grievous deception, the deception that will haunt her to her political grave—that 'there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead'.

It is the world's biggest carbon tax at the worst possible time. Already, a month before the tax begins, there are jobs gone in the steel industry and jobs gone in the aluminium industry. Prices are up and routes have gone in the airline industry. Rates are up in the local government sector. You just have to look at the government's own documents—its own carbon tax modelling. It says that there will be a 21 per cent decrease in steel and iron production in this country, a 61 per cent decrease in aluminium production in this country and, absent carbon capture and storage, coal generated power in this country will fall from 70 per cent to 10 per cent. That is why the carbon tax is the death of the coal industry. The whole point of a carbon tax is to make using coal and using gas more expensive—too expensive, in fact—for us to use as opposed to the alternative.

This is a country that is suffering because of an incompetent government that just cannot be trusted with the economic management of our great country. Every day this government does more damage to families' cost of living. It does more damage to job security. But there is a better way. This is a great country let down by a bad government. There is nothing wrong with Australia that a change of government would not improve.

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