Greg Combet (Charlton, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Blair for his question. I know he has a keen interest in the meat industry. The fact of the matter is that nine months into carbon pricing the meat industry is one where you can look quite clearly at how the carbon price is working to help transform the economy. In the industry it is reducing carbon pollution and driving investments that improve the industry's competitiveness.

Those opposite made many dire, terrible, doom-and-gloom predictions about the future of the meat industry as we went towards 1 July last year, with its introduction. It will be recalled that Senator Joyce predicted a $100 lamb roast and that a single head of beef going into an abattoir would cost the abattoir $575,000. That is the nature of the absolutely ludicrous claims that were made, joined in by the Leader of the Opposition. The member for Wright raised the case of AJ Bush and Sons and their Bromelton plant in Queensland, in particular. He said that that particular meat facility would face an 'absolute walloping' from the carbon price. He visited the abattoir with Senator Joyce and prophesised all the terrible doom and gloom about never being able to afford another T-bone.

But now that we are nine months into carbon pricing, what has actually happened at the Bromelton plant is quite interesting because, with government support, the company is capturing its methane emissions, cutting its electricity bills and also cutting its emissions. It is doing it through an investment in a biogas facility and more energy efficient boilers. Recently, in the Beaudesert Times, AJ Bush's manager, David Kassulke, previously a critic of carbon pricing, said that these investments will cut their emissions by more than half and allow the company to produce half of the plant's electricity requirements. He said that as a consequence the abattoir 'will ultimately be in a much more competitive position in the marketplace as a direct result' of carbon pricing—

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