Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

Carbon taxing in this country is a costly, futile nonsense that should be brought to an immediate end through this bill and the other bills in the package. The cold, the hard, the indisputable reality is that nothing Australia does alone or could possibly do in limiting carbon emissions, even cutting them to zero, can make the slightest impact on our climate. Our gross emissions are globally inconsequential, barely one per cent, and are offset entirely by the rapid acceleration of emissions elsewhere in the world. If Australia stopped emitting every gram of greenhouse gasses from today, from this minute, and never emitted another, ever, our emissions would be made up elsewhere inside one year. The sacrifice would be utterly and absolutely pointless.

The only way there can be an appreciable reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions over time, carrying the theoretical potential to reduce the long-term impact on climate change, is if there is a concerted, coordinated, global effort that includes the world's biggest emitters, particularly China and India and especially the United States. The prospect for that is as remote now, probably even more remote, than it has ever been.

Members opposite are in total denial of these fundamental facts. Their carbon tax has inflicted great damage on Australian industry and our families. There has been at least a $15.4 billion negative impact on our economy, a $9 billion attack on Australian jobs. They have imposed cost on Australian families and the Australian economy through what is, ridiculously, the most comprehensive and among the highest carbon taxes on the planet on a fundamentally dishonest premise. They must know it in their own hearts that this was a fundamentally dishonest premise. It is a relic of the Labor-Green's deal, which of course ought now to be redundant, but Labor still hangs on to the carbon tax in spite of the fact that it is clearly no longer politically useful for them.

Labor's carbon tax has certainly made a significant contribution to the fact that unemployment rose by 200,000 people under the Labor government, much of it, clearly, the result of the carbon tax. Our industry ceased to be competitive, particularly energy intensive industry. Smelting and industries of that nature came to Australia because of our low-cost energy advantage. But we have squandered that advantage. We have taxed it away. Carbon taxing on our electricity costs has meant that we can no longer be competitive internationally in energy intensive industries. This plus the renewable energy target have meant that, when decisions are being made about extending the life of aluminium smelters and other heavy energy consumers, those decisions—almost invariably these days being made in a foreign boardroom which has the option of coming to Australia or being in other parts of the world—are going against Australia. They are going to countries now where there is not likely ever to be a carbon tax. They are going to countries that can offer the cheap energy that once Australia was able to provide as an incentive. So refineries are already starting to close and, as new investment decisions are required, sadly, others will close into the future. Thousands of Australian jobs will be lost. Value-adding will go to other parts of the world. There will be no new refineries or energy intensive industries built in this country.

Our car manufacturing industry is moving to a position where it will cease to exist—another industry which requires significant energy. It has not just been the uncompetitive work practices et cetera in this country that have led to the demise of the car manufacturing industry; it has clearly been high energy costs, too, and the prospect that those energy costs would continue to go up and up and up, because the Labor Party wants to lock in increases in this carbon tax every year. We are only days away from seeing a practical example of that: the carbon tax going up, because Labor has already legislated for it to go up on 1 July.

We hear reports of our airlines, for instance, chalking up losses and, if they were not paying a carbon tax, those airlines would instead be returning a profit. Instead of our aviation industry being at risk, it could in fact be trading profitably, if there were no carbon tax.

Many farmers are now having to make the decision that they cannot afford to irrigate. The cost of electricity is so high that the increased yields they expect to get from irrigation cannot justify the higher cost, so we lose productivity. This is a ridiculous tax. This is a tax on our advantage. This is turning Australia into an uncompetitive country.

The renewable energy target, which is another part of Labor's high energy cost strategy, adds to the enormous cost and energy cost that Australian industry will face into the future. This is a tax that is having a significant impact.

The previous member in his remarks said that the carbon tax is working. It is working: by closing down Australian industries therefore you do reduce your emissions; and if you close down a refinery, there are fewer emissions. But then we are not going without aluminium or steel or other products; we are buying it from other countries where there is no carbon tax and no intention of having a carbon tax. This is the greatest case of self-inflicted harm that I think any country has ever contemplated. We continue to use the products, but Australian jobs are lost and we are not able to undertake this work.

Members opposite have been needlessly, artificially and wilfully inflating the performance of other countries on carbon tax to try and justify their own actions in relation to implementing their carbon tax. I am not sure that the former Prime Minister was being deliberately dishonest when she said 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' I think that she probably was intending that that would be the case but she was so devoid of principle that, when it came to doing a deal to hang onto the trappings of office, she was prepared to trade in those principles irrespective of the damage that it was going to cause to our country.

The Labor Party keeps talking about examples in other parts of the world. They frequently tell us about China making huge efforts to reduce their emissions. A prime indicator of China's intent, according to the former Prime Minister, was that China was shutting down 'dirty' coal-fired power stations, was commissioning a wind turbine an hour and was drastically reducing its emissions intensity. All those examples epitomise Labor's deceit on the issue.

What the former Prime Minister did not say—and I am sure deliberately didn't say when she was talking about the closure of dirty coal-fired power stations—was that the ones being closed in China were small, very old, inefficient plants and that they were being replaced many times over by massive new coal-fired power stations, so that net emissions were—are and will be—possibly for decades to come going up and going up substantially.

For every gigawatt of coal-fired power capacity China has been shutting down, three were being built. There is no doubt they are cleaner. Some of the new technology that is available for coal-fired power stations and some of those being planned for Germany are right at the cutting edge of coal-fired generating technology: critical, supercritical and even hypercritical generators, built around advances in boiler construction that allows much higher pressures meaning less coal has to be burned to spin the turbines for a given amount of power. In net terms, and in spite of this technology, the reality is: China's emissions from coal-fired power are going up.

There have also been these suggestions that the Chinese are building a lot of wind farms. It is true that they are building a number of wind generators but they make a very, very tiny contribution to China's energy needs—about two per cent—and the reality is that China's total emissions are going up substantially. In 2000, China's total emissions were around three billion tonnes, around six times ours; in 2020, there are expected to be 12 billion tonnes, around 24 times ours.

There is no evidence that countries around the world are lining up to introduce carbon taxation schemes like the one this legislation abolishes. In fact not one of the top five emitters—China, the United States, India, Russia, Japan, generating between them well over 50 per cent of total global emissions—is proposing to do what Labor asked Australia to do. The reality is that there are very few emissions trading schemes anywhere in the world.

We look at New Zealand and Europe, the examples that are often put up. New Zealand a year or two ago introduced a two-for-one discount on their emissions trading certificates, so the real cost of their carbon trading scheme now is about $1.80 a tonne. Of course their scheme does not cover most of their economy.

When you move to Europe, the price is about $8 a tonne but, if you look at the real impact of the carbon tax on people in those economies, in Europe the scheme raises just over $1 per person per year. The New Zealand scheme also raises a very, very small amount of money. The European scheme is 400 times less onerous than the Australian scheme, so our scheme has 400 times the impact of the European scheme. There is no country in the world engaging in this level of self-harm. There is no logical reason why it should continue.

This government was elected with a clear mandate to scrap the carbon tax and reduce costs to business and households. Indeed, the last two elections were won by parties promising not to have a carbon tax. But Labor did not deliver; they welshed on their commitment. The Australian people voted at the last election to get rid of the carbon tax. This government intends to honour its commitment. Now is the time for the Australian parliament to respect the wishes and the mandate of the Australian people and vote to get rid of this insidious tax.

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