Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

While I rise today to speak against the Safeguard Mechanism (Crediting) Amendment Bill 2022, it's good to follow the Assistant Treasurer, who spent the last 10 minutes seemingly apologising to the people of the Illawarra region for the pain that is about to be inflicted on BlueScope Steel. Of course, even though BlueScope Steel sits in the member's electorate, as he quite rightly says it provides steel all across Australia, including in my electorate. It seemed like the Assistant Treasurer was foreshadowing problems ahead for BlueScope under the safeguard mechanism. If, indeed, they are forced to close their doors due to the requirement to reduce emissions by around five per cent per annum between now and 2030, we will simply see those emissions replaced and in fact increased, because that steel will simply be imported from North Asia, which is where the bulk of our steel currently comes from. Today I rise to talk not about the Illawarra region or BlueScope Steel, where the Assistant Treasurer mentioned one business that will be dramatically impacted by the safeguard mechanism; as a proud Western Australian, I am here to talk about Western Australia and the impact the safeguard mechanism is going to have on my home state and my electorate in particular.

With 10 per cent of the nation's population, Western Australia produces 50 per cent of the nation mercantile exports. I'm very proud of that. Much of that comes from my electorate, but a great deal of it—in fact, the majority—comes from the member for Durack's electorate; I know how proud she is of those hardworking people and those businesses that operate in her electorate. We have 50 per cent of our nation's mercantile exports and 10 per cent of the population, and Western Australia will cop 32 per cent of the impact of the safeguard mechanism. On a per-head-of-population basis, we're copping three times the hit other states are copping.

I will run through the very long list of businesses impacted in Western Australia. I will start with statewide businesses that provide services to people across Western Australia and mention some of the impacts they will have on the individual consumer. In this place we've heard the Prime Minister and the Minister for Climate Change and Energy stand up and talk about the Business Council of Australia supporting this, and other large businesses are calling for the introduction of this carbon tax. But I don't hear them talk about individual consumers calling for higher costs of, for example, gas. ATCO Gas Australia, a distributor of gas, is one of the companies that will be required to reduce their emissions by five per cent per annum—at a cost; these things don't come cheap. Centurion Transport, which distributes most of the groceries around the very large state of Western Australia—and transport costs are important—will be forced to increase their costs, which will mean the consumer will have to pay more when they go to Woolworths, on top of increased energy prices and other supply chain issues which are forcing up the cost of fruit and vegetables in the supermarket. Goldfields Gas Transmission Pty Ltd, another business which reticulates gas, and Alliance Aviation, which provides air services to regional towns across my electorate, are other businesses that will be caught up in this.

The Kwinana CSBP facility—I don't know much about anything else, but I know a little bit about agriculture. I know that when you force up the price of fertiliser, which is a key component particularly across the poorer soils of Western Australia, the cost for farmers goes up and the price of food goes up. Once again, you've got the consumer unaware of what's coming their way; they are already dealing with significant cost of living issues today, and they will pay more when they go to the supermarket. We've got fuel refineries across Australia that will be caught up in this, which means people will be paying more when they fill their tanks. Aurizon rail freight are caught up in this safeguard mechanism; that's the business that carts the bulk of the grain Western Australia produces—26 million tonnes this year, our second record crop in a row. Our farmers are doing an amazing job of producing the best, cleanest, greenest product in the world, but their costs are going up and their fertiliser prices are going to go up under this bill, and the cost of getting that product to a port to go on a ship is going to go up. There's a lot in this bill that Western Australians need to be aware of and need to be very wary of.

Coming back to my electorate in particular, I've counted around 20 businesses that will be impacted. It's not one business, it's not just BlueScope Steel; there are 20 businesses that will be impacted. I will name a few of them because some of them are quite iconic. The Kalgoorlie Nickel Smelter is an iconic business in Kalgoorlie. Many local people did their apprenticeships there and grew up working at the nickel smelter. That will be caught up in this particular new carbon tax. We've got the Super Pit, which sits at the top end of Hannan Street in Kalgoorlie and employs over 1,000 people. That will be caught up in this tax. Moving away from the Goldfields, we've got the Murrin Murrin nickel operation, which is between Laverton and Leonora. It's a very important business out in that part of the world. At Boddington in the south-west part of the electorate, which is a long way from Kalgoorlie, the largest gold mine in Australia will be caught up under this safeguard mechanism. Many, many important businesses will be affected but none more so, in terms of local jobs and people's employment prospects, than the Worsley Alumina refinery in the Shire of Collie. Owned by South32, Worsley employs about 1,800 people directly at the alumina processing plant, and there would be many hundreds more contractors and others that are supported by that business. So these are really important businesses that employ a lot of people.

Production of aluminium, in particular, and alumina is a highly energy-intensive business. I have spoken to South32 about their plans to reduce emissions. They can get to 12 or 13 per cent, I believe, but, beyond that, it becomes more and more difficult. At the moment they are currently importing—can you believe it?—coal from Newcastle to run the plant because the Collie coalmine, under the WA Labor government, can't provide coal either to the power stations in Collie or to South32. This is a business that employs almost a couple of thousand people directly and then many other hundreds more indirectly. If they chose to offshore that business—perhaps, move it to South Africa where they do their smelting—that would be 2,000-plus jobs that would be gone from my electorate. Quite frankly, I'm not sure how they're going to achieve this 35 per cent reduction in emissions over the next seven years that is required under this particular legislation, and that means that those jobs are at real risk. It will devastate that particular region if those jobs go.

Bizarrely, the Prime Minister, in question time today, linked the safeguard mechanism with somehow reducing the cost of living. I've really got no idea, whichever way you cut, dice and spin this, how you can suggest that that would result from increasing the price of aluminium, increasing the price of petrol, increasing the price of cement—all of these key commodities that we consume, whether it be a young couple looking to build their first house or the state government embarking on an infrastructure project that requires a lot of cement or steel. These costs are going to go up. There is no other way you can spin it. The whole carbon tax is designed to drive the cost of these products up; that's what it's designed to do. So how anybody can come into this place with a straight face and try and claim that this is going to reduce costs for people is beyond belief. I would say it is bordering on misleading the parliament.

One of the perverse outcomes of this particular policy is that these companies will be required to purchase carbon credits if they can't reduce their emissions. They've got to go and buy a carbon credit at $75 a tonne. Are the companies going to absorb that or are they going to pass it on to the consumer? They are going to pass it on to the consumer. That's what these businesses do; that's how they survive. But the real threat—and we're already seeing this under the current carbon reduction efforts by these companies—is that they're now going out into prime agricultural production areas and buying up productive farmland to plant trees under a 70-year covenant, which means that farmland will never be available for productive farming again. In my home area, farms have been around for 150-plus years, and they've never been more productive. Yet here we have the situation where companies are producing gas or iron ore or products that are finite products. Don't get me wrong. I support these industries to the hilt, but to take out productive farmland that will still be producing food in 150 years time—probably infinitely more than we're producing today—to meet these obligations of these companies to reduce their carbon emissions is, quite frankly, the definition of insanity. I think when the Australia people wake up to what is being proposed here, they will pretty quickly change their mind.

By way of observation, in the Netherlands on the weekend, where similar types of programs have forced farmers to reduce their emissions and nitrogen use by up to 50 per cent, we saw that the BBB, which is the farmers and citizens party—importantly, the citizens as well as the farmers—won the largest vote of any party in the regional electorates in the Netherlands. The government party that has tried to introduce this particular imposition on the Dutch farmers has now lost its majority, and the Prime Minister there will be in serious trouble.

I want to conclude with those comments on where this policy is headed and where it may well end up, and on the impact on Western Australian consumers, farmers, and, most importantly, the householders who are going to be paying more for their electricity and gas and paying more for food when they go to the supermarkets. I proudly stand here today opposing this particular piece of very bad legislation which seeks to impose a new carbon tax on the Australian people.

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