Ben Small (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to ask, what happened to choice in our country? When did we decide that Canberra knows best, that unelected bureaucrats who live far, far away from communities like mine are somehow best placed to decide what ordinary Aussies do in their homes, their businesses and their communities? It's a lens through which I come to look at most policies of government because I'm a live-and-let-live kind of guy, after all. I honestly believe that an important part of the Australian psyche still holds that we simply don't want to be told what to do all the time. So when we come to the issue of emissions reduction, it seems that this government has decided that it knows better than every Australian—or, more egregiously, that perhaps it doesn't trust those Australians to do the right thing in their own circumstances. Rather than leaving it to each Australian to decide when an electric vehicle suits their needs—whether for commuting, recreation with a caravan or boat, or even to for their work, whether it be on the construction site or in the back paddock—this government decided to impose taxes on folks who chose internal combustion engine cars, pushing up the cost of a new Ford Ranger, one of Australia's best-selling cars, by some $14,000 by 2029.

Worse still, the assumed sales of electric vehicles are failing to meet the government's expectations. In the month of September, eight per cent of vehicles purchased by Australians were battery-electric vehicles, which is clearly well less than half of the expected base-case uptake of 20 per cent. It begs the question, will this government slug Aussies even more because they chose the wrong sort of car, as our net zero evangelists here in Canberra have dictated?

I think the truly criminal part of the government deciding that they know more about what sort of car you should drive is the fact that they have cooked up a scheme of subsidies that make a Tesla cheaper for a surgeon than a nurse. I thought Labor was supposed to represent the worker, but here they are running a scheme that gives high-income earners a bigger tax break to buy an EV through a novated lease, and taxpayers are the ones left to foot the bill. We're taking tax money off a nurse to make a surgeon's novated lease for a Tesla cheaper. Astonishingly, the Parliamentary Budget Office expects this rort to cost some $23 billion over the decade, and yet still the government stands by it.

So why can't we end all subsidies, taxes, penalties and every other way that bureaucrats here in Canberra are trying to direct Aussies as to what sort of car they drive, and just leave it to them?

We know that Australians will make the right choice when it comes to doing their fair share for the environment. We know this because we've seen massive uptake of rooftop solar panels, and the uptake was not due to the subsidies offered by the Howard government, the rebate schemes of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years or even the various schemes of the Abbott government. No, rooftop solar took off in Australia around 2017-18 because the capital cost after incentives finally made economic sense, falling below $1 a watt in terms of capital cost, and Australians rallied to open their wallets and do the right thing. So household installations doubled then, and they've continued at breakneck pace.

As an aside, in recent years some troubling questions have emerged that suggest that the manufacturing of solar panels in certain parts of China relies on slaves to achieve their incredibly low cost of production. These reports have come from reputable sources like the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the BBC, New York Post and even Australia's Walk Free foundation. So I wrote to the climate change minister on 6 August this year to understand whether the government had satisfied itself that there was no risk of slave labour in the supply chains of solar panels coming to Australia. Eighty-three days later I'm still clicking refresh on my inbox, waiting for a response from Minister Bowen. It's pathetic that the government appears to be turning a blind eye to credible reports of slavery because it is so infatuated with its pursuit of net zero. Is the affordability of rooftop solar too good to be true? Mr Bowen's green dreams would leave a dark stain on our national history if these claims were ever validated.

Returning to choice, however, I recently sat in a room with 25- to 35-year-old folks from Bunbury and watched as the shadow Treasurer asked them a simple question: 'What do you like least about Australia today?' 'Red tape,' 'Overregulation,' 'Constantly going for the lowest common denominator,' and, 'A nanny state'—these statements are from young entrepreneurs who are horrified by the constraints that we've layered upon them. It started with forcing coffee to be sold in cups that say, 'Caution! Contents may be hot'—seriously?—and now the mind virus seems to have completely killed off the drive of Australians to build things, create things and do things.

Take my electorate, where a successful young business owner runs a shed-building company. He tells me that it takes at least four months to get the approvals in place to build a commercial shed and just seven to eight days to actually construct it. Just think about that. That's four months of plans being shuffled from one desk to another within bureaucracy, creating no value whatsoever, and then just a week for a crack team of tradies to actually build the shed. That's to say nothing of the truly catastrophic examples like the McPhillamys goldmine which, after years of planning approval work and with more than $1 billion ready to invest, was knocked back.

So it's no wonder that more than four in five jobs created in the last two years depend on taxpayer money, and, from there, it is also no wonder that we are already spending $50,000 a minute on interest that our kids will ultimately pay. It really is un-Australian to rack up debt on the credit card and then give the bill to your kids to pay, especially when we've spent their whole lives telling them what to do, think and say.

For another example where we could have embraced choice, take the government's mandatory climate reporting legislation, administered by ASIC, which started on 1 January this year. Businesses across the nation are now required to document, calculate and estimate their emissions and credits with a level of detail that, frankly, demands additional staff or compliance specialists. For a large multinational, it's simply the cost of doing business, but, for a family run operator, a manufacturer, a local trucking company or a regional retailer—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 13:19 to 13:43

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