Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise this evening to voice my opposition and that of my electorate to Labor’s proposed carbon tax. The impact of this tax will be most felt by the hardworking communities in rural and remote Australia. The tax will have an additional impact on communities outside our major capital cities.

According to Professor Ross Garnaut, to meet the target of a five per cent cut to greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, Labor’s carbon tax would have to start at around $26 a tonne. That means that electricity prices would initially increase by at least $300 per annum for households—just small family households—and would continue to rise to about $600 per annum, more than $10 or $12 a week, in three to five years. Professor Garnaut also let the cat out of the bag when he suggested to the government—after all, he is an adviser to the government—including petrol in the carbon tax mix, which would see fuel prices skyrocket.

For people living outside cities and regional centres, this carbon tax’s impacts on petrol and diesel mean a lot more than just extra dollars on the household bills. Every day thousands of people across rural and remote Australia, including my electorate of Maranoa, travel for business. It is an essential element of how they do their business. People often travel from town to town just for their jobs. Out there in Maranoa there is no urban transport subsidised by the taxpayers of Australia. They pay the full costs for their motor vehicles: the depreciation, the fuel and the wear and tear. One constituent in particular comes to mind. She lives in Dalby and works in Chinchilla—every day she has a 160-kilometre round trip just to get to work, do her job and come home. Our sports men and women, players and teams, travel hundreds of kilometres during the week just for training, and on the weekend they travel to attend matches. There is no subsidised urban transport for them in the electorate of Maranoa. Under this proposed carbon tax, every time a family in Maranoa travels in their car, just to carry out their everyday tasks, they will be taxed by this proposed carbon tax, as it would impact on fuel. They will feel that a great deal more than their city cousins.

The cost of bringing critical services to people of the bush will also rise under Labor’s proposed carbon tax. We rely on nurses, doctors and veterinarians who travel between a number of clinics every other day or week to provide health services to communities. They have to travel from town to town. There are teachers who travel across districts to teach languages and music and to coach the sporting teams at different schools. What about the future of our Royal Flying Doctor Service? The Reverend John Flynn recognised many, many years ago when he established that service that the tyranny of distance in rural Australia was a factor that impacted more heavily on people who live in the bush than on people who live in the city. We rely on the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Through their aerial work and also their on-road work, they would be a significant contributor, according to the government, of carbon emissions. According to Professor Garnaut, they too should pay carbon tax when theybring health services to people in rural and remote Australia.

Much of the economy of Maranoa relies on road transport. Tourists bring their caravans through for the outback tourism season. They would be taxed. Our mining companies bring their equipment in via road and rail. They would be taxed. The agricultural sector alone generates something like $155 billion in production and underpins 12 per cent of our gross domestic product every year. It also feeds some 60 million people in Australia and around the world every day. Our farmers would be taxed as they produce the food that we eat and so many people in other countries rely on, and it would cost them more to produce that food.

The other thing that concerns me greatly is that we would see more and more of a drift from the rural areas into our cities. Instead of encouraging the decentralisation of this great nation of ours, we would see a greater centralisation, because this carbon tax would impact on the cost of living and daily business in remote and rural Australia. (Time expired)