Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Action, Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to address the latest independent modelling on the impacts of the carbon tax, which was released today by the Master Builders Association. It is about the effects of a carbon price on the building and construction industry. It is an independent report prepared for the master builders of Australia by the Centre for International Economics in Sydney.

Three conclusions come from this report, all of which should make Australians deeply concerned about the negative effects of the carbon tax, where prices are driven up but emissions are not reduced. First and most significantly, at the young homebuyer level, the report confirms that the cost of a new home will be at least $5,000 greater under a carbon tax. So for young families who want to get into the market for the first time that is a $5,000 increase on a modest new home, according to the independent work of the Centre for International Economics.

Secondly, over and above that impact—which will hurt families, which will make it more difficult for young people to enter the market and which will have an impact on national savings as a consequence—there is a community impact. This is some of the original work contained in the Centre for International Economics' report. The report states:

The increased cost impact of the carbon tax on new housing has been generally accepted by the Government's own modelling but what is not generally understood is the cost impact of the carbon tax on the broader community.

Community facilities and infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, medical centres, aged care facilities and roads are not immune from increases in construction costs whether as a result of large wage rises or a price on carbon.

This will have a direct impact on governments' capacity to deliver much needed public infrastructure. Governments will be forced to either deliver less or increase taxes and charges in response to increased construction costs.

So there we have it: the impact of the carbon tax will go straight to hospitals, schools, medical centres, aged-care facilities and roads, and either the charges will rise or the facilities will be fewer. That is what is at the heart of this tax. It is about increasing costs and increasing the operating costs of the economy without reducing emissions. The carbon tax will see Australia's emissions rise not fall. Australia's emissions will go up by 43 million tonnes between now and 2020. Instead, we are going to have to spend $3½ billion offshore in 2020 alone on almost 100 million tonnes of foreign carbon credits. It is not an emissions reduction scheme; it is a foreign carbon credit scheme and an electricity tax. The third level of increased expenditure is at the national level. The findings in the Centre for International Economics report are very clear. They say that the loss in building and construction industry value in 2020 alone could be as high as $3.6 billion, or, between 2013 and 2020, just over $24 billion in cumulative terms. Those are enormous figures and they are about construction industry jobs—jobs for blue-collar workers, jobs for independent contractors. They represent income for families. These are deep and significant levels of lost income.

The CIE work shows that building and construction costs 'will increase by between 1.4 and 2.0 per cent by 2020, due to price increases in key emission-intensive inputs such as steel, aluminium, cement and glass'. There is no way around those costs. This is why we have seen two things occur—firstly, we have seen the government guillotine its own legislation in the Senate. The Prime Minister would not give the Australian people a say at the last election and she does not want to give the parliament a say right now. That is an abuse of democratic process and the Prime Minister should allow the debate to run in the Senate and then take the issue straight to the people. The reason the Prime Minister has guillotined debate by publicly elected representatives in the Senate is that she wants to lock in the carbon tax before Kevin Rudd can take her job. It is no coincidence that this bill has been brought forward now. She wants to bury it— (Time expired)