Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. I remind her of Oxford Cold Storage, a business in her electorate that I visited recently which employs over 400 people. Even on the government's own modelling, Oxford Cold Storage will pay an extra $300,000 a year on their electricity bill, and that is just for starters, thanks to her carbon tax. Will the Prime Minister guarantee to those 400 workers in Lalor that not one single job will be lost because of her toxic carbon tax?

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would say to those workers and that business in my electorate, as I would say to workers and businesses around the nation: we need to act on climate change, we need to reduce carbon pollution and we should do that in the most efficient way possible because that is best for business and therefore for jobs. That is why the government has acted in the most efficient way possible, with a market mechanism—that is, we have taken the same approach that the Leader of the Opposition took when he went to the 2007 election under the leadership of John Howard.

Since then of course the opposition has trashed Liberal Party tradition and repudiated any link with markets. That is why, as we stand here today, we are able to say the choice facing those workers in my electorate is whether or not the nation has a market based mechanism, whether we have a carbon price starting at $23 a tonne of carbon pollution, or whether we endorse the Leader of the Opposition's plan—an inefficient scheme which would have an effective price of $62 a tonne. I ask the Leader of the Opposition to contemplate how job destroying that approach of $62 a tonne would be. I say to the Leader of the Opposition, too, that I do hope when he had the conversation in my electorate with those workers he explained to them that his scheme relies on charging each of them, each family represented in that business, $1,300 a year. I hope he explained that as well. Perhaps, if he ever chooses to visit that place again, when he next goes he should say to them that he does not want them to get a company tax cut, that he is going to make sure in this parliament he votes against that business getting a tax cut, that he is going to exercise his choice in the parliament to stand up for billionaires—

Peter Slipper (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister will return to the question.

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

rather than the working people in that business.