Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance and Administration) Share this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister made it abundantly clear last week that we do think that a precondition to effectively taxing carbon in this country is that there is a truly international system in place but one that at least captures the major emitters. India, China and the US have to be part of such a system given their contribution to global emissions. Any system that does not include China, India and the US is utterly futile. The background to this debate must be that, whatever you say, Australia contributes 1½ per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and that, if we were to shut down the Australian economy tomorrow, China would replace all of those emissions within about nine or 10 months. So any discussion of this matter which ignores that absolute fact is facile in the extreme. We are not going to cost Australia’s jobs and industry for absolutely no gain to the world environment under any circumstances.