Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I want to speak on the report of the Standing Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport, on Climate change and the Australian agricultural sector. This is a very important report of the committee. It highlights what this ill-thought-through emissions trading scheme will do to Australia generally, and, can I say as a parochial Queenslander, to my home state specifically. One of the very significant parts of the Queensland economy is the beef cattle industry. Under the Rudd government’s proposal on emissions trading that industry will be excluded until 2015, but then there is no indication of what happens after that.

People in that industry are petrified that the beef cattle industry will be brought into the emissions trading scheme at that time. As someone said at a Senate inquiry which I was attending, this could well turn Australia into a nation of vegetarians because we will simply not be able to afford red meat if it is going to be taxed at the rate that a lot of people in that industry envisage when the Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Wong, has her way with an emissions trading scheme. The beef cattle industry in Queensland is very significant. It employs hundreds of meat workers, and I cannot understand why the meat workers union advocates on the other side of the chamber are not standing up with me demanding that some certainty be given to the Queensland beef cattle industry today, not in 2015—so tell them today what they have got to plan for and that fills those people with horror.

The beef cattle industry employs thousands of unionists in meatworks throughout my state of Queensland and they are likely to be thrown on the unemployment scrapheap. What do we hear from the so-called saviours of the working man who sit opposite us in the chamber? Absolute silence—fall over and get in behind Mr Rudd. If you want a job in the government that brings power and money, do what he says and forget about the workers that you are supposed to be representing. All of those meatworkers should really have a look at what is going to happen to the beef cattle industry in 2015—and it is not just Rockhampton and Townsville; it is all of those places in the north and north-west of Queensland that rely on the world’s best beef cattle industry for a living.

This report of the standing committee deals with other industries as well. What becomes clear is that the emissions trading scheme will be a tax on many things. It will be a tax on fuel. It will be a tax on our electricity. It will be a tax on manufacturing.