Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Climate Change and Water (Senator Wong) to questions without notice asked by Senators Cash and Boswell today relating to the proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

We have seen over recent days an extraordinary backflip by the government on its emission trading scheme. What it demonstrates is that the Australian people cannot believe what Kevin Rudd tells them. We heard before the election that the government was going to bring this scheme in and the parameters surrounding the commencement of the scheme. But it also needs to be noted that the design of the scheme in itself is a breach of promise—another demonstration that people need to have real caution when believing what Kevin Rudd tells them. In his election promise from 2007, he said:

As part of its comprehensive approach to climate change, Labor has already indicated that it will develop mechanisms to ensure that Australian operations of emissions-intensive trade-exposed firms are not disadvantaged before an effective global regime is in place. This will be pursued as a key component of emissions trading, alongside the expanded MRET.

We have seen over recent weeks that that is not the case, that it was not true. We have seen company after company and industry after industry come in to committee inquiries telling us that they would be negatively impacted as emissions-intensive trade-exposed industries. We have heard it time and time again. Obviously industry do not believe what the government told them before the election. Quite clearly they do not believe them. We have seen evidence from industries that they potentially could be forced to insolvency by the processes that are put in place by the emissions trading scheme. And now we have seen this extraordinary backflip that occurred last Monday.

We finished hearings on the Senate Select Committee on Climate Policy on the Friday of the week before. Right up until the last day, we had Labor senators asking questions of submitters to the inquiry, making suggestions to them, cajoling them, almost insisting that the global financial crisis was not a reason to delay the commencement of the emissions trading scheme. It went on for three weeks. How must they feel now, when, on the following Monday, Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong waltzed out in front of the national media and said, ‘We are going to delay the commencement of the emissions trading scheme because of the global financial crisis’? One of the key parameters that they had been arguing in the hearings for the previous three weeks had just been completely ripped out from under their feet. They were left there, wearing their little tin hats with their little guns, firing off the bullets that they had been given by the powers that be in the Labor Party: that the emissions trading scheme should not be delayed by the global financial crisis, and yet that was the very excuse that was used by the government to delay the emissions trading scheme.

It is quite clear from those three weeks of the inquiry that we have a flawed scheme. The impact on agriculture in particular is absolutely devastating. We have heard of job losses through the coal regions of Australia, and Senator Boswell has spoken of those extraordinary impacts. We heard of the cost of $6,000 to $9,000 per dairy farmer. The government told us during hearings that agriculture is not in; that there will not be an impact. Yet the pass-back impact from agriculture into dairy—$6,000 to $9,000 per dairy farmer—is the impact as the impact comes through from the processing sector of agriculture. A flawed scheme is a flawed scheme is a flawed scheme. It ignores abatement opportunities. It locks out proposals and opportunities for abatement that could be incorporated into the scheme. The rigidities of the scheme were criticised across the country. It is quite clear from the hearings that we held over the last few weeks that we cannot believe what the Prime Minister tells us in relation to the ETS. We have to be careful about what the Prime Minister tells us about anything, and I would urge the Australian people to use that as a prime approach when the Prime Minister says anything.