Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This current scheme is the form of Mr Rudd, who in his attempt to cool the planet has decided to put the air conditioner on the outside of the house and then switch it on to cool the world rather than cooling the house. Two things are going to happen. First of all, you are not going to cool the planet. The second thing is that you are going to go broke in the process. This is exactly what the scheme is: it is the metaphorical air conditioner on the outside of the house in a vain attempt to cool the planet.

All through this inquiry one thing that kept on coming up on the economic side—I am speaking on behalf of the economics committee and my role in the economics committee—was the cost. Out there in the public there is not a great understanding of exactly what an ETS is, but people will understand that perfectly once they start paying for it. More and more we are seeing, through discussions of people such as Lord Christopher Monckton and Professor Ian Plimer—and there is also an emeritus chair, I think, in Harvard—what the cost of this scheme is. There are two questions that have to be asked: do you have the potential to pass that cost on or do you wear the cost? We are speaking on behalf of the people who will wear the cost. And the person who will wear the cost is the lady pushing the shopping trolley out of the supermarket, who has to pay for the groceries, whose price will go through the roof because agriculture will come in, and the cost will be delivered back to her. The farmer will pay the cost. The coalminer will pay the cost because he or she will lose their job. And the person who loses their job will therefore deliver that cost back to the family, who cannot make the house payment and cannot make the car payment and who will lose their social standing in their own community and get the locks changed on their house because of a political gesture. This is a gesture. It does nothing to the global climate. It is a political gesture and poisonous in how it will affect those people it is delivered to. When this parliament decides to start voting for political gestures we are in a very dangerous process, because there are a lot of gestures out there, there are a lot of great ideas out there, but the reality of them when they are delivered back to the people can be absolutely overwhelming and detrimental not only to them personally but to our nation as a whole.

People have tried to categorise this that therefore you do not believe anything that is environmentally appropriate. That is rubbish. There are so many things, such as biofuels, solar, geothermal and tidal—all these things—that have the capacity to be looked at. But no, what the Labor Party insist on is a very peculiar subset of possible carbon pollution reduction schemes. There is a myriad of carbon pollution reduction schemes, but the Labor Party, in their intolerance in this debate, have said: ‘No, you must only accept one. This our ETS; this is the one you have to vote for.’ They are not playing for the environment. We have proved categorically—even Professor Garnaut acknowledges it—that this will do nothing to the global climate. They are playing this for a political point-scoring mechanism and they are doing it in the middle of the greatest economic turmoil since the Great Depression. That is how belligerent this is as a policy.

The position the National Party has on this is no, we do not believe in this ETS. That has been reflected in the report: no, we do not believe in it. The answer on this ETS is no. The position on other ETSs? Well, there are no other ETSs. There is no alternative policy on the table, so we do not have to have a discussion on something that does not exist. Do you therefore rule out all forms of carbon pollution reduction scheme? Quite obviously not and quite evidently not, because in the past there have been methods that have reduced carbon output and there have been no questions asked. We have sulphur content rules for fuel. There have been tree-clearing guidelines and a whole raft of things that have gone forward.

This is a politically motivated piece of legislation for a political outcome—that is, the Labor Party is gearing itself up for a double dissolution so that it can try and bunny hop the consequences of the next budget, when the Australian people will see in its full glory the complete and utter basket case that the Labor Party has turned the finances of our nation into. As far as the evidence provided to the Senate Economics Legislation Committee is concerned, this emissions trading scheme is the worst possible outcome for our nation. It is absolute economic bastardry of our nation.