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

I also repeat the thanks of other people on the climate change committee to the secretariat and the secretariat staff, who did an enormous amount of work often in very rushed periods to get the report done and to get the material out. I also want to pay tribute to my colleague Senator Richard Colbeck, who was chairman of a committee comprising equal numbers of Labor and coalition members, a Green and an Independent. He did a marvellous job of getting the committee through its work. He also had the difficult job of trying to get together recommendations which were supported by the majority, and I congratulate him on achieving that. I support, in general terms, the recommendations of the committee. I think there are, in many instances, areas where the committee recommendations could have been stronger, but in the attempt to get a consensus we have gone along with a number of recommendations.

As a member of two Senate committees dealing with climate change, I was disappointed in the Treasury modelling. I do not blame Treasury themselves—they only do what their political masters tell them to do—but the Treasury modelling was clearly deficient in many instances which I do not have time to go into now. Suffice it to say, however, Treasury did not model the impact of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme on rural and regional Australia. I think all of the Labor Party members on both the committees I served on came from capital cities and did not seem to have much interest in what happens in regional Australia at all. The evidence clearly showed that agricultural industries would be, in many instances, devastated by the imposition of this Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. The impact of this scheme on jobs in areas such as where I live up in the Bowen Basin coalfields—Gladstone, Rockhampton, Mackay, Townsville and Mount Isa—will be catastrophic. I was disappointed that the union movement rolled over to Labor in the evidence they gave in not fully pointing out the impact that this scheme will have on their members.

All of this action, which will decimate many job-creating Australian industries, is being taken for what everyone accepts will have no appreciable impact on the changing climate of the world. I think we all accept that the climate is changing but, with Australia’s less than 1.4 per cent contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, if we shut Australia down completely it would have no appreciable effect whatsoever on the changing climate of the world. I was delighted to hear Mr Keith De Lacy, the long-serving Labor Treasurer of Queensland for many years, say exactly the same thing just the other day.

What this inquiry and the inquiry of the energy and fuel committee that I appeared on clearly showed is that not enough effort has been made to protect Australian jobs. We will not be making any appreciable difference to the changing climate of the world. What we will be doing is putting Australia at an uncompetitive disadvantage in so many fields. For those, like the climate change minister, who say, ‘Australia has to lead the way and if we go to Copenhagen with a legislated outcome that is going to convince everyone else in the world to follow us,’ I say, ‘What absolute poppycock.’ We were very fortunate in this committee to have two witnesses who had actually been at the Kyoto climate change conference. They are proud Australians and they like to think we are important, but they gave evidence that Australia is a very small player. Unfortunately time does not allow me to repeat the words of people who really know what an international conference is about, but the suggestion that having a legislative response before Copenhagen is going to make one iota of difference is just poppycock and should be ignored. We will all have a greater opportunity later to discuss this. I commend this report to the Senate. It is clear that it should not be passed at this stage and that the government should go back to the drawing board.