Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

A very helpful guide for consumers, Senator Fifield. You would have to have driven for about four or five hours and the $5 you might have been able to save on your grocery bill would have been more than spent on increasing your carbon footprint and on petrol. Talking about the carbon footprint, I am sure the Prime Minister is now breathing a very heavy sigh of relief that the Senate did not pass the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, because it would have caused so much damage to the Australian economy and in fact to the world environment. We all know why I say the world environment: because there would have been carbon leakage to other countries courtesy of that badly thought-out proposal.

So what we have got is a government drowning in its self-made sea of incompetency but still telling the Senate in a most arrogant manner to get out of the way. The arrogance of Mr Rudd and Labor can be likened to a drunk going up a one-way street the wrong way and saying to all the traffic coming the other way, ‘Get out of my way, get out of my way,’ and then, when finally crashing to a halt, blaming the law-abiding drivers. Let us have a look at the facts about the Senate’s role. In all of Mr Rudd’s lifetime, the Senate has never sat for lesser periods than it has during the Rudd government.