Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this matter of public importance. I cannot remember a greater betrayal of the Australian people. The Prime Minister stood up a week before the election and said, ‘Under my government, there will definitely be no emissions trading or carbon tax.’ Then three or four months later, in the Senate and in the House of Representatives, we are faced with a carbon tax, which is supposed to give us certainty. What is the certainty? I was speaking about this to one of the players yesterday. What is the certainty? We do not know what it is. We do not know how much the carbon tax will be. We do not know when the ETS is going to come in. We do not have the figure for how much it will be escalated. The government have provided the greatest uncertainty for Australia’s industry ever. There is no certainty. No-one knows what is going on out there. You admit it yourselves. You will not tell the people what the price of electricity will be. How can you get certainty with that?

Last week the Prime Minister bravely stood outside her office, surrounded by the Greens. She was going to put her stamp of approval on the party. This would be unequivocal. She was going to stand her ground and she was going to tell them. She was going to stand there and put a stamp of authority on this government—no shilly-shallying like Kevin Rudd; she was a woman of authority, and she was going to stand there and tell the Australian people: ‘I know what I’m doing. I’m a person who will take a position.’ The position she took was surrounded by the Greens. It looked as though she had subcontracted the government out to the Greens, and that is what the people are saying.

On Friday I happened to go down to a radio station. That is just a matter of fact. When I was down there I was talking about fishing, but the ETS came up. I put my head in the door and asked if I could say a few words, and I was given three or four minutes. I walked into the next cabinet and talked about fishing and walked out. It probably took half an hour. In that time the switchboard had lit up like a pinball machine. There were calls coming in everywhere. One hundred and sixty calls came in, not from well-heeled people and not from the business community but from the people, the battlers, who had placed their trust in the Labor government. These were not businesspeople; these were people who had to find the money—find the money for increased interest rates, find the money for increased food prices—and they could not see their way clear.

This government has put the price up. I asked the question in estimates the other day: how much is the price going up at $25 a tonne? The answer was that the price will go up 19 per cent, and then when you throw in the green power and renewable energy it goes up another five per cent, so the prices will increase by 24 per cent right across the board. Working families are going to have to find an additional 24 per cent to meet their commitments on electricity. Many people cannot even pay the bills now. Ergon Energy and the other authorities in Queensland are putting out lists of people who cannot meet their electricity costs and are getting their power cut off. So what does the government do? It whacks another 24 per cent increase on it.

It is bad enough for the workers, and it is going to be horrific for them. Many of them are struggling. But they are going to be cheered on by the Volvo socialists. The Volvo socialists are out there being represented by the Greens, and the Greens are taking the Labor Party to the cleaners. It is going to be a holocaust at the next election, because you—the Labor Party—are going to be vying for that 14 per cent vote and you are going to be fighting it out with the Greens. The blue-collar workers have abandoned you, and rightly so, because you have abandoned them. You have abandoned them on fishing. You have abandoned them on electricity. You have abandoned the Aboriginals on Wild Rivers. You have walked away from your base. And you are trying to fight for that 14 per cent that is occupied by the Greens. You will battle it out, and you will probably split the vote fifty-fifty, but you have lost your credibility.

If you do not think this is serious, I refer you to BlueScope Steel. BlueScope was part of BHP. BHP built this nation. It was one of the great companies that built this nation. It employed thousands and thousands and thousands of people. What has happened to BlueScope? Last year BlueScope turned in a minus profit of $50 million.