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

Senator O’Brien, if you listen to this, you might even learn something. BlueScope suffered a $50 million loss because of a high dollar, increased imports and global financial problems. What is this government going to do about a company who employ 10,000 people? On their estimation, at $25 a tonne, it is going to cost BlueScope $315 million. So they will not lose $50 million; they will lose $365 million. How does that work? How does that work by giving people certainty? Their expected losses will be $365 million, but it is not only BlueScope; it is OneSteel and it is many, many businesses. Take the case of Qantas. They are going to cop emissions trading. Well, that is all right; they will add it onto the ticket. Everyone will fly United or Singapore Airlines or something like that, disadvantaging our own Australian icon.

I do not think anyone over on that side has ever run a business. They have not run a business. They come in here with prepared speeches—Senator O’Brien probably will not—and get up and rattle off a prepared speech, probably written by the minister’s department. Have you ever, ever gone out there and experienced what it is to run a business, to meet the payroll, to pay the bills? You obviously have not done it.

We are told that the rest of the world are doing it. Well, the rest of the world are not doing it. I would not mind if the rest of the world were doing it. The United States has said, ‘We can’t afford this.’ India cannot afford it—and would you blame them, with people begging on the street for something to eat? Do you think their government are going to put an ETS over their industry? Don’t be stupid; they can’t. Even if they wanted to they could not. What about China? Are they going to do it? No. What about Brazil? No. What about Japan? No. What about Russia? No. We are doing this unilaterally. The EU have an ETS, in a certain way, but even they exclude agriculture, they exclude mining and they exclude 164 industries. They just about have an ETS where you don’t have an ETS. But come in, spinner! Come in, you bunch of mugs! We will fix Australian industry up. We will handicap it with so much tax, and then try and make a virtue out of it by saying we are going to create 34,000 green jobs by putting a tax on people like BlueScope, OneSteel, Qantas and meat processing companies like Teys and Nippon, and saying, ‘We’re being terrific!’ If putting a tax on was so easy, why not double the tax? We could double the number of jobs! It is absolute stupidity.

But even you cannot convince Heather Ridout. She is distancing herself from you today. Heather Ridout, who has been your No. 1 supporter, your fallback position, will not have a bar of it—nor, of course, will the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. They have walked away from it too. You have not got a friend out there; you have not got a feather to fly with. You have lost your blue-collar vote and you are trying to fight for that 14 per cent narrow vote, which we call the doctors’ wives or the Volvo socialists. That is the vote you are going to get. You cannot expect the blue-collar workers of Australia ever to support you again, because you have let them down so badly.