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

It is indeed a real pleasure to follow my colleague Senator McGauran, who has just delivered a very clear exposition of the subject that we are debating today: after more than three years in office and a change of Prime Minister, the government still has not found its way and continues to fail to deliver on its commitments to the Australian people. Senator McGauran has clearly pointed that out.

I start my contribution to the debate by reporting a crime. The crime is that the Canberra pickpockets are at it again. The Gillard government, based here in Canberra, with a regional development minister based in Melbourne, has today announced a magnificent program for rural and regional Australia. It follows on the announcements that Ms Gillard made with the two rural Independents to cling to power after the last election. But the announcement today shows that the Independents wasted their time by holding out for those tortuous 17 days after last year’s hung parliament to get a better deal for regional Australia from Ms Gillard. Today’s announcement shows that, with great gusto, the Canberra based Gillard government has provided a billion dollars for rural and regional Australia, replacing the Regional Development Australia fund which they announced last year, which was for $1.2 billion. So somewhere along the line the pickpockets in Canberra have stolen $0.2 billion from this program.

The documents released by Mr Crean today clearly show that regional Australia has again been done over, contrary to the promises made by this government. What is worse, this fund set up for rural and regional Australia can now be accessed by, wait for it, capital cities. How can a fund for rural and regional Australia be accessed by capital cities? My colleague Senator Cormann, coming from Perth, is very pleased about that, and so he should be. For him and the people of Perth I am delighted about it too, but it is a direct theft from the people of rural and regional Australia. The only announcement that has been made about those funds so far is the announcement of some $480 million for Perth. I am delighted for Perth, but I wish they could get money from this government somewhere else besides pinching it, pick pocketing it, from rural and regional Australia.

My colleagues have paid a lot of attention, as they should have, to the carbon tax that is about to be inflicted upon Australia. I take the Senate back to Ms Gillard’s words. We have heard over the last week the Labor Party saying that everybody knew their policy and knew that the Labor Party were in favour of an ETS or some sort of tax on carbon. But look at Ms Gillard’s words. Ms Gillard did not say ‘if the Labor Party wins we won’t have a carbon tax.’ If she had said that, perhaps we could say that they did not really win so the Greens have come along and put their proposal. But she deliberately said:

There will be no carbon tax under any government I lead. 

That, we know, was a direct mistruth. That commitment was clearly given a couple of days before the election, when the spin masters and the focus groups of the Labor Party had told Ms Gillard there was no chance of her being elected if she did not rule out a carbon tax. So, a couple of days before the election, she deliberately told the voters of Australia that there would be no carbon tax.

I know that many voters in Australia would have asked themselves who to vote for, would have been not real keen on Labor’s tax and spend policies but who could vote for Labor rest assured that there would be no carbon tax. She said it not once but I think three times in that last week: ‘There will be no carbon tax under any government I lead.’ She did not say if the Labor Party won the election; she said ‘under any government I lead’. That was a deliberate misstatement, one which I do not think at the time Ms Gillard had any faith in keeping. Because of that claim, a lot of people voted for Labor candidates when they would not otherwise have voted for them. She will stand condemned by the Australian electorate for that breach of faith and the breach of her word.

I can only say to Ms Gillard and my friends across the chamber, if you believe Australians would have voted for a carbon tax, put your money where your mouth is, have the courage of your convictions and say, similar to what John Howard said, ‘We will go to an election on this in a couple of months and the main item of contention will be whether we should have a carbon tax in Australia.’ If the Labor Party are so certain it is good policy, they will win the election in a canter. But they know, as well as we know, that they will not win an election based on carbon tax.

I have heard Labor speakers all week saying that John Howard said ‘never, ever’ to a GST. Well yes, he did, but then he changed his mind. But he did not bring it in in the still of the night; he said he would have an election on it. He went to an election, we had to explain it all, and we were the target of the most negative, whinging campaign anyone has ever heard in this country from the Labor Party, who were totally opposed to it. Of course they have changed their mind now, just as an aside. John Howard had the courage of his convictions and put forward a very difficult to explain tax but one that has transformed Australia. It was the sort of taxation reform that Australia had desperately needed for decades but no-one had the courage to do it. John Howard put it forward, fought an election on it and won.

Julia Gillard, by contrast, is bringing in a tax on every element of Australian life. At the minimum, it has been calculated that the cost of living will rise by $300 a year. I think it will be well in excess of that. We know that fuel is going to go up by 6c a litre at least. While that will be difficult for all Australians, can I tell you that there will be a much greater impact on those of us who live in regional and remote Australia who have to use our cars because, sorry, we do not have public transport, we do not have hospitals down the end of the street, we do not have a school in the next block and we have to drive kilometres and kilometres to get to anywhere even to see a doctor. We will pay more with this 6c a litre increase that Labor’s carbon tax will bring about.

If the carbon tax were going to do any good, I suppose we could grin and bear it. We could say that if it is going to save the world, we have to do it. But, to use the famous words of a failed climate change minister, nothing we do in Australia is going to make one iota of difference to climate change. I always say that of course the climate is changing. There was a time when the globe was covered in ice, and it has clearly changed and will continue to change. Is it man-made carbon emissions that are causing it? Thousands of scientists say it is, but equally thousands of scientists say it is not. I do not know; I am not a scientist. I simply say that if the rest of the world is doing it and it is going to have some impact, yep, let’s go along with it. But nobody else in the world is going to do this, yet we are going to do it in Australia.

Mr Acting Deputy President Forshaw, you well know and some of your colleagues well know that Australia emits less than 1.2 per cent of the total greenhouse gas output in the world, so with all these measures from Ms Gillard and her government, the Greens-Labor coalition, what are we going to reduce our emissions by? Five per cent, is it? Ten per cent? Twenty per cent? Thirty per cent? Do the arithmetic: 30 per cent of 1.2 per cent is what? Practically nothing. It is not going to make one iota of difference. In fact, it is going to make matters worse because companies currently manufacturing in Australia, under a fairly strict regime introduced by the coalition government over many years, emit a reduced amount of carbon. Those companies will, with this new carbon tax, move offshore; they will be forced offshore.

I was talking to some miners from Western Australia in the magnetite industry. They were showing me that magnetite really is better than the other form of iron ore because you actually process the end result downstream at your mine. It is a sort of manufacturing in Australia, and that brings jobs to Australia. What this tax will mean, however, is that rather than doing that downstream processing of iron ore onshore in Australia companies will do what currently happens to Australian iron ore, which is send it off to China to be processed and converted into goods.

This tax is having the exact opposite effect and nobody but nobody on the government side, not even the failed climate change minister—principally the failed climate change minister—can ever explain that. How is Australia reducing its very small emissions by a very small amount going to save the world? It needs concerted global action, which the failed climate change minister said was going to happen at Copenhagen. We all had a good laugh at that. We knew it would not happen and of course it did not happen. There are ways, of course, in which the world can help with reduction of carbon emissions, if that is as important as is said. More uranium plants—the cleanest form of power that you can get—would help reduce them. But, no, this government simply cannot make up its mind on that either.

The case against a carbon tax has been clearly made by my colleagues before me in this debate, by other coalition speakers all week and, I might say, by the public of Australia. Take any opinion poll, radio talkback call or letter to the editor in the days since this new tax was announced and see what the response has been to that proposal. Nobody wants it because it will do no good. It is simply a churn of money. As my colleagues have pointed out, the government claim they are going to compensate everyone. If you compensate everybody you are not going to change habits or behaviour. You are not even going to reduce the reliance on carbon. It is a stupid policy, but if those in the Labor Party think it is good I say: have the courage of your convictions. Do what John Howard did and go to an election on it. Do it next month and we will see who is right.

I want to move on to some other of the promises made by the Labor Party that have been broken with the same sort of disregard for honesty that happened with the carbon tax. You might remember the Labor Party promised they would give us a national broadband network for $4.7 billion. Remember that? The amount they were going to spend was roughly equal to the amount the coalition had said it would spend to have a national broadband network in Australia—a commitment that was actually converted to a legal contract. Had the Labor Party not won the 2007 election, we would have a high-speed national broadband network up and running today for a cost of about $5 billion.

Instead of that we have paid $20 million for one assessment, we paid some other consultants $25 million for another assessment, we have had Senator Conroy struggling and running around all over the place trying to find a policy on broadband, and what have we come up with? A $55 billion slug on the Australian public to produce a broadband network that private industry and government support could have done for about $5 billion.

Go anywhere around the world and you will find people are saying that Australians are paying far too much for a network that, for example, Korea is getting for a much lower price—and it is an equally good network. In Korea they are taking advantage of existing private networks, putting in government subsidies and getting what Australia should be getting.

Go to any aspect of Labor Party promises in recent times and you will find that the Gillard government, and before that the Rudd government, believe their promises should be treated with impunity. They mean nothing. I know a lot of people say, ‘Most politicians lie,’ but when it comes to Ms Gillard’s commitment on the carbon tax people are taking a stand. They are saying, ‘How can you, one or two days before an election, an election which was clearly going to be close, hand on heart make the solemn promise that there will be no carbon tax, to stay in power, and then a few months after that come up with a carbon tax?’ People thought they were voting for either Tony Abbott or Julia Gillard. They did not realise that they would, by voting for Ms Gillard, actually be voting for Senator Dr Bob Brown as the new Prime Minister of Australia, and that is a great shame for Australia.

I know Senator Bob Brown is not in the Senate for this debate. He rarely is on a Thursday afternoon. He has usually slipped off somewhere. If he were here, perhaps I would not be able to talk about him because you saw the kerfuffle he went into the other day when I interjected on him and said, ‘Who?’ and he then demanded that the President protect him from vicious interjections. ‘Who?’ is the sort of interjection that Senator Brown could not handle. What a sook! He is the bloke who is now the effective Prime Minister of Australia and what a calamity that is for our country. We are going to get all the crazy left-wing ideas coming through not as Greens policy but as Labor Party policy. They are the sorts of ideas that went out in Europe with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the old Communist Party philosophies that went out of fashion 20 years ago. The Greens still stick by them and now, in their desperate attempt to stay in power, to retain the ministerial leather and the flash limousines, the Labor Party have done the deal with the devil and Australia will suffer as a result.

I could speak on this for hours and I know colleagues who follow me will do that. Go to any field of policy and you will find that what the Labor Party says before an election is quite different from what they do after an election. People driving home today listening to this debate on the radio will be saying to themselves, ‘We now have a Prime Minister we cannot trust.’ We now have a Prime Minister who, a couple of days before what was going to be a tight election, made a solemn commitment, a promise, and said, ‘Trust me, there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.’ A couple of short months after that promise was made, we are going to have this tax, which will add at least $300 to the cost of living of pensioners, low-income workers and everyone else and all for no environmental gain. This government must be condemned for its failure to commit itself to promises it makes.