Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Whatever the issue, whatever the challenge, one thing is clear: under this government, we will end up with another new Labor Party tax. New and increased taxes as policy responses to everything are part of Labor’s DNA. That is why the people of Australia, the media and people on the coalition side of parliament are very suspicious whenever this government rules out a tax. We do not believe them. Look back to the Paul Keating precedent. Then Prime Minister Paul Keating went to the 1993 election and said ‘l-a-w tax cuts.’ After the election, there was no such thing as l-a-w anymore. This is why the Prime Minister was confronted time after time during the election with the question, ‘Will you be introducing a carbon tax if you are successful at this election?’ Wherever she went, she was asked that question. Eventually, she knew that she had to rule it out; she knew that she had to say, ‘There will be no carbon tax under the government that I lead’; she knew that she had to say, the day before the election, ‘I rule out a carbon tax.’ Otherwise, she would have lost the election; otherwise, she would no longer be in the Lodge; otherwise, she knew that there would be no such thing as a continuation of this Labor administration. We know that, like Paul Keating before her, this Prime Minister has deliberately deceived the Australian people.

Now the Prime Minister is preparing the next deceit. She is trying to say to people: ‘Don’t worry about what I said five days before the election. Don’t worry about me ruling out a carbon tax. I am now going to introduce a carbon tax. And do you know what? It won’t hurt. I will introduce a carbon tax and you won’t notice a thing. We are going to have compensation, we are going to have tax cuts, we are going to increase pensions, we are going to do this and that.’ There is a plethora of announcements about what the government is going to do. There are no details of course and no plan; it is just one thought bubble after another. And what is the Prime Minister really saying? She is saying to the Australian people, ‘Trust me; I am going to make sure that this carbon tax, which I ruled out before the election and I said was never going to happen, is not going to hurt you.’ How dumb does the Prime Minister think the Australian people are? Of course the Australian people know that this carbon tax is all about hurting them. It is all about having an impact on their behaviour. It is all about doing something that will actually change their spending habits.

The reality is that this is bad policy. The previous speaker criticised our direct action plan. Our direct action plan will actually reduce emissions in Australia in a way that reduces emissions in the world. That is not something that can be said about either the carbon tax or the emissions trading scheme. The carbon tax, the emissions trading scheme or any other mechanism that this government may come up with to put a price on carbon will not reduce emissions in the world. I asked Senator Wong last week what the net impact would be on global emissions of the Gillard carbon tax. She was not able to answer that, because the government knows that putting a price on carbon in Australia, putting a carbon tax on or putting an emissions trading scheme in place in the absence of similar arrangements in the US, in China and in other competitor nations will shift emissions into those countries. It will also shift jobs into those countries because it will make business in Australia less competitive. It will make polluting businesses in other parts of the world more competitive.

This government is asking people in Australia to make a sacrifice, to pay more tax, for no benefit at all in terms of reducing emissions. If you are going to make an environmentally friendly business in Australia less competitive than a polluter overseas because they are not part of a comprehensive global agreement to price carbon, then what you have done is increased emissions in the world while imposing a sacrifice on the people in Australia. That is the fundamental problem with Labor’s flawed tax and flawed policy. They fail to understand this. That is why they do not understand the great benefit of the direct action plan put forward by Tony Abbott and the coalition, which reduces emissions in Australia in a way that reduces emissions in other parts of the world to an equivalent amount.

The previous speaker said that we should not have to wait for everybody else and we should just tackle climate change now. The problem is that this government is not trying to tackle climate change. This government is looking at imposing a new tax. This is part of the great con. It is why Prime Minister Gillard advised the previous Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, back in February/March 2010 not to go ahead with his emissions trading scheme. After Copenhagen the debate inside the Labor government changed because they realised that they had a problem. Then Prime Minister Rudd wanted to lead the charge in Copenhagen. He wanted to go to Copenhagen and say, ‘Aren’t we great. We got this legislation to impose a price on carbon through the parliament.’ The reason he wanted to do it, the one single argument he came up with to justify that proposition was so that he could go to Copenhagen and convince all of the other nations—the US, China, India and so on—to follow our lead and do like we have done in Australia. And of course the US, China and India were never going to go down this path. It was very obvious that that would happen in December 2009 in Copenhagen long before congress in the US changed. It was very obvious that the US was not going to go ahead with a cap and trade carbon scheme.

We now have the government’s adviser, Professor Garnaut, out there desperately trying to help the Labor government to come up with ways of salvaging its broken promise, which is bad policy for Australia. He says, ‘Why don’t we link tax reform with the carbon tax?’ The problem with this government is that they do not want tax reform. They want more and new and increased taxes.

Every time they come up with another tax reform proposal, all it means is another new and increased tax. This whole concept of lower, simpler and fairer taxes is not something that comes easily with this government, which is why they have resisted holding a tax summit for so long. In the end they could not resist it any longer. The Independents were on their back so they are going to have it in October now, but it was supposed to have happened in June. We should go for lower, fairer and simpler taxes without having a carbon tax. To link the proposition of tax reform—lower, fairer and simpler taxes—with the proposal of a massive new tax on carbon is just a complete con. It is saying, ‘We are going to take $1,000 from you over here and we are going to give you $500 back.’ Senator Birmingham went in great detail through the deceit by people like the Minister for Regional Australia, Regional Development and Local Government, Simon Crean, and others, who are trying to suggest that 100 per cent of the carbon tax revenue is going to be used to compensate households. It is not true. We are having an announcement a day where the government is perpetuating this deceit of the Australian people, which has been going on ever since the Prime Minister broke the promise not to introduce a carbon tax.