Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of answers given by the Minister representing the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency (Senator Wong) to questions without notice asked by Senators Fisher, Boswell and Birmingham relating to carbon pricing.

Specifically, these questions were about the carbon tax. While I was listening to Senator Wong's answers I was reminded of a particularly distasteful joke which mentions the three greatest lies ever perpetrated by humanity. I think we have to add a fourth one to that, and that is Ms Gillard's lie to the Australian people when she said, just six days out from an election: 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' That goes down as one of the greatest lies in the political history of this country. It is a travesty for the Australian people. We know it is going to put the cost of living up. That has been established. We know it is going to cost tens of thousands of jobs, and we know it is going to see industry exported overseas and emissions exported overseas as well. We also know, but because the government is unwilling or unable to supply an answer we can only deduce, that it is actually going to have zero beneficial impact on the environment.

Let me remind senators that we are talking about emissions of carbon dioxide, that odourless, colourless gas that is exhaled by all of us as we go about our daily business. According to the government this is rampant pollution and, despite the fact that Australia contributes only 1.4 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions globally, apparently we are going to save the planet by imposing a tax on the Australian people. But when called upon to justify this tax, Senator Wong, with all the arrogance that we have come to associate with her approach to policy, said it is because we are not slackers—Australians are not slackers, so let us whack them with a new tax. What sort of logical conclusion is that for any government to make, that because Australians are not slackers, which I presume to mean they work hard and pick up their end of the bargain, we should whack them with a new tax. There is an incentive to do a bit more! The logic that has flowed over the last three years on climate change policy saw it characterised as the great moral issue of our time and saw it characterised by the great success of Copenhagen, which led to the dumping of that 'necessary' thing called the emissions trading scheme, then to the dumping of Kevin Rudd and then the dumping of the minister afterwards. Now we have seen the policy of no carbon tax dumped. We have also seen the citizens assembly, to convince the people of Australia about the merits of this great new tax, dumped. The only things we have not seen dumped are those two spruikers of government policy who are paid extortionate amounts of money to peddle lies and misleading statements. I am referring to the person Senator Wong once described as an 'input', Mr Garnaut, and Professor Tim Flannery. These people have been trotting out government policy and outlandish scaremongering and fear campaigns which have no justification in fact. They take a kernel of truth and then embellish it to say that the seas are going to rise by eight storeys, we are going to have to save the planet, and the Barrier Reef is going to die—all these things which have later been debunked. Of course, the government never admit that, because they will never admit they have got things wrong. Clearly the Australian people know they have got this dreadfully wrong, because the Australian people cannot afford a new tax, no matter how this government dresses it up. This is not about saving the environment; it is about the government trying to save their spendthrift ways. It is about them putting more money into the government coffers. In fact, there have been reports that government ministers have said: 'You're going to get a tax because we need the cash and we need it very quickly.'

This is a problem. We have got a government that cannot manage its budget finances. The failed climate change minister is now in the finance portfolio where $50,000 million more than they have taken from taxpayers will be spent in the year ahead. That is an alarming thing for any Australian. We know there is disquiet and distrust about it, because we know that people are going to the Treasurer and saying all sorts of things to him, in a very pointed manner, and we would like to hear from one of those people shortly—'Slugger' Hutchins, sorry, Senator Hutchins. I would like to know how you got your new nickname. It comes back to this: the Australian people trust governments to do the right thing for them. It is not just about the economy, it is not just about their finances. They want to make sure there are practical solutions for the environment. What we do know is that no matter how the government wants to dress this up, there will be no benefit to the environment from this carbon tax. There will be none whatsoever. It will only be bad. It will be bad for everyone except for this government, but they will ultimately reap the rewards of what they have sown at the election.