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

The Leader of the Opposition is giving you a way out. He is going to introduce a bill tomorrow for a plebiscite asking: are you in favour of laws to impose a carbon tax? This is the greatest opportunity you have. You can get out of this by supporting that bill. You can say: 'Well, 72 per cent of the people voted against it; we can't defy them. The people are always right.' I will give you a bit of advice: take this and run. Take this offer of Tony Abbott's and say: 'We support it. We want to go to a plebiscite.' And when the result is, as it will be, 72 per cent of people, or around that number, saying they do not want a carbon tax and 24 per cent saying they do, you can come to the parliament and say: 'We cannot do this. It is clearly not in the people's interest. They have expressed their wish for no carbon tax.'

But no, you are not going to do that. You will go full steam ahead and defy 72 per cent of the people. You are going to get the result when the next election comes around. You are thinking: 'We'll put this in and rush it through. We'll give people a bit of compensation and they're so stupid they'll forget it.' You are completely under­estimating the intelligence of the Australian people. If you think they will take this, you are so naive that you just do not understand what it is all about.

The unions are erupting. Paul Howes, before he was kneecapped, said, 'If one job goes, that's it, we're out.' I can assure Paul Howes that many more jobs than one will go. Now we have Tony Maher of the CFMEU starting to say we will need more compensation, more assistance for the mining industry. That is shorthand for saying, 'Get out of this.' Senator Cameron is the most inconsistent. He says, 'We've got to have a carbon tax, we want a carbon tax and, by the way, let's bring some tariffs in to protect jobs.' On one hand, a carbon tax will kill jobs, but Senator Cameron says, 'Let's have some tariffs so we'll balance it up a bit.'

If you cannot believe me, why don't you believe Paul Howes? Why don't you believe Tony Maher. Why don't you believe the unions? Because they are telling you in no uncertain terms. They are on the floor, hearing it from the workers, the people who work at BlueScope and OneSteel, the 20,000 people who are employed by the steel industry. They only have to add another $8 a tonne on 7.5 million tonnes of steel and that will put the bottom line up $60 million, a loss for those two companies. They have already lost $55 million in the last six months and now you want to inflict on them another cost of $60 million. How do you expect these people to pay decent wages when they are making a loss? How do you expect them to retain their workers when they are making a loss? Every day the CEOs of BlueScope and OneSteel are wondering how to keep the industry going. They think, 'We're already losing money, and the government is just hitting us again and again and again.' I am a bit different from a lot of people here—I made my living as a salesman. I was a manufacturer's agent and I sold things, and I was pretty successful at it. I want to tell the Labor Party one thing: never try and sell a shoddy product. A product has got to give value, it has got to give a price advantage and it has got to give someone who buys it an advantage. This carbon tax falls down on all three fronts. It is going to put the worker at a disadvantage. It is going to put business at a disadvantage. It is going to put the battler at a disadvantage. And they know it. If you try and sell a product that is shonky and then try to back it up with $12 million worth of advertising—we had a word for that in the trade. Something that was very bad to sell we called a 'dog'—and this thing is barking. A carbon tax is just barking, that's how bad it is!

If you want to go and sell this carbon tax, let's go and tell the farmers and tell the battlers and tell industry they are better off. But when you have convinced them of that—and you will not—let's go to the people in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines and tell them: 'We want to inflict a higher cost on your food, on your electricity, on your transport, on your accommodation. We want you to suffer. We want you never to be able to get out of Third-World-country status—we just want you to stay there and suffer.' Do you think they're going to do that?

A carbon tax will only work if you get the rest of the world to come on side. In China in 2020 the carbon tax will have risen by 496 per cent; in India, by 350 per cent. What is the point of inflicting this on us when you know that there is no other country in the world, other than in the EU, that has brought in a carbon tax? And even a carbon tax in the EU collects $5 billion compared with ours collecting $11 billion in one year. (Time expired)