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

It is a little difficult for me to actually acknowledge the actions of the minister in allowing further speakers, but I do thank the minister for his coopera­tion in allowing further discussion. I under­stand for the record that the minister has indicated that he is happy to allow two further speakers on this motion, and so I do thank the minister for that. It is very important that those senators who do have a view on the motion before the chair should have the opportunity to put their points of view.

Just by way of recapitulation, what we are doing is discussing a message from the House of Representatives which requests the concurrence of the Senate to a resolution to set up a joint select committee on Australia's Clean Energy Future legislation, which is to be appointed to inquire into and report on 19 bills that are listed in the motion. They all relate to the Clean Energy Bill 2011, which is a nice way of calling or labelling or titling the carbon tax bills.

This joint select committee is to look into all of those 19 bills that impose on Australians a carbon tax. Just over a year ago the leader of the Labor Party, the then Prime Minister and now current Prime Minister, promised hand on heart to all Australians that she would not introduce a carbon tax with those famous words: 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' It was not a spur of the moment commitment or promise that she made. It was a commitment that she repeated a couple of times. In fact, her assurance was repeated by the deputy leader of the Labor Party, Mr Wayne Swan, when he responded to Tony Abbott, who had suggested to the Australian public that, if Labor were elected, we would have a carbon tax. Mr Abbott told the Australian public that; but Mr Swan said that Mr Abbott was being hysterical in even suggesting that the Labor Party would introduce a carbon tax. The Prime Minister at the time, Ms Gillard, promised once and then promised again the day before the election: 'There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.' Because of that assurance, and because of the fact that every member of the Labor Party was seen by the electorate to be running to the election on a policy of no carbon tax, a lot of people who would not have voted for Ms Gillard and her team changed their mind, because they believed her. If Ms Gillard had got up the day before the election and said, 'Australians, we need a carbon tax; I am going to intro­duce one', I will bet you anything—and any observer, student or person learned in poli­tics could tell you—the Labor Party would have been absolutely thrashed at the last election. But they were not thrashed—well, they were thrashed but not thrashed suffic­iently to change the government—because Ms Gillard promised there would be no carbon tax.

To make matters worse, the government then introduced 18 different bills to impose this carbon tax. Those 18 bills were dumped on the opposition's table a couple of days ago. I certainly have not had any opportunity to read even one of those bills. We all do have other work to do in this chamber. I want to spend some time reading all of those 18 bills to get an understanding of what they are about. I want to read the explanatory memorandums for all of those bills and then I want to debate those bills.

But if this proposal for so-called 'time management' passes, then I and all of my colleagues are going to have one minute per bill as the time we are allowed to debate them when they get to the Senate chamber. I understand the Green-Labor alliance has agreed upon these curtailments of speaking time when the bills come into the chamber. There is not much I can do about that. I will be voting against those proposals but I suspect the coalition of Greens and Labor will prevail on that issue.

Accepting that, I would like to have a look at these bills in committee and get some evidence from experts on each one of them. I could assess those bills much more carefully if we followed the normal Senate practice—that is, bills that are introduced into the Senate go off to a Senate committee. Under the rules of the Senate, every senator can be a participating member of those committees and I and all of my colleagues from all sides of the chamber would have the opportunity then of hearing witnesses, getting expert advice, looking at the fine details and draw­ing out the many errors that we are going to find in these bills. We know without even looking that there will be errors in these bills.

We are only too well aware of the Labor Party's record when it comes to hasty introduction of legislation and government action—just look at the pink batts fiasco. That was rushed in supposedly to fix a problem. It turned out to be one of the great­est wastes and one of the most dangerous actions taken by any government. It cost the Australian public millions and millions of dollars, not only to install these batts but also then to take them out to save houses from being burnt and to save further deaths. It is a given that there will be in these 18 bills errors, unintended consequences and issues that highlight how futile this all is. We all know the Treasury figures that show by 2020, even with this massive tax on every Australian, we are going to increase the amount of emissions coming from Australia. So it will be a big tax but the amount of emi­ssions coming from Australia will increase.

I always say, if the rest of the world were doing something then certainly Australia should be doing something, but, in spite of the protestations of the Prime Minister, we will be leading the world on a tax of this nature and extent that no other country has imposed. I remind listeners to this debate that Australia emits less than 1.4 per cent of total world carbon emissions. So, even if we stopped every emission, it would make absolutely no difference whatsoever to the changing climate of the world—not one iota of difference. But we are not even proposing to cut the 1.4 per cent of emissions that Australia is responsible for. We are only going to cut five per cent of that.

This huge tax is all about—

Senator Hanson-Young interjecting—

You don't like the truth of this, Senator Hanson-Young? Clearly the Greens do not want the facts to be known. Tell me, Senator Hanson-Young, is it true or not true that Australia emits less than 1.4 per cent of world emissions?