Sean Edwards (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of answers from Senator Wong, but in addressing Senator Wong's answers I must not let Senator Gallacher's comments go unaddressed. I remind Senator Gallacher, who has now left the chamber and is bunkered down in his office, that he might listen to his own leader. Prime Minister Julia Gillard said about the carbon tax:

There will be price impacts. The whole point of pricing carbon is to say that goods that have got a lot of carbon pollution in them get relatively more expensive, people innovate, they start to make things with less carbon pollution in them and those things are cheaper.

Forgive me, but where is the logic in it if that is what you are looking to achieve with this carbon tax? Why do you go out and turn the money wheel, the money churn, and start compensating all of these people with $9.90 a week if you want to change behaviour? I must also point out a further quote from the same leader, Julia Gillard, in one of her radio interviews:

Now I wasn't going to get involved in a semantic and ultimately sterile debate about what you call that fixed price period. That's why I was upfront and said it's effectively like a tax. And it will take us through to a cap and trade emissions trading scheme, a market mechanism to price carbon.

A tax is a tax is a tax.

That is why in South Australia, in my home state, the Olympic Dam project is in doubt. It is a project which offers great hope to South Australia, a state which is lagging well behind the national average in employment and growth. That project offers some 15,000 jobs directly in its construction phase and would add about $6 billion a year to the state's economy. It was revealed also in yesterday's Advertiser that a record number of South Australians are struggling to cope with the skyrocketing power prices. I hear in everybody's retort from the other side that the pricing regulator says it only affects this cost by $5 a week, that one by $5 a week. How many more lots of $5 a week can the Australian people put up with? That $9.90 in compensation does not cover all the $5 here and the $5 there.

Back home in South Australia, the Tea Tree Gully council recently announced that it is being forced to factor in a cost of $500,000 this year for the carbon tax in their rate rises, while Mitcham council has been forced to allow for an increase in costs of $190,000 because of this government's carbon tax. It has also been revealed in the Adelaide Advertiser that the carbon tax will add another $4.6 million to the cost of the Southern Expressway duplication which is now being constructed. To boot, the cost of multi-trip bus tickets will rise to $33.14, and diesel costs for the metropolitan bus services in South Australia will increase by $1.3 million. How many lots of $9.90 per week in compensation to all these people is this going to cover? It is just not going to cut it. Taxpayers of South Australia are getting it everywhere, whether it be municipal rate rises, electricity price rises or the rise in the cost of groceries by virtue of transport and manufacturing.

The Essential Services Commission of South Australia announced last Friday that they would allow South Australia's electricity prices to rise by 18 per cent, 11.5 per cent of which is due to the Gillard government's carbon tax and the green schemes of their state Labor counterparts. What is Minister Wong's message to the households in South Australia, her home state? South Australian households will be paying average energy bills of $2,876 from next year. Shame, Senator Wong. Shame!

Question agreed to.