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

Senator, it is all the difficulties of a change in the climate. I just want to make it clear, as I always do, that of course I believe in climate change. I read the stories about the fish fossils that are found in the middle of Australia, in the middle of the desert. I am also conscious of the fact that the centre of Australia was once a rainforest. I also know that the world was once covered in ice. So of course the climate is changing, and that is something I have always acknowledged.

My concern on Ms Gillard's broken promise on carbon tax is that Australia emits less than 1.4 per cent of carbon in this world. I do not know whether it was man's emission of carbon back in the dinosaur's time that caused the climate change then. I always concede I do not have the scientific knowledge to make a view on that. But what I do know is that, even if carbon is the cause of climate change, even if the people who say that man's emission is the cause of it, even if they are 100 per cent correct, Australia is taxing itself with the largest tax in the world for the less than 1.4 per cent of carbon emissions which we emit. Even under the Labor Party projections of the carbon tax, carbon emissions are still going to go up, so why are we doing this in advance—