Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to take the interjection. The vote in this place, supported by both the coalition and the Labor Party, was to try to achieve a reduction of five per cent by 2020. I acknowledge that the Greens have always sought to have a much higher target, but I am sure that the Greens would not like to see a target lower than five per cent. So let's just say that we all agree it would be unacceptable to have a target lower than five per cent. I hope that satisfies Senator Ludlam's concerns about what I have just said.

In the context of a balanced economy and ensuring that Australian businesses are not detrimentally impacted, we have to realise that we live in a global economy. I believe the carbon tax did extraordinary damage to Australian businesses, and obviously to the Australian public as well, by increasing the costs of doing business. We need to take those sorts of things into account. I have no problem with moving to a clean energy future and I do not think anybody in Australia would be uncomfortable with us moving to a clean energy future, but we should not move to that future at a more accelerated rate than our competitors around the world. If Australia moves at a far greater rate, all we will do is to make our businesses in Australia non-competitive. The ultimate result of that is obviously that we will offshore these businesses to countries that have a much worse record for emissions and that produce products per unit at a far higher rate of emission than we do, because we are actually quite efficient in Australia, despite the information that is being put into this debate.

I draw the chamber's attention to a recent article in relation to our place in the rest of the world. It was written by The Australian's Greg Sheridan, and it says:

If the Abbott government is successful in reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 5 per cent based on 2000 levels then Australia will have done more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than almost any other advanced nation.

I do not believe that that particular sentiment has been expressed at all. Whether it is exactly right or exactly wrong, there is evidence, which he goes on to quote in his article, that Australia is playing its part. There are a number of measures by which this 5 per cent by 2020 would actually make Australia quite a significant contributor to the reduction. The article stated:

Our per-capita emissions by 2020 will reduce by 32 per cent, a bigger decrease than any of the others considered, which shows Canada with a 29 per cent reduction, the EU less than 26 per cent, the US 27 per cent. Our emissions intensity decreases by 45 per cent, more than any other nation analysed except South Korea.

And compared with business as usual — that is, if we didn’t have a target — calculated from last year, our decrease is 19 per cent, significantly bettered only by South Korea.

There are those in this place who have a different agenda and those who think that carbon tax was a great thing. I for one—from the evidence that is being put before me by myriad sources—do not believe that the carbon tax has achieved very much at all, and that cost has been at huge cost to Australian businesses. The $7 billion taken out of Australians businesses for a 0.1 per cent decrease in carbon emissions strikes me as not very well spent money.

We can talk about the compensation that was attached to the increase in household costs and the burden of cost increases by the introduction of the carbon tax. But the cold hard reality is that the money that we used to compensate these people still had to come from somewhere. So it goes around and around in a circle. If you just keep on taking money away in some vain attempt to compensate somebody, thinking that it is all going to be okay, there will be consequential impacts on our economy, which need to be considered in this space.

I will not go on, because I am sure that there are a number of other people who would like to make a contribution to this debate, but I would like to put on the record that I support the abolition of the carbon tax because I think it has been an abject failure. I look forward to the introduction of the Emissions Reduction Fund and the associated Carbon Farming Initiative. I do not think that we have given the opportunity to either of those particular instruments to be properly debated because we continue to debate whether climate change is real or it is not real.