Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

Here we have the Labor Party saying that we have backflipped. No, I have explained the reason why our position has changed since 2007 and 2008, and that is that in Copenhagen in December 2009 it became very clear that the global context had changed. There was no prospect of an appropriately comprehensive global agreement—no prospect whatsoever. That situation has not changed. Of course, the Labor Party are still stuck in the past. They have not realised that the world actually has changed on them.

Guess what? People across Australia have understood, which is why at the last election, overwhelmingly, people across Australia voted to get rid of the carbon tax—because they want the benefits that come with that. They want the stronger economic growth. They want the improved job opportunities. They want the cost-of-living reductions that come with us getting rid of this terrible Labor-Greens tax that, quite frankly, should never have been introduced in the first place.

I heard comments earlier on how our emissions trading scheme under Labor's laws now is linked to the European scheme. That is actually a very incomplete statement, if I might say. With the European scheme, we might be linked to the same price under Labor's laws, but we are not actually linked to the same coverage. A lot of the businesses that are included in Australia under the Labor-Greens arrangement are excluded in Europe, to the point where, in competing with coal producers in Europe, if we kept this law in place, where the Australian arrangements would stay connected to the European emissions trading scheme, do you know what would happen? We would be paying the European carbon price but European coal producers would not. How does that make sense? In Europe, they are good at putting all these rules and regulations in place and saying: 'Here we are. We've got this market based mechanism, introduced and imposed by government structures'—with lots of regulation, by the way—but then they give free permits across the board. In fact, there were so many permits that the price collapsed. At the end of the day, in Europe, ultimately, nobody really makes any substantial payment under that scheme because it is just a big merry-go-round of money.

We can continue to go around and around in circles. We have an amendment in front of us which at least, finally, reveals the truth about Labor's position. Contrary to what they said in the lead-up to the 2013 election, when they said that they had removed the carbon tax already, and contrary to what Senator Bullock said in the lead-up to the WA Senate state election, when he said that Labor are scrapping the carbon tax, what we now see is that Labor want to keep the carbon tax and that all that Labor want to do in hoodwinking the Australian people is modify it a little. They want to give it a new branding. They want to change the way it moves—maybe instead of walking this way it will walk that way a bit—but essentially all the fundamentals are the same. They still want to push up the cost of living for Australians with a carbon price that goes up every year. They still want to push up the cost of doing business. They still want to reduce opportunities for people across Australia to get jobs in businesses that can compete internationally without this cost burden imposed on them.

Senator Singh asks me: why don't you accept an emissions trading scheme? I say again to Senator Singh: why don't you accept the verdict of the Australian people about your carbon tax? The people across Australia do not want your carbon tax. They voted against it and it is time that you stopped acting in defiance of the will of the Australian people.

Debate interrupted.