Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Cormann, you are misleading the Senate in what you are saying. You said earlier here today that Minister Hunt was right when he said that the airlines, the supermarkets, the landfill operators could be fined if they did not remove the carbon tax impost. That is not in the legislation. It is not in the explanatory memorandum. The scope of any substantiation notices applies to an electricity retailer that sells electricity to electricity customers; a natural gas retailer that sells natural gas to natural gas customers; and a bulk SCG importer that sells synthetic greenhouse gas to SCG customers. That is it. So you have told the Senate one thing that is completely wrong. You do not even understand your own legislation, yet you are out there saying things. You could have said that Minister Hunt got it wrong last week, but you did not. You said he got it right. But it is not in the legislation. What is more, you just stood up in answer to Senator Dastyari, trying to imply that monitoring covers some sort of legal requirement to remove the carbon price. It does not. The ACCC simply has the power to monitor changes in goods, monitor changes in this, monitor changes in that and if someone has unreasonably exploited—and that is why I asked earlier what 'unreasonably exploited' meant—is that okay? You cannot explain that.

I want to take you back to the issue of solar panels. You referred me to the explanatory memorandum. You must have read that. Let me tell you: the word 'wholesaler' does not appear in the bill anywhere. The only place you will find it is in the minister's second reading speech. Do you know why? Because he is desperately cobbling together some sort of explanation in the hope that it might guide the courts, if this matter were to be taken to the courts, in saying that it does not actually apply to people with solar panels. But let me take you through box and dice, Minister, as to why, as the legislation currently stands, it does apply to someone with solar panels on their roof.

The scope for providing a substantiation notice is: an electricity retailer that sells electricity; a natural gas retailer; and a bulk SCG synthetic greenhouse gas importer. So who, by definition, is an 'electricity retailer' in the bill? It is:

(f) any other entity who produces electricity in Australia.

An 'electricity customer' means an entity that purchases electricity. So if you produce electricity and sell it to someone who purchases electricity, then you are captured by this substantiation notice. That is why the Greens have a very sensible amendment to remove it.

In your rushing about to try to accommodate the Palmer United Party, you got yourselves into a mess and you cannot explain any of it today. And, as I said before, you know full well that this will fall over in the courts and, when it does, you do not care. You do not want all this difficulty out there about substantiation notices. You do not want people to have to explain anything. When you went around Australia and said, 'Frozpak in Canberra is going to incur $60,000 worth of carbon cost impost in one year,' you knew, as well as I did, that it was not true at the time it was said. This whole thing has been designed to ensure that people never have to substantiate it.

All that has to happen is that someone has to make false or misleading statements, which is pretty customary under various other acts for business et cetera. But the point here is that you have conned a group of people into thinking you are going to require all of these so-called cost savings to be passed on and the only people who will be required by law to do it are, as I said, those within the scope of the act: electricity retailers, natural gas retailers and bulk importers of synthetic greenhouse gases. All the rest is just hot air, reports and, supposedly, monitoring and somebody is going to make a judgement about whether or not there is real substantiation.

I ask the minister, since he is so familiar with the legislation and the explanatory memorandum, to point to me where in the bill it says that an electricity retailer will not be captured, because it applies to people selling to a wholesaler.