Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

I did say something about the opposition's amendment—very clearly I did.

The CHAIRMAN: Senators will come to order. Senators should not be interjecting when they are not in their places.

Maybe Senator Birmingham would be better off answering questions as parliamentary secretary because we know he has interests in his portfolio and we know he has knowledge and perhaps a different ideological position when it comes to carbon pricing. We know the government has a number of senators and members who support an emissions trading scheme. They are hanging their heads in shame at the fact that the Prime Minister has let them down the path of not supporting an emissions trading scheme, despite having done so before. We know how many times minister Greg Hunt has been on record saying he supports putting a price on carbon.

The reason Labor has moved an amendment for an emissions trading scheme—I made it very clear before—is that it does deliver business certainty and positions Australia to maximise our economic benefits from the growing global trend of pricing pollution. That growing global trend is very clear. It is something about which the Prime Minister has again told lies and furphies. Recently when he was in Canada he said clearly that the world was not moving towards emissions trading when the world is moving towards emissions trading. We have China's seven pilot emissions trading schemes, which cover a quarter of a billion people in the second largest carbon market in the world, second only to the European Union. We have South Korea's which will start on 1 January 2015. Mexico put a price on carbon in 2013. The European Union has had an ETS for many years and on top of that many European countries have applied their own carbon price—for example, France in 2013. In the United States, Oregon and Washington are exploring carbon pricing options. California, which happens to be the world's eighth largest economy, already has an emissions trading scheme in place, as does New York and as do eight other states in the USA's regional greenhouse gas initiative.

We know that comments recently by President Obama highlighted that this is a major global challenge which is facing our planet and facing the United States. That is why all these countries are acting. Yet there is an amendment on the table but the government refuses to qualify why it will not support it, even though it did in the past. If it is not supported and the current bills are passed through this Senate, we will be left with nothing and we will be going backwards. Senator Cormann may want to deny the science and to deny the scientific facts.