Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I always have a bit of a wry smile when I hear a coalition member talking about delivering on commitments. I think anyone who has seen this budget knows that this is not a government that delivers on its commitments. This is not a government that can be trusted. This is not a government that you can listen to and take anything away from what they say. When you hear Senator Birmingham talking about delivering on commitments, the first thing you have to ask yourself is: what is this government's form, what is this government's history on delivering on commitments? We all know what it is. It is a government which made commitments prior to the election and did not deliver, which engaged in all of the fear campaigns that they could muster on a range of policy issues and have not delivered on one of the biggest economic issues facing this country—that is, the economic issue about ensuring that children in the future will be brought up and live on a planet which is not choking on carbon emissions. That is the bottom line here. Yet we have a federal government which went to the last election with a policy called the Direct Action Plan. Senator Birmingham waxed lyrical about it. Senator Birmingham knows fine well that direct action was put in there to give the then Abbott opposition a fig leaf to say that they were doing something about climate change. Do not take my word for it; take the word of the now Minister for Communications, Malcolm Turnbull, who said that this policy was a fig leaf and who also said that the best thing about the policy was that you could get rid of it quickly.

So this direct action policy, which the coalition say is going to help reduce emissions, has been roundly criticised by scientists, criticised by environmentalists, it has been under critique by the CSIRO and it has been under critique by the Bureau of Meteorology. They all know that it will not work. No wonder the Prime Minister does not to go to the UN Climate Summit—because he would have to be facing reality, he would be mugged by reality. And for our Prime Minister, who said that climate change was crap, it would have to be in a forum looking at the science on climate change, at what climate change is actually doing to the planet.

That is why Labor, when we were in government, said that we had to do something about this. We took advice, which was to put a price on carbon as being the cheapest, most effective way of dealing with carbon pollution. What does direct action do? Direct action actually pays the polluters. Instead of the polluters having to pay for polluting, we, the public, the taxpayers of this country, under the coalition policy, will be paying the biggest pollutes to try to stop polluting. We will be paying. It is an absolute nonsense. Everywhere else around the world people are coming to grips with dealing with carbon pollution. People are accepting the views of scientists around the world. They are saying that there is a huge problem. You can come here and argue about how great economic managers you are. I do not believe for a minute that the coalition are good economic managers. They are not good economic managers. They never have been, even under Howard and Costello. They left us with a structural deficit.