Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Does anyone else get a feeling of déjà vu, the feeling that we have had this debate before over and over again? My colleague here, the shadow minister for the environment made some comment about the Prime Minister being a weather vane. I have just got a few quotes here and we might guess where they came from. 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.'

We will go a little bit more current. How about this: Mr Albanese told Labor MPs on Thursday at an ALP caucus meeting that Labor should offer the Abbott government a deal to reduce carbon tax to zero immediately if the coalition would agree to introducing an emissions trading scheme. And here we have the member for Port Adelaide saying that Labor supports terminating the carbon tax. It is all well and good to say that you want to terminate the carbon tax, the relatively high price on carbon, immediately—on that we agree, member for Adelaide.

I have got a few more here, Mr Deputy Speaker Scott. We had the member for Fremantle speaking about the victims of climate change. I can tell you who the victims of climate change policy have been. They have been the people in my electorate. They have been the farmers. It was costing them a bomb to keep their milk refrigerated and to irrigate their crops. It has been the pensioners that sit under a doona all winter because they are not game to turn on the heater because of the cost of electricity.

And what about the cement workers at Kandos who no longer have a job, because on the very week that the carbon tax was introduced it closed down. Are we using less cement? Indeed the wind turbines now in the same area are being secured to the ground by cement that comes through Sydney Heads from Asia. The member for Hume in his usual eloquent manner mentioned the fact that we have shifted these emissions offshore, and that is exactly what has happened. We have outsourced to the poorer countries.

The thing that really frustrates me is that when we look at who is going to pay the price for putting a price on carbon and saving the planet, it is always people that I represent. We have the member for Melbourne—and it is a pity that he is not in here—and the people who live in the most concreted and altered environments in the country who take great joy in putting in policies that affect the people they do not represent. That is why we had such a focus on land clearing. Somewhere along the line in the 1990s there was a decision made that this environment had to look exactly the same now and for evermore. So we have an expanding global population and we have got places like the Walgett Shire that are 20 per cent developed and are frozen at a point in time.

But we would wear the pain. Professor Garnaut said that regional Australia would wear double the cost of introducing a price on carbon of their city counterparts. The people in my electorate would accept that as fair enough and wear that pain if it was going to make some difference. But it was making no difference. I think that it would be much easier if we decided that maybe we would paint our front doors blue, because the answer we get from the Labor Party when we talk about the carbon tax or the emissions trading scheme or whatever, is that they say, 'At least we are doing something.' That is the idiot's excuse for putting petrol on a fire—'At least I am doing something!' If we want to do something, just paint your door blue—or green—because it would have just as much effect as this carbon tax. We saw the bizarre schemes of the pink batts and other such government policies from the previous government that cost Australians billions of dollars and made no difference.

The member for Makin is sitting down there. He was responsible for one of my favourite speeches in this place. In 2008 we were debating the original emissions trading scheme and he said, 'It's 43 degrees in Adelaide. We need to pass this bill today. It is 43 degrees in Adelaide and we have got no time to waste.' I presume that he had a barbecue planned for Sunday and he thought we could get the policy through on Thursday and cool things down for when he got home! It is one of my favourite times, when a member of the Labor Party has confused the climate with the weather and has got it all wrong. (Time expired)

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