Alex Hawke (Mitchell, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Member for Charlton, I would not be spruiking your scientific credentials in this chamber. You are no rocket scientist. I will put it this way, member for Charlton: you are no rocket scientist. I just want to make that clear.

But this is a serious issue that deserves attention, and the government came to office on a pledge to remove the carbon tax because, as my colleagues and the government has pointed out, the Australian taxation system is not going to solve climate change. I know that the Labor Party believes in taxing and spending, and that that is the solution to all problems in life. Those opposite believe that if you have a problem the government has a taxation and spending plan to solve your life story. But taxation cannot and will not solve climate change.

It is a real problem and it deserves real scientific solutions—real evidence based solutions. We have seen state Labor governments do the same as the last federal Labor government. They have made a hash of climate change policy. We have seen them introduce solar bonus schemes that pay such a whacked out price that people who sign up to them make a hell of a lot of money and these schemes have to be abandoned, giving renewables a bad name.

We have seen Bob Carr in New South Wales—who described desalination as 'bottled electricity'—build a desalination plan on the advice of people like Tim Flannery, who said that all dams in capital cities would be dry within five or 10 years. He said that the rivers would not run and that the dams would be dry. Now, everybody in Sydney is paying a premium on every electricity bill, for a desalination plant that produces no water ever and has no benefit to anybody but uses a lot of people's capital. That is the bad name that the Labor Party, state and federal, has given to climate policy in Australia. They have made a real hash of it.

And the public are not mugs. They are more scientific than members of the opposition back bench, I can assure you. Scientifically, they have looked at it. They have looked at the rhetoric and the in-fighting and squabbling. They have listened very carefully to people like Tim Flannery, who said that even if every country in the world stops emitting carbon today it would take almost a thousand years before we saw any temperature difference.

I ask the member for Charlton: does he believe that? His government paid this person $180,000 a year to tell us that there is nothing we can do on climate change. I do not believe that there is nothing we can do on climate change; I believe there are scientific responses we can make. (Time expired)

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