Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction) Share this | Hansard source

If I'm watching a game of cricket, a game of rugby, or very occasionally a bit of AFL or netball, or if my kids are playing hockey, I want to know how it's going. I look at the scoreboard. The scoreboard on emissions reduction is absolutely clear: emissions are down 20.8 per cent since 2005. That's the scoreboard. There's no ambiguity about that. Indeed, if you look at the commentators forecasting, you see that their own forecast back in 2013, before they left government, was that emissions last year, with a carbon tax that, of course, the member for McMahon backed in because he's never seen a tax he doesn't like, would be 100 million tonnes higher than they turned out to be. That is, under a coalition government we saw emissions 100 million tonnes lower than Labor expected under their own policies.

Of course, in that time we got rid of their toxic carbon tax. They only know one way to try to solve any problem in this nation: to whack a tax on it. There's only one tool in this bloke's toolkit: a tax. We know he's going to find it one way or another. He's going to force people to buy things. He'll find some way of getting a sneaky carbon tax, and implicit carbon tax, a shadow carbon tax, a trading price for carbon. One way or another, he's going to get a price on the electricity and energy that all Australians buy, because that's how he tries to solve a problem.

We beat our Kyoto era targets by 459 million tonnes. That's the scoreboard. We're on track to meet and beat our 2030 Paris targets. Over the last two years alone, when you look at the improvement in our position versus the 2030 targets, we've improved our position by more than 639 million tonnes. That's the equivalent of taking every one of Australia's cars—14.7 million of them—off the road for 15 years. This is the extraordinary improvement we are seeing, and one of the factors driving that is the record levels of investments in renewables. There was a record seven gigawatts in 2020, the equivalent of about four large coal-fired power stations. Indeed, over the two years prior to now there were 13.3 gigawatts, equivalent to about seven large coal-fired power stations., added to the grid. That means that, as a result, we have the highest household solar in the world.

Australia forged. We drove. We shaped the development of solar in the world. We are right at the forefront. The University of NSW led the work, and the result has been that we are the biggest user of household panels on roofs in the world. One in four Australians have them. Just drive around the suburbs of Western Sydney: Fairfield, Camden, Campbelltown—they're there. That's under our policies. We trust the Australian people to make choices.

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