I stand here today with a great sense of weight and gravity because I think the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009 [No. 2] is probably the most important piece of legislation that this country is going to see for quite some time. It is certainly the most important piece of legislation that I have had to deal with in my very brief four years in this parliament. I stand here as a representative of all of the people across New South Wales, but I unashamedly say that my primary focus is on those who live outside the capital city, those who live across regional Australia. I am far more comfortable in a pair of jeans and boots in a paddock than I am in a suit in this chamber, but I am here so that those people who are out there right at this minute in paddocks across this state harvesting in their jeans and boots have someone to be their voice here in this chamber, and it is my absolute privilege to do that for them. It is not just those farmers across regional Australia but all those people in the small businesses, all those people in those regional communities, who work so hard to be the backbone of this country, all those mums and dads and children right across this state, all those teenagers and all those single people right across this state, particularly in those regional areas, that I am here to represent. This is such a serious moment for them. We have seen all the hype and debate and spin around the ETS. What is missing is the awareness that this is so important. The decision that this parliament makes about these bills, if we do not get it right, will change their lives for ever.
How did we get to the point of having these bills here in the chamber before us? We got to this point because of the debate, so-called, around global warming and around climate change. We have heard a lot over recent times from the scientists about the warming of the globe and the contribution that, in their view, man is making to that change in the climate. I put it to you, Mr Acting Deputy President, that we have not had a balanced debate. There is a significant cohort of scientists who have an alternative view. We have not had a balanced debate. There is a significant cohort of individuals who have a differing view, but we have never had the debate.
We keep being told that the science is in and the science is settled, but by whom? By that particular cohort of scientists who believe that they are correct and that no amount of dissent should be entertained, that no amount of dissent should ever be appreciated or accepted because if you do—oh my goodness!—you are a sceptic. How dare you question the beliefs of this particular bunch of scientists! How dare you question that! I was brought up to believe that questioning was a good thing, that to question those things put before you, whether you were two, 15, 40, or 90 years old, was a good and a healthy thing because it meant that you were using your mind to make your own decision, that you were balancing up the debate before you, that you were looking at all the options and that you were coming to your own determination of what you thought was right. But that is not being allowed in this debate for one moment because, if you do not agree that man is causing global warming, you are a sceptic. That is wrong. Regardless of what your view is on whether or not man is causing that change, to pillory those people who ask the question is simply wrong.
But that is not what we are discussing today. Today we are discussing the CPRS bills that are before us. I commend the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate Nick Minchin for pointing out earlier what a misnomer CPRS legislation is. I also commend him on his speech to the chamber. The interesting thing is that when we go out there into the community around 90 per cent of people say that they have no idea how this ETS and this CPRS will work. They have no idea. I put it to you that the other 10 per cent are lying, because to understand how this is going to work is impossible. It is absolutely impossible, and anybody who says they know how it will work is probably stretching the truth a bit. As my good colleague Senator Mason said, ‘We haven’t even seen the regulations yet.’ We have not got a clue. We are working on what we assume are the principles on which this will work. Those principles are so incredibly indeterminate at this point it that is very difficult. But what we do know about are the basic premises—and that is why I, for one, am so against these bills and this ETS.
I want to make one thing very clear. We in the Nationals have always said that we want a healthier, cleaner future for the environment. There is no doubt about that. I think all Australians—every single Australian across the country—would want a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable future for the environment. That goes without saying. But this ETS is not the way to do it. I say to those people out there who are listening and those who perhaps one day might read my speech that just because you believe in an ETS does not mean you support a better environment. They are completely separate. Do not for one moment think, ‘I’m saving the environment because I support the ETS.’ That is a completely wrong premise; it is a furphy because it is simply not gong to do it. The ETS does not stand for a cleaner, healthier environment for the future.
What we need to look at here is a very simple set of circumstances. The government has a goal. Let’s bring this right back to simplistics: what is their goal? They want to reduce man’s effect on what is causing the globe to warm. I do not think there is any argument about that. This government wants to change man’s contribution to the warming of the globe. But the action that they are taking is completely incongruous with the goal that they are trying to achieve. It is completely incongruous: it is like apples and oranges. They are trying to introduce a set of legislation that will not achieve the goal that they are trying to achieve. It simply will not achieve it. The rest of the world is not on board. Until the rest of the world is doing this it is not going to make one tiny bit of difference to the climate.
So it fails sense and reason. It is beyond the realms of commonsense that the government should say: ‘Okay, we want to fix the warming globe. We don’t want it to warm up anymore so we’ll have a really good look at man’s contribution to that and we’ll fix it,’ when the mechanism that they have given us to fix it is not going to work. How stupid is that? If ever there was a stupid decision taken by a government this is it, because no matter how many hundreds of pages of legislation they introduce and no matter how many vain speeches get put forward by the Prime Minister and those opposite on how incredibly good this legislation is, it is not going to fix it. You cannot get away from that fact, and no amount of argument from the other side will lead you to the view that this is going to fix it. It simply is not.
But, of course, the other side have a Prime Minister who has to show leadership! There was a beautiful cartoon the other day of the Prime Minister underneath a big planet, with all the other world leaders saying, ‘Didn’t he get the memo?’ He is the only one that does not realise that he is the only one who is doing this at the moment—on some vain sort of avenue towards being leader of the world. I think that is where he is trying to head. Along the way he is forgetting the people of Australia. He is so concerned with what he is doing that he is forgetting the people of Australia.
Senator Cormann—He does not spend enough time in Australia.
Senator NASH—I will take that interjection, thank you, Senator Cormann. He does not spend enough time in Australia. He certainly does not spend enough time in regional Australia, although he did go to a wind farm yesterday. I find it somewhat ironic that the Prime Minister should be somewhere where there is wind!
Senator McGauran—And that’s both ends!
Senator NASH—I will take that interjection, thank you, Senator McGauran. No, you were not in your seat, I cannot possibly do that! But this is absolutely serious. The Nationals have been very clear on this issue since day one. We have not wavered one speck. Indeed, it was Senator Boswell, standing in this chamber, who belled the cat on this long before anybody else. I remember sitting here, listening to him speaking on his MPI one day and I thought, ‘Senator Boswell is onto something here.’ That was a very long time ago and he was dead right. The Nationals, from that moment on, have not moved away from our view that we should be voting against this ETS.
And there are some very clear and simple reasons for that. This is a massive new tax. Forget about the GFC; we now have the MNT—and this massive new tax is going to be far worse for people across Australia than any GFC ever would be. The legislation is going to hit regional Australia harder than anywhere else across the country. I am not going to stand here, as a senator for New South Wales, and not do everything I possibly can to make sure that those regions have someone here fighting for them. My Nationals colleagues and I—and, I must say, some of my Liberal colleagues as well—are trying to do this for people in regional Australia because the legislation is simply wrong. It is not right, it is not fair and it is not on. The other very simple reason we oppose this is that we emit 1.4 per cent of the emissions. While ever the rest of the world is not on board, while our major trading partners are not on board, it is not going to make the slightest bit of difference to the climate. So why on earth are we even considering these bills? Because of the Prime Minister’s vanity, because of some fairyland path the government want to go down because they have to show leadership. It is just rubbish. What is really sad is that it is people in Australia that are going to be hurt so badly by this.
That MNT, massive new tax, has been related to an increase to the GST of around 2½ per cent. So let’s have a 12½ per cent GST—there is a really good idea! As my very good colleague sitting here in front of me, Senator Joyce, said: it is going to come at you out of your shopping trolleys, your light switches and your power points. It is going to come at you from everywhere. I commend my Senate leader for the excellent speech he gave in this chamber this morning and for the work he has done out there fighting for the people that need someone in here to bat for them so that this craziness on the other side of this chamber, and on the other side of the other house, does not take hold. It simply cannot.
It simply cannot. Look at the job losses: 126,000 jobs to go, including 66,000 in mining. And guess who those people are—
Senator Boswell—Blue-collar workers.
Senator NASH—Thank you very much, Senator Boswell; I will take that interjection. They are blue-collar workers. They are mums and dads. They are the so-called working families that this Prime Minister railed about so strongly during the election campaign, saying they needed his help to have a good life. Now he is going to ruin it, because it is those people that are going to lose their jobs and face the higher costs. It is those people that are going to have those bills, and that is a fact. He cannot run away and squib out from that. Those costs will be passed on—for what? So he can go off on his merry tractor being leader of the world? It is not good enough for a Prime Minister of this country to so completely disregard the people that he represents.
The impacts on regional Australia are appalling. We have heard over recent days that agriculture is going to be excluded from the ETS. What a no-brainer that is. Everybody wants agriculture to be excluded from an ETS.
Senator Boswell—It was left out in the first place.
Senator NASH—Thank you very much, Senator Boswell. I was going to refer to some comments that the leader, Senator Joyce, made earlier this morning. Isn’t it peculiar that they are being hailed for taking out something that was never in? I might be a little bit cynical in my old age, but my bet is, given that we have had the deputy before the Senate committee saying that they have absolutely no idea how to measure the emissions from the animals, that the government was never going to have it in the ETS anyway. So here we have a fantastic thing—they have taken five weeks to give in on something that, quite probably, they were never going to include anyway and which, as Senator Joyce said, was not included in the first place!
So there is no great joy there, and I will tell you why. All of those imbedded costs—fuel, transport, electricity, cement, packaging and fertiliser, and the list goes on—will still fall right in the laps of our farmers, the backbone of this country. Those farmers are feeding this nation. This government expects those farmers to just accept those costs and say: ‘That’s okay; that’s fine. We’ll accept costs for something that’s going to make no difference to the environment.’ How stupid is that? Those farmers are also going to have to put up with the fact that food processing is still in the ETS, so abattoirs are going to have to pass their extra costs down to the farmers. Farmers are the bottom of the food chain; there is nowhere else for those costs to go. I will not stand in this chamber and not do everything I can to try and stop that happening. It is simply wrong.
Regional Australia has had absolutely enough. Since this government have been in, we have seem them abolish the single desk, get rid of the $2 billion communications fund and try to whack on an extra 40 per cent to AQIS fees. We have seen Land and Water Australia gone, cuts to the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, a $12 million cut to the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation and uncertainty around the future of drought funding—right at the very time that so many farmers in rural communities right across this country are still in the grip of drought. And now what does the government want to do? They want to give regional Australia an ETS. They want to give all of Australia, obviously, an ETS, but they want to—
Senator Mason—A Christmas present.
Senator NASH—Thank you very much, Senator Mason. What a Christmas present that is—‘By the way, we’ll just whack up your charges’!
And for what? The CEO of the Food and Grocery Council, Kate Carnell, has said that people are going to move to cheaper imports because the price of food on the shelves is going to go up. Do we really want to become a nation of importers? Is that what we want, with all of the quality assurance issues—look at melamine in China—and all of the issues of security of supply? The only reason we get security of supply at the moment is that we have a domestic productive capacity. The minute we lose that we will be at the mercy of those overseas countries in terms of supply. I do not think there is a single Australian that wants to go down that road. If we do not do everything we can to ensure that rural Australia has a productive, sustainable future then our food security becomes tenuous. This is not just a scaremongering tactic; this is dead serious. If we do not have a sustainable rural Australia, we do not have a sustainable domestic production capacity.
It is not only our own people we need to feed in this world. The world population is going to go to nine billion by about 2050. How are we planning on feeding them? It is this country that has the ability to do that, and yet we have a government that at every turn is ripping the guts out of rural Australia, which is there to provide for this nation. It is not fair, it is not right and it is not on. I know that my Nationals colleagues and many of my regional and metro Liberal colleagues recognise how important this is and what sort of impact this is going to have.
We know there are some amendments being discussed at the moment to the ETS. I will put my position very clearly on the record: my view is that those amendments will not change anything. They will not change those three key things: that it is a massive new tax; it is going to hit regional Australia harder than anywhere else; and, if the rest of the world is not on board, it is not going to make the slightest bit of difference to the climate—not any.
Monday, November 23, 2009 9:07 PM
Dear Senator Nash
I have been reading your speaches about ETS and you are on the right track. I believe that for a real opposition this is a great opportunity to pick up lots of points in the next election. You may want to include in your arguments the following:
- Today in 2GB in Alan Jones's program they mentioned about some senior "scietists" falsifying information about warming. This senior person was concerned about data not showing enough warming of the planet and was requesting how it could be modified to show more warming. This information was a made availabe by some hackers who haced into a site in Germany.
- Last week there was an Article which demonstrates that warming has stopped over the last 10 years.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,662092,00.html
Keep up good work
Juha Toivanen
Wednesday, November 25, 2009 6:54 PM
Dear Senator Nash,
Thank you for saying the truth that needed to be said.
The reason that AGW opponents are shouted down and silenced is because they are correct. Global warming is a hoax, with a very sinister agenda.
The IPCC et al fear that the global warming hoax will be widely exposed before the masses are subdued by poverty, hunger and excessive regulation.
K.RUDD and Furher Turnbull are desperate to force the ETS through before too many people discover they have been conned. If they succeed, these two traitors will be rewarded with positions in the World Government to be formed by the Copenhagen treaty. Their New World Order masters will be very happy with them.