As we approach 11.30 pm, I would like to start by addressing the perhaps very few Australians who are listening to this late, after-dark edition of the Senate. We are still broadcasting out to the Australian people. If you are listening out there, I could hazard a guess that you’re struggling to sleep and you’re hoping that putting on the Senate will help fix your insomnia and get you to bed. If you are struggling to sleep right now, I think you’re among a lot of Australian families who are struggling to get to bed, who are up at night worrying about how they are going to pay the mortgage this month. They’re worrying about when the energy bill is going to turn up and whether there will be enough on the credit card to pay it. They’re worrying whether, the next time they go to the self-serve check-out at Coles, they’re going to have the transaction declined, going see ‘funds not available’ on the little screen. That’s what a lot of Australians are worried about right now.
To those Australians who are listening tonight: I wish I could assure you that we’re up late working to fix these issues for you. I wish I could say that we’re debating legislation that will put you at ease and provide some relief to the cost-of-living pressures you’re facing right now, keeping you in your home, keeping your mortgage paid and making sure you don’t fall behind on those bills. But we’re not doing that, unfortunately. The government, in all its wisdom, is devoting all of this time tonight, and all of the taxpayer dollars it costs to run this place late into the evening, to debate a bill to actually make things worse for you. Sorry; I don’t want to keep you up any later than you should be, but there’s no doubt that these measures before us are actually going to make things worse, not better, for people struggling with the cost of living. They’re going to make things worse because they amount to a new tax on doing business in this country.
I will explain briefly what these reforms to the safeguard mechanism are intended to do. What they will do is take 215 businesses around Australia and effectively tell them all that they have to reduce their emissions by roughly five per cent a year and that to do that they’ll have to pay money. They’ll have to pay money to invest in new technologies to do it and/or they’ll have to buy these things called carbon credits, which are a complete scam. Those carbon credits at the moment go for about $70 a tonne in New Zealand. In Europe they’re over A$100 a tonne. The government, in their changes here, are setting a cap of A$75 a tonne on the price of those credits, so we’ll probably end up paying around $75 a tonne. The government are saying that they want to reduce emissions over the next seven or eight years to 2030 by 205 million tonnes. So it’s very simple maths. Get a calculator out and you’ll find that 205 million tonnes at $75 a tonne is a $15 billion hit. So we’re debating tonight—and almost certainly this will eventually go through, because of the stitch-up deal the Labor Party have done with the Greens, selling out workers and jobs to the Greens—a $15 billion extra hit to the bills and costs that Australians are already facing today.
The 215 businesses I mentioned include our major airlines, Qantas and Virgin, so, if you’re planning a holiday to get away from the stresses of trying to pay the bills, that will become more difficult. They include major public transport entities, so those costs will go up. They also include our last two oil refineries. Why is the government putting a tax on the two oil refineries we’ve got left in this country? A tax goes on them, too, through this, which will make it harder for us to maintain our fuel security and will put upward pressure on petrol prices.
Before I go into a bit more detail about the costs of this, I want to focus on something that very few people do discuss in this debate: what exactly will be the corresponding benefit of this legislation? We’re going to have all these costs—an extra hit of over $15 billion to the Australian economy, in very simple maths. The government won’t release their modelling, because it obviously shows some pretty dark and concerning conclusions about the impact of the cost, but we know the cost is roughly $15 billion. What’s the benefit? Is anybody in this debate, from the government or otherwise, able to say how much the temperature of the globe will fall through this legislation? How much will it change? How much coral will regrow on the Great Barrier Reef? How many bushfires will be avoided? We do hear that. There was a contribution from someone saying Tasmanian devils are getting burned and other horrible things. That’s terrible, it’s tragic, but how is this particular bill going to stop Tasmanian devils dying? How will it do that? What did we say? It’s 205 million tonnes we’re going to abate. The world produces 30 gigatonnes of carbon a year, and here we’re debating a bill for 205 million tonnes. We have this ridiculous level of superiority, thinking that somehow, by discussing all these things here and staying up late at night, we’re saving the planet, apparently. I hear that from others. Apparently, in this little room here in Canberra, we’re going to save the world. It’s just absurd. It’s total megalomania on stilts. None of these things are going to happen by this change—none of them.
If anyone wants to turn on a TV and see what’s going on around the rest of the world, they will see that other countries are certainly not taking action to cut their carbon emissions in a way that is equal and proportionate to what we’re doing here tonight. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Biden administration opened up hundreds of thousands of hectares of land to drill oil in Alaska. That happened. The Biden administration say they’re doing all these things and they’re putting all these subsidies in. They’re not putting a carbon tax on. They’re not doing that. At the same time, they’re opening up massive swathes of Alaska for oil drilling. That’s what they’re doing. In the UK they’re opening up the North Sea for more oil drilling, again with no restraints and no restrictions—go for your life. In Germany, the Greens party are in government. They’ve actually got the energy ministry. They’re reopening 24 coal-fired power stations. In fact, they’re ripping down wind turbines to expand coalmines in Germany—ha, ha, ha! And we’re here putting a new tax and impost on Australian industry. We’re fools—absolute fools.
Of course, China, which is the world’s largest emitter of carbon emissions, with about 30 per cent of those 30 gigatonnes of carbon, announced plans just the other week that they will build 104 gigawatts of coal-fired power stations this year. A good-sized coal-fired power station is about one gigawatt, so they’re building two coal-fired power stations a week in China right now. We’re going to debate this for about a week, and, while we are debating this bill to cut 205 million tonnes from little old Australia’s carbon emissions over seven or eight years, China will have built two coal-fired power stations—ha, ha, ha!—and they would emit about 20 million tonnes a year. Over the next 10 years, those two coal-fired power stations that will be built in this week will be as much as, and will completely offset, all of the changes that we have done and all of the effort we’ve put in. China’s just going to get rid of it in a week for us—one week. But we are going to save the planet—just little old us. We have this power, and we’re going to do this.
Let’s look into the details. I don’t know where the benefits are here. Maybe someone can explain to me exactly what benefit the world, or any Australian, will receive from this, but it doesn’t seem apparent. What is apparent—what we do know—is that this $15 billion cost will be paid by businesses all around Australia. Again, very few people have pointed out that this is a massive hit to those Australians who don’t live in the places where there are big buildings. This list of 215 businesses is not fair and equitable across the country. Guess how many of those 215 businesses are in Sydney. It’s the biggest city in Australia, with big, big amounts of carbon emissions, lots of transport and lots of concrete and steel. In a country town, if you want to go and get a good view, you walk up a hill. In the city, you get in an elevator made out of steel, pulled by a cable made out of steel, in a building made out of concrete—all of those carbon emissions embodied in that—and you go up to the top of that building to see the town. Of those 215 businesses, one is in Sydney.
Senator McKenzie interjecting—
Senator CANAVAN: That business, Senator McKenzie, you’ll be interested to know, is a plastics manufacturer which mainly produces poly pipe and tanks for the rural industry—ha, ha! So we’ll still pay the bill for that, even with that little business in Sydney, Qenos, which provides very important services to agriculture.
Really the big impact is in the bush. Eighty-four per cent of those 215 businesses. Only 30 per cent of Australians live outside capital cities, in regional Australia, but 84 per cent of those businesses are there. Why are the Labor Party and the Greens conspiring to put a hit on regional areas of this country? Is it because they don’t really have a lot of seats in those areas? They’re not exposing their own seats. Of course, the Greens have nothing out in the regions. The Labor Party has a few but not many. So the little old Greens here are not going to put any costs on their own little businesses in their own inner city areas. They get off scot-free, but the 84 per cent of businesses that make money for this country—the mines and the gas fields—get hit. Sixty-three coalmines get hit. It’s not just coal—22 iron-ore mines get hit by this, as well as 35 gas facilities. I want to point out for my Western Australians—someone mentioned this before—that it really is an anti-Western-Australian policy. There are more Western Australian businesses on this list than there are from Queensland. It is a big hit.
Where are the Western Australian Labor senators? They have completely and totally sold out to Canberra. They’re all Canberra based senators. They’re not representing Western Australia; they’re representing the interests of Canberra and the inner-city Greens over here on this side of town. Why is Western Australia paying? They already pay a lot of GST and they already pay a lot of income tax to prop up this budget, and now they’re being asked to pay the lion’s share of the carbon tax too.
Why is this? There’s a bit of a perverse quirk here—and I’m running out of time. How do these 215 businesses get picked? They’re the businesses that have more than 100,000 tonnes of what’s called scope 1 emissions. But if you’re a business in an inner-city area and you use a lot of coal fired power—if I can use a bit of a prop here, I have a new sticker on my laptop that says: ‘Proudly powered by Aussie coal. It’s cheap and reliable and it works at night’—those emissions don’t get counted towards your emissions in this list. If you’re in the city and connected to the grid, which is 70 per cent coal in eastern Australia, you don’t get hit. Two of the four big banks would be over the 100,000 tonnes because they run big data services and use a lot of coal fired power to run them, but they’re exempt. Banks get off!
Poor old Western Australian mines tend not to be connected to grids; they have to use diesel because they’re remote. They use diesel for their trucks and they often use diesel to run their crushing plants and blending facilities. That all has to be done through diesel fired power, which gets captured under this perverse and ridiculous scope 1 definition. That’s why you end up with all these Western Australian businesses on the list. They get penalised for being remote. The further away you are from the big lights, the more tax you’ll pay under this safeguard mechanism from the Labor and Greens parties. How is this allowed to go through this parliament when it is the people who live out in the camps, away from their families, who are paying the bills of this nation? It is their hard work—their loneliness—which is funding all of the largesse here in this chamber. What do we do to show gratitude to them? ‘Here’s a big new tax on your futures. Here’s a big new tax on your towns. We won’t impose it on ourselves, but we’ll put it on your businesses as well.’
All of these things are what was bad before the Labor and Greens deal. This was already bad; that’s why we were opposed to it. All the businesses out there are getting angry with us for not supporting a carbon tax. Well, I don’t know if they’ve been noticing politics for the last couple of decades, but we are against carbon taxes. We’ve always been against them. We went to the election against them. I’m not copping any rubbish from the Labor Party that they’ve got some kind of mandate. They got fewer votes than we did. More people voted for the Liberal and National parties in the last election than for the Labor Party. I get it: with the system we’ve got, they form government—whatever. But they have no mandate for their policies.
We also have a mandate to represent the plurality of Australians who voted against carbon taxes at the last election, and we’ll keep fighting for them in this chamber. That’s why we’re against carbon taxes today, that’s why we’ll be against them tonight and that’s why we’ll be against them tomorrow. I tell you what: we’ll be against them when we come back to power at some point in the future, and we will rip up this piece of legislation. It will go. It won’t be there. To all those businesses crying out for certainty: the only certainty you’ve got is if you can make sure you bring down the cost of living for Australians. This bill will increase the living costs for all Australians. It will increase power prices. It’s going to lead to gas shortages and, potentially, blackouts, thanks to this sell-out to the Greens.
When that happens, the Australian people will be angry. More of them will be listening to the Senate at night because they won’t be able to sleep and they’ll be pretty angry. Do you know who they can blame? They can blame this terrible Labor government, which is not lifting a finger to help them right now. Where is the legislation from this government to help with the cost of living? Where is it? There is nothing, and all we’re doing is putting more and more costs on the backs of the Australian people. Eventually we’ll have another election, and they’ll have the opportunity to decide whether this government has helped them and made their lives easier over its three-year term in power or whether it has not. We’ll be there saying: ‘Hey, look. Why don’t we get rid of these stupid taxes and bring down the cost of living? That might be a good idea.’ I’ll keep fighting for that common sense, I’ll keep fighting for Australia and I’ll definitely fight against these things, which will just make the lives of Australians, especially regional Australians, much harder.
