Speeches

Thank you very much Bruce and our LNP officials, Campbell Newman and his state parliamentary team, Graham Quirk and the members of the City council,  Senators and Members my colleagues in Canberra, Convention Delegates and Observers.

 

Well last year when I stood to make this address we were only hours away from the Prime Minister going to the Governor General at Yarralumla to call a federal election.  For some reason I don’t think that is going to happen today. 

 

What a wonderful election result it was for the LNP in Queensland, we certainly did our share to change the government.  As a result of the work of the LNP and the campaign team’s right across the state we welcomed back to Federal Parliament Warren Entsch, Teresa Gambaro, Ross Vasta.  And we welcome a team of new faces, Karen Andrews, Scott Buccholz, George Christensen, Ewen Jones, Ken O’Dowd, Jane Prentice, Wyatt Roy and Bert Van Manen.  What a wonderful effort that was!

 

Seven seats won from Labor, one new seat and all of our sitting members enjoyed handsome swings.  There aren’t much better results than that, but it wasn’t quite good enough.  We just didn’t quite make it.  If only couple of the other states had just gone part of the way.  If a few of the brick-bats which were lined up for the Labor state governments in Victoria and NSW were delivered a couple of months sooner, I would be welcoming Tony Abbott today as  Prime Minister. 

 

And our country would not be in the mess it is today.  The reality is that this government has no legitimacy.  They have sold out to the Greens and the independents.  Julia Gillard may well have the keys to The Lodge but the Greens have the keys to the Treasury.  And doesn’t it show.  Labor’s has stumbled from one disaster to the next.  They have been unable to stop the deficits and they haven’t been able to stop the debt.  They haven’t been able to stop the mismanagement and the waste and they haven’t been able to stop the boats.  It has been a government of failure.

 

Now the Prime Minister wants to deliver the biggest new tax of all.  It is the fundamentally flawed carbon tax.  It is a tax based on no logic.  It is a tax that will hurt all Australians. 

 

I like all my federal colleagues have been travelling across the country in the six days since the day this tax was announced.  I have talked to people in big towns and in small, in cities and villages.   I have talked to employers and employees, miners, manufacturers, people in the tourist industry, retirees, pensioners, parents and families.  I have talked to people from the big end of this country and the small. 

 

I have found a unity of purpose, people don’t want this tax.  They know it’s going to hurt them.  It will hurt everything they do.  It just makes no sense whatever and yet this government is determined to inflict it upon the Australian people.

 

She hasn’t won hearts and minds as she travels across the country.  The Prime Minister is just plunging the carbon tax dagger into the livelihoods of the communities that she has betrayed.  Workers and employers are united in their pain and in their anger.  They know they are going to have to pay more for everything they do - this year, next year and every year -  it gets bigger and bigger all the time. 

 

We are already told electricity will rise by $150 a household.  The Victorian government says $1000 for the average business and $1500 for a farmer.  An average meat works in Australia will have to pay $250,000 more for electricity just to run its freezers.  The Food and Grocery Council say our food and groceries will go up between 3 and 5% that’s ten times the government’s estimate.  The cost of an average house is set to rise by $5000.  The Master Builders Association says the carbon tax will add $480 to the cost of the average mortgage.   The new fuel excise will add half a billion dollars to the cost of the trucking industry every year. 

 

The coal industry says the tax will cost them $18 billion between now and 2020 and $13 billion of that is from escaped fugitive emission - something they can do absolutely nothing about.  This is the industry that earns US$50 billion a year.  Do we want these industries or don’t we?  If we have got something that is successful giving us a fast speed in our economy, why are we trying to crush it to death by taxing it out of existence and making it uncompetitive around the world?

 

The cost of building roads will go up by 5% adding hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of rebuilding the Bruce highway and our other important roads.  Local councils will find the value of their road building budgets eroded.   The Roads to Recovery programme alone losses $40 million in buying power as a result of this tax.  Yet there will be no compensation or top-ups for road budgets.  The carbon tax adds to the cost of everything, everything that we do.  That’s not a scare tactic.  That’s not the Opposition just wanting to frighten people.  That is the purpose of this tax.  It is designed to hurt.  You are supposed to hurt so much that you change your behaviour and not do things that might damage the environment by emitting Co2.  If it didn’t hurt or if you were being fully compensated, the tax would not achieve its objective.  So don’t be surprised when we say this tax is going to hurt.  The government knows it has to hurt if it’s going to have any effect in changing people’s behaviour.

 

Yet the government says it is going to compensate you for its carbon tax.  The average person is going to receive compensation for these extra costs -  in fact more than you actually need - 20 cents a week more.  20 cents a week! This is a government that can’t get its billions right let alone 20 cents and expect that to satisfy the people of Australia.

 

This is a great big new tax that will raise $9 billion in its first year.  Yet in a typical piece of Labor economic incompetence, in spite of raising $9 billion plus  a year, they will have a black hole of $7 billion over the first four years because they are going to collect less than what they are going to spend. What sort of budget, what sort a government if this one?

 

The carbon tax is supposed to reduce Co2 emissions, but emissions will actually continue to go up not down – they will just go up a little slower.  Despite spending hundreds of dollars on every tonne abated, Labor still plans to have to spend billions every year buying permits from overseas to pay for emissions in this country in excess of the commitment we made at the failed Copenhagen Climate Change Conference.  We will be buying permits from countries like Russia who have permits stacked up from the closure of their factories twenty years ago.  This is just a massive transfer of money from Australian to other parts of the world and yet its suppose to change the climate.

 

The carbon tax is so full of ambiguity and anomalies.  The government says that the new tax will result in emissions savings equivalent to taking 45 million vehicles off the road.  We don’t have 45 million vehicles.  Even if we did have 45 million vehicles, Labor is not going to tax petrol so there is no direct implication for motor vehicle users in any way.  

 

If you take the train or the bus ti work you are going to pay the carbon tax, but if you drive your own car to work you won’t.  Is that the best way to reduce Co2 emissions?

 

If you decide to have your holiday by flying to Cairns or the Gold Coast you will pay the carbon tax, but if you fly to Vanuatu, Fiji, China or the United States you won’t. 

 

If you take sugar on a ship from Mackay to Melbourne you will pay the carbon tax, but if you ship it from Thailand you won’t.  What is the sense of that?

 

If you buy Australian fruit and vegetables you will pay the carbon tax, but if you buy a can of Thai pineapples or Brazilian concentrate or butter from New Zealand you won’t.  How does that help the Australian industry?  If your factory emits 24,990 tonnes of carbon you will not have to buy any permits but if you add one more tonne to your emissions that you will have to buy more than $500,000 worth of permits for that extra tonne.  What added value is there for you to expand your business? 

 

If you buy an imported luxury car you may not have to pay sales tax or Labor’s luxury car tax, and you will not pay the carbon tax, but if you buy an Australian car, a Holden, a Falcon or even a hybrid Toyota, you will have to pay the carbon tax.  What sort of mixed messages are we getting from this government?

 

Is all this fair?  Is it reasonable?  Is it going to help our country? And what’s more, will it reduce the temperature? How will it help the environment?  How many polar bears do we expect the tax to save?

 

This is typical of this government’s dishonesty, shonky deals and mismanagement in selling this concept.  And, of course, they have been full of lies.  We all know the big lie, “there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead”.  But that’s not the only lie.  Remember she also says “she didn’t mean to mislead”.   I think that is another lie.  If she didn’t mean to mislead why didn’t she correct the newspaper headlines and the television stories before the election rather than waiting until after she had the keys to The Lodge. 

 

When she says the big polluters will be the ones to pay, that is also a lie.  Her own guru Professor Garnaut says in his final Review, it is Australian households who will ultimately bare the full cost.   She also said we have to do this because we have to keep up with the rest of the world.  Her own Productivity Commission Report told her we were doing as much as the rest of the world in dealing with climate change issues. 

 

The Prime Minister also says that we will start Australia’s carbon tax small and build it up as time goes by.  But this $23 billion a tonne tax will be the biggest in the world and cost $9 billion in the first year, going up every year from then on.    It will only take three months of the Australian carbon tax scheme to raise as much money as the Europeans have raised in the whole five and a half years that their scheme has been in operation.  The Europeans are paying S1.00 a person for their carbon tax.  Australians will be paying on average $400 per person.  Is that starting small?  Yet the Europeans are suppose to be the leaders, we need to chase.  Australia’s trading scheme will raise more in its first month than the US scheme has raised since it commenced.  Our carbon tax is not starting small - that’s another lie. 

 

We are also told we are the biggest emitters in the world so we’ve got to act but that also is untrue.  There are plenty of countries that emit more per capita than Australia.  Countries like Qatar, UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain emit much more per capita than Australia.  Even amongst developed countries, similar energy rich economies are equivalent to what we emit. Another lie.

 

She also promised that there would not be job losses and jobs will be created, but all the experts tell us that hundreds of thousands of jobs are at risk because our industry will not be competitive.  

 

And she also promised that she would develop a community consensus before doing anything at all on a carbon tax.  Another lie!  If there is a community consensus it is that we don’t want the tax.  The Australian people say we don’t want it!  So there is in fact no consensus and indeed she has dishonoured her commitment also in that regard.

 

So this is a government that has not been truthful with the Australian people. It has lost its credibility and has no mandate to deliver on the tax it now wants to impose.

 

This time last year we were heading to an election.  We should be heading there again.  And if there been one man who has captured the imagination and the hearts of the Australian people over this period it is our own leader Tony Abbott.  Tony Abbott has taken the fight against this insidious tax up to the government.

 

But he’s not only talking about the evils and the failings of this government.  He has also been positive about the things we intend to do upon being returned to government.  We have a policy development process that’s working strongly and when the election is held we will have a sweet of positive messages.  Things that we will do that will help make our country better.  That is so much an important part of the role of opposition as well.  

 

Tony has been effective in leading the process. 

 

We now have leading the Opposition Australia’s preferred prime minister - our leader our champion, let’s give him the chance now to be Australia’s real prime minister.  Ladies and Gentleman Tony Abbott.