Carbon tax a failure: Coulton
06-June-2011
Federal Member for Parkes Mark Coulton highlighted the failures of the Gillard Government’s carbon tax in Parliament this week, attacking the “misleading and dishonest campaign that is being run at the moment in regard to the implementation of a carbon tax in the Australian economy.”
“Nowhere in this moral debate is the government talking about how this tax is directly going to cool the temperature of the globe. What they are talking about is sending a signal, working towards some point in the future. Indeed, Professor Flannery said that maybe in a thousand years we will see some difference in the climate.”
“Are we prepared to sacrifice the welfare of our lowest income earners—our fixed income earners, our elderly, our small business community and our farmers—to make a grand gesture to the rest of the world? It would be a gesture, given the level of emissions coming out of Australia that would have no effect at all on the temperature of the globe but a remarkable, huge negative effect on the economy of Australia and, more particularly, the economy of regional Australia.”
Mr Coulton criticised the Government’s comments that anyone who is against a carbon tax is in fact a climate change denier stating “Implying that anyone who did not agree with their tax is some sort of denier is deeply offensive. I come from a background of practical environmental care. It is not a philosophical position for me; I actually have the dirt under my nails and blisters on my hands from working towards improving the environment. To be called a denier I find deeply offensive.”
Mr Coulton also took aim at the Government’s chief Climate adviser Professor Ross Garnuat and his statements that a carbon tax would cause a severe economic downturn in regional Australia.
“Professor Garnaut, in his opening paper for the government a couple of years ago, stated that the emissions trading scheme that was first proposed, and which this carbon tax is going to morph into, would have a downturn of 20 per cent on regional Australia.”
“People must realise that for a carbon tax to have any effect on emissions, it has to make energy more expensive. If you are on a fixed income, if you are a small business person, if you are a pensioner, you have no choice but to go without. If you cannot pass those costs on then you have to absorb the cost or do without the energy. This is going to have a devastating effect across the part of Australia that I represent.”