Joint Doorstop Interview with Mrs Sophie Mirabella MHR, Queanbeyan
Posted on Monday, 23 May 2011
Subjects: Julia Gillard’s carbon tax; border protection.
E&OE……………………….…………………………………………………………………
TONY ABBOTT:
It’s good to be here in Queanbeyan with Paul and the team from Weldcraft and also with Sophie Mirabella my friend and shadow ministerial colleague. This is typical of the tens of thousands of small businesses right around Australia that are going to be badly damaged by the Prime Minister’s proposed carbon tax. A business like Weldcraft is going to be hit at every level by the carbon tax. It’ll be hit because of the electricity it uses. Its bill will go up about $4,000 a year in power alone. It’s also going to be hit in the transport that it needs to get materials to the workshop and out of the workshop. Most of all it’s going to be hit because the steel industry will be very, very badly damaged by any carbon tax.
We’ve already heard people like the boss of BlueScope say that the carbon tax is economic vandalism. We’ve heard the boss of BlueScope say that the people who are proposing the carbon tax don’t want manufacturing to continue in this country. We’ve heard Paul Howes the head of the Australian Workers Union say that there should be no carbon tax on the steel industry and I say to the Prime Minister listen to what the workers and the small businesses of Australia are saying and that is that this is a toxic tax, toxic to jobs, toxic for small business and toxic for people’s cost of living. This is a seriously bad tax and the Government should not proceed with it. Certainly it shouldn’t proceed with it without seeking a mandate at an election.
The other point I should make is that there can be no compensation for people who’ve lost their jobs as a result of this toxic tax and there is no compensation even mentioned for small businesses like Weldcraft. People talk about help for households, they talk about help for large businesses, particularly large export businesses, but nothing is proposed for small business. So this is a toxic tax. The longer people have a chance to consider it the worse this tax looks. I’m going to ask Sophie to say a few words and then I might ask Paul to say a few words because he’s been in business here personally and through his family since the early 1960s and people who have been in this kind of a business, who love this business, who want to do the right thing by their staff and by their customers, they know that this is a toxic tax and it shouldn’t go ahead. So Soph, over to you first.
SOPHIE MIRABELLA:
During this week which is Manufacturing Week it would be a good time for the Prime Minister to face up to the concerns and anxieties of Australian workers and Australian small businesses and actually dump this toxic carbon tax. Here we’re at a third generation small business and as the Coalition we want to make sure there’s a fourth generation to carry on the local tradition of manufacturing, building schools, building hospitals, building our shopping centres here in and around Canberra. This week we call on the Prime Minister to take her head out of the sand, to start listening to Australian workers and to Australian businesses because there are one million Australian workers employed in the manufacturing sector and we want to ensure that we have a thriving and surviving manufacturing sector. We don’t want to send it all offshore.
TONY ABBOTT:
Paul, do you want to just jump in?
PAUL BOSCHERT:
Yeah look, this is a tax that definitely puts a lot of pressure on our small business and the industry that we are in right across Australia. It’s not one that we can absorb. It’s one that makes us very vulnerable to the international competitors and we would lose jobs offshore clearly by introducing a tax that would put our margins to a point that we could not complete. We have 40 people here, 40 people’s jobs just in our industry alone in this shed would definitely be put in jeopardy and it’s something that needs to be readdressed I believe.
TONY ABBOTT:
Thanks so much Paul. Ok, do we have any questions?
QUESTION:
Doesn’t today’s Climate Commission report sort of highlight just how important a carbon tax would be?
TONY ABBOTT:
Absolutely not. What the Commission report does is state that direct action would be quote, “a rapid way” of reducing emissions. Now, the argument here is not about climate change, the argument here is about how to deal with it and the Climate Commission report says that direct action is a rapid way of reducing emissions. It also says that soil carbon is going to be a very important factor in Australia getting its emissions down.
QUESTION:
Can you just clarify once more how this business would be affected, how many jobs will go or how much more they’ll have to pay in bills?
TONY ABBOTT:
Well, as Paul was saying just in this workshop alone there are 40 staff. Now, this workshop will be impacted first because its electricity and gas bills would go up. Electricity alone would go up by $1,000 a quarter here if a $26 a tonne carbon tax were put in place. So first of all, its electricity and gas bills go up. Second, the cost of getting its supplies into the workshop and its product out of the workshop goes up because of the carbon tax on fuel. Third and perhaps most significantly, the cost of the steel which is its basic raw material goes up dramatically because steel is an inherently energy intensive product. There is no way of making steel that doesn’t involve very large quantities of energy and a carbon tax on Australian steel doesn’t mean that we use less steel it means that we import it, that’s what it means. That’s why I keep saying that under a carbon tax you won’t clean up the environment but you will clean out people’s wallets and you will wipe out jobs big time.There is no evidence whatsoever that a tax will reduce emissions but there’s abundant evidence that it will hit people’s jobs and hit people’s cost of living.
QUESTION:
Mr Abbott, have you had an opportunity to take more detailed look at what Britain has announced as far as their approach to climate change is concerned?
TONY ABBOTT:
Look, it’s a very different economy, a very different economy and fundamentally it’s an economy which has exported large numbers of manufacturing jobs over the last two decades and it’s basically closed down its coal industry. So it’s a very different economy and what may or may not be right in the United Kingdom is not necessarily right here in Australia.
QUESTION:
The report may indicate that direct action is a rapid way to achieve the outcome but doesn’t it also indicate it’s not enough by itself?
TONY ABBOTT:
Well, it’s more than enough to get our emissions down by five per cent by 2020 and that’s our objective. The objective of both the Government and the Opposition is to get emissions down by five per cent by 2020. We’re not proposing to go further than that, the Government, to the best of my knowledge, is not proposing to go further than that. What we all want to do is to get our emissions down by five per cent by 2020 and direct action is more than capable of doing that. The beauty of direct action is that direct action will bring about a whole lot of otherwise environmentally sensible things like more trees on suitable land, more carbon in our soil which is going to be good for agriculture and smarter technology such as turning carbon dioxide from power stations from a waste product into an input into valuable products like biodiesel and stockfeed.
QUESTION:
Are you confident you’ll get the support from the Greens for the asylum seeker inquiry?
TONY ABBOTT:
Look, in the end, they have to make their own judgement but frankly, what we see in our detention centres is a rolling crisis. There are something like three significant incidents being reported every single day now from our detention centres. This is a real problem which we have because the Rudd-Gillard Government changed policies that worked and started up the boats. So look, I think everyone accepts that we’ve got a big problem in our detention centres and I think this inquiry is a good faith way of getting to the bottom of those problems.
QUESTION:
But the Ombudsman conducts regular inquiries. What can this inquiry find out that the Ombudsman can’t?
TONY ABBOTT:
Well, the beauty of a parliamentary inquiry is that it can call witnesses and it can hold hearings in public and it can protect the evidence that’s given to those hearings. So there’s a lot that a parliamentary inquiry can uncover which inquiries of a different nature can’t. So, I think this is a very important way of getting to the bottom of the crisis inside our detention centres, of trying to ensure that as far as is humanly possible our detention centres are run effectively. So, I think it’s an important inquiry and obviously the Greens and the other crossbenchers have to make up their own minds but I think if they’re fair dinkum about trying to ensure that these places are run as well as they humanly can be they would support the inquiry.
Finally, let me just go back to the original theme though. This is a toxic tax, it’s bad for jobs, it’s bad for our cost of living and it’s terrible for small businesses like this and what we’ve seen from the Climate Commission is actually a tick of approval for direct action as a rapid way of getting our emissions down. So, far from being unhappy, I’m actually very pleased to see the Climate Commission report.
[ends]