Mr TRUSS (Wide Bay—Leader of The Nationals) (15:36): Within just a few days the government will be announcing a great big new tax on all Australians. The government themselves say that this is the biggest economic change in history and yet they are waiting until after the rising of the parliament to make this so-called important announcement. They would not answer any questions during this week on the nature of this great big new tax. They wait until everybody has left Canberra so that their announcement cannot be subject to the scrutiny that parliament should be providing. This is no small tax. This will be the biggest carbon tax in the world. It will add to the cost of everything we do every day of our lives. It will make our businesses in this country less competitive. It will cost jobs. Yet the government do not think it is important enough for this to be debated and considered in the federal parliament. This tax will have an enormous impact on all Australians, but its impact in regional areas will be particularly severe because there are higher costs already in regional communities. This tax will add to every single one of them. On top of that, most of the jobs that will be lost in the first round of this tax are in regional communities. So this will have a devastating impact on our nation but, in particular, it will have a devastating effect on people who live outside the capital cities. This is a carbon tax that the Prime Minister said we would never have under a government she leads. Mr Hartsuyker: She's not leading the government. Mr TRUSS: The lady who will come out and announce this new tax is the same one who told the Australian people repeatedly before the last election that there would be no such tax. That was an untruth. A few days ago she said she did not mean to mislead. That was another untruth. She waited until she was in the Lodge and she had the keys before she told the truth to the Australian people. Now she asks us to believe that she did not really mean to mislead. If she did not mean to mislead why did she not correct the newspaper headlines in the days that were available before the election? Why did she not ring up the television news services and say: 'You got it wrong. I did not say that at all'? What she said before the election was 'there will be no carbon tax'. There was no lack of intention to mislead. Let us make that absolutely clear. That is not the end of the untruths that the government has told us already about this tax. For instance, it repeatedly says that only a thousand big polluters will pay. Everyone knows that is untrue. If you want any greater expert to make that observation, just ask Professor Garnaut or read his last climate review. This is the man who the government paid for several years to give it advice on this question—their trusted confidant—and he said, 'Australian households will ultimately bear the full cost'. Of course, that is the real truth. What the government told us about there being only a thousand payers is an untruth. An opposition member: 22 million Australians. Mr TRUSS: Ordinary families will cop the carbon tax in the neck. An opposition member: They will cop the lot. Mr TRUSS: They will pay the lot. Their electricity bills at a carbon tax rate of $25 a tonne will go up by around $500; gas will go up by 10 per cent; there will be increases in fuel costs; groceries will be up by at least five per cent—everything will be slugged. New South Wales consumers are likely to wear a thousand-dollar-a-year extra costs. The South Australian Council of Social Service said a few days ago that it expected the cost of living in South Australia to rise by $1,200 and a significant proportion of that would be the carbon tax. That is only the start. The Greens have made it absolutely clear that they want a carbon tax of at least $100 a tonne so that people will change their behaviour. It would close the coal fired power stations. They want a much more severe tax than whatever number is announced on Sunday. That is not a scare tactic. This tax is supposed to hurt. It is designed to hurt so much that people will stop doing the things that they normally do. They will leave their car at home rather than visit their sick mother on the other side of town. They will walk to school or walk to work, or sell their house and buy a new one near their job so that they will keep their vehicle at home. They will switch off their heater on a cold Canberra morning, or they will not turn on their cooling system on a hot summer's day. This is a tax that is designed to hurt. It is designed to hurt so much that people will change their very behaviour. The Prime Minister has said that we have got to do this because we are being left behind by the rest of the world. That is another untruth. The Productivity Commission report commissioned by the government made it absolutely clear that Australia's efforts in this regard are about average, similar to what other countries are doing. Another untruth that the government keeps telling us is that— The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Hon. Peter Slipper ): Order! I am reluctant to interrupt the Leader of the Nationals but I do want to draw to his attention the provisions of standing order 90. To accuse the Prime Minister of an untruth is skating very close to a personal reflection. Mr TRUSS: What I am saying is that the statements made by the Prime Minister and indeed by others are incorrect. They are wrong. For instance, her statement that this tax will start small is incorrect. It is untrue. The reality is that this will be the biggest carbon tax anywhere in the world. Evidence given to the Senate Select Committee on Scrutiny of New Taxes on 9 June stated the proposed Australian carbon tax would raise more money in its first three months than the European scheme raised since it began 5½ years ago. It is only going to take us three months with Labor's proposed carbon tax to raise the same amount of money as Europe has raised since their scheme started, and it is supposed to be the example of the nation that is tough on carbon emissions. The Australian emissions trading scheme will raise more revenue in its first month than the US scheme has raised in the two years that it has been operating. It will take only one month to raise more money than the North American scheme has raised since it began. We are also told, incorrectly, that Australia is the biggest emitter in the world. China is only going to take about seven or eight months to increase its emissions by the amount that we have promised to reduce ours by 2015. That assumes that China actually meets its commitment to only increase its emissions by 496 per cent. The reality is that the government's statements about this are completely inaccurate. It is also not true to say that we are the biggest per capita emitter of carbon in the world. It is quite clear that because we are a major energy producing country we have higher emissions than some other places, but if you want to look around at who are the biggest per capita emitters in the world you cannot go past Qatar, which has double our emissions, or countries like the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, even Luxembourg. They all emit significantly more than Australia. The government is misleading Australian consumers if it makes this claim that we have to do this because we will be left behind by the rest of the world. Here is another really sad untruth inflicted upon the people of Australia. This is really sad and perhaps the sorriest of the misleading statements being made by the government: that we have to have a carbon tax to boost jobs. That is simply untrue. It is ridiculous to suggest that a tax like this is going to make extra jobs. Access Economics predicts the number of job losses at 126,000— Mr Burke: Mr Deputy Speaker Slipper, I rise on a point of order. I tried to give the Leader of the Nationals free rein but when he is surrounded by people who are interjecting out of their seats constantly— The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The minister will resume his seat. The minister does make a valid point. Honourable members ought not to interject from outside their seats, and that includes the honourable member for Dawson. The Leader of the Nationals. Mr TRUSS: ACIL Tasman has said that 16 coal mines will close costing 10,000 jobs. But the Greens, who are driving this agenda, want every mine closed—every single mine closed. That will cost hundreds of thousands of Australian jobs. In addition to that we have the extra costs that are going to be imposed on every business in this country, meaning they will be less competitive. There will be sectors right across the country that will have to bear bigger costs—agriculture for instance—even if Labor exempts agriculture at the first point. Professor Garnaut has made it clear that he wants agriculture in within two or three years. Australian farmers will be the only ones in the world to pay a carbon tax on the production of food for our nation. In addition to that, of course, there is the processing of food. It seems that Australian dairy processors are to be the only dairy processors in the world to be paying a carbon tax. How does that enable them to compete with New Zealanders and others on world markets? When we look at the cost of transport and the cost to farmers of fertilisers and inputs, they are going to be less competitive and that, of course, means more lost jobs in regional areas. If you need any further advice about where the government's policy is heading, just take the words of Senator Hanson-Young whose advice to everybody was to close down the OneSteel plant at Whyalla—it will only cost 4,000 jobs—'and we will replace them by building windmills'. Let us have windmills all over the place because we will not have any other jobs. Another statement that the Prime Minister made, which she has simply failed to honour, is the promise to compensate people for these extra costs. The government have already said that only half of the money raised will be used as compensation. But no-one can compensate people for the loss of their job, for the closure of whole industries and therefore, potentially, whole towns. There will be no compensation for those people. In fact, if you are not being paid anything because you have not got a job, no compensation will make up for the higher prices they have to pay. Let me make another point, which I think is very important, the Prime Minister made another promise before the election. She promised that she would build community consensus before doing anything at all. Maybe she has not broken that promise. There is community consensus and the Australian people have made it absolutely clear that they have made up their mind and they do not want a carbon tax. The latest poll suggests over three-quarters of Australians do not want the tax. There is a community consensus and the government should listen. Call off Sunday. Do not have this big announcement. They have not achieved the consensus or, if they have, the consensus is there should be no tax at all. Is it any wonder that ordinary Australians feel shut out and betrayed by what this government have said. They have not been consulted in the process. This has all been put together by some so-called multiparty committee, which is in fact an alliance between the Greens and the ALP with a couple of Independents as cheerleaders. The reality is that the Australian people have not been given the opportunity to have their say. The government did not tell the truth with the Australian people before the election. Now they are having a tax imposed on them that they had made absolutely clear they did not want, and they are not being consulted or given a chance to have any say. What is going to be the benefit of this tax? The parliament secretary let the cat out of the bag when he said in a letter that this tax will make no difference even in 50 years' time. Professor Flannery, another one of the Labor Party's favoured sons in this particular area, went further. He said that if the whole of the world stopped emitting immediately it would not make any difference to the temperature for a thousand years. Yet this government believe that for Australia, which produces 1.4 per cent of global emissions, a tax is going to change the world. That is complete nonsense. I ask the government: on Sunday do not tell us how much you are going to tax us and how you are going to distribute that money around the place, but tell us how many polar bears you expect the tax is actually going to save. Tell us how much better off the Barrier Reef is going to be because of the $25 a tonne Labor imposed tax, or whatever the price might be, on Australian consumers. Tell us how often the Murray will fill because this tax has been imposed. I have never seen a tax in my life that changes the climate. Sometimes it makes people get hot under the collar, but to suggest that a new tax is actually going to make our planet cooler is clearly a nonsense. If taxes made the country cooler, under a Labor government we would be frozen over from west to east. There are plenty of taxes already. The government have no mandate for a carbon tax. They have no legitimacy for government. They said they will not have a plebiscite. If you will not have a plebiscite then you must have an election to decide this issue. (Time expired)