PRIME MINISTER:
As you know this is a Government which is determined to keep its commitments. It's a Government which is determined to be consultative and collegial with the people of Australia. As you also know, there was no clearer commitment that this Government took to the election than our commitment to abolish the carbon tax.
So, I can inform you today that at 4 o'clock this afternoon, the Government will release on the Government website an exposure draft of the carbon tax repeal legislation. This legislation will be the first bill considered by the new Parliament. It is a bill designed to not only keep the Government's commitments, but to do the right thing by the people of Australia. When this bill is passed, Australian households will be better off to the tune of $550 a year. When this bill is passed, the Government estimates that power prices will go down by 9 per cent, gas prices will go down by 7 per cent, and that means that the average power bill will be $200 a year lower and the average gas bill will be $70 a year lower.
So, this is very important legislation. It is legislation designed to do the right thing by Australian families, to take the cost of living pressure off Australian families, and to boost the competitiveness of Australian business. So, if you are in favour of a good deal for Australian families, and if you are in favour of a fair deal for Australian workers and for Australian jobs, this is legislation that you must support. I'm going to ask the Minister, Greg Hunt, to say a few words and then obviously we'll take some questions.
MINISTER HUNT:
Thanks very much Prime Minister. The repeal legislation is about helping families, helping businesses, and about helping Australian jobs. The legislation removes the carbon tax from all three areas to which it was applied. It removes it from electricity and gas and the general construct of the carbon tax. It removes it from synthetic greenhouse gases, and it removes it from liquid fuels. The legislation delivers on the pledge and the promise which we took to the Australian people and on which they voted.
The legislation will also bring in to being, as the Prime Minister said, a saving of $550 on average next financial year, as opposed to the current situation. On average, it's a saving of $3,000 per family over the next six years. If the ALP votes against repealing the carbon tax, they are voting for higher electricity prices, higher cost of living issues, and for greater impacts on Australian businesses and Australian jobs. We will do what we have said, and we will also be deeply consultative. We will give the public a real chance to consider and to consult on these bills which will be available for consultation until 4 November.
QUESTION:
Mr Abbott, the federal government has no power over electricity prices. What pressure do you need to put on to states and regulators in order to get this through?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, as you'll remember, during the election campaign, we also promised to give the ACCC further powers to monitor the price impact of the repeal of the carbon tax and this legislation does that.
QUESTION:
Mr Abbott, is it still your aim to abolish it on July 1, 2014, and is it possible to do it retrospectively, have you not achieved the abolition by that date?
PRIME MINISTER:
We are confident that the public pressure on the Labor Party will be such that they will not defy the mandate of the Australian people at the election. Let's not forget that if this election was about anything, it was about the carbon tax. This election was not just a choice of political party to govern the country, it was in fact a referendum on the carbon tax. If the Labor Party persists in saying yes, we support the carbon tax, they will effectively be saying no to the people of Australia. The people of Australia understandably want lower cost of living, and they want more secure jobs. This bill gives them both. That's why the pressure on the Labor Party in the end, not to oppose this bill, I believe will be irresistible.
QUESTION:
Mr Abbott, despite what you say, the Labor Party is likely to persist. So, when does your threat about a double dissolution kick in? Will you wait for the new Senate?
PRIME MINISTER:
Michelle, the new leader of the Labor Party is nothing, if not a political pragmatist – he is nothing, if not a political survivor. The absolute lesson of recent Australian political history is that political parties cannot defy the public view, and the public view is overwhelmingly that they don't like this toxic tax. Now, we are giving the Labor Party a chance to repent of its support for the carbon tax. We are giving the Labor Party a chance to repent of its massive breach of faith with the Australian people in the last Parliament. I think that the Labor Party, being pragmatic political survivors, will ultimately embrace that opportunity.
QUESTION:
Will you take steps, Mr Abbott, to make sure that Clive Palmer pays his outstanding $6.2 million carbon tax bill and will you give him any ability to use his influence in the Senate to avoid paying that bill, perhaps by making the abolition retrospective?
PRIME MINISTER:
Obviously, people do need to honour their obligations. People do need to meet their obligations under tax law and that's true under the existing carbon tax law, just as it's true under any other law of the Commonwealth.
QUESTION:
Will you entertain his idea of making it retrospective and refunding the carbon tax payments that companies have already made?
PRIME MINISTER:
For reasons of technical efficacy, for reasons of making a clean break with this toxic tax, it makes abundant sense to abolish the carbon tax at the end of the current financial year. That's what we intend to do. Obviously, people will be liable for their carbon tax obligations up until that time.
QUESTION:
Given that states like WA, for example, suffered electricity power price increases of 57 per cent in just the space of three years, what guarantee can you give that Australian consumers would see any decrease in their power prices? Secondly for you, Mr Hunt, in your thesis that you wrote with Rufus Black, you talked about a price on pollution being the most efficient way to reduce that pollution. Is that not your view now?
PRIME MINISTER:
Just on the price guarantee, some of you would be old enough like me, to remember the introduction of the goods and services tax and as some of you would remember, that also involved the abolition of the wholesale sales tax, which meant that while some prices went up, other prices went down. The ACCC at the time did a very good job of policing the introduction of that particular tax package, so that prices only went up as much as they had to and that quite a number of prices went down quite significantly. The ACCC did a highly competent job then. I believe they'll do a highly competent job in the future. I am confident that we will get a significant reduction in power prices as a result of the abolition of the carbon tax. I take your point though, Andrew, there has been a dramatic escalation of power prices in recent years for a whole host of reasons. The carbon tax is one very significant factor. That will be gone. That will be good for households. That will be good for jobs. And that's why it should be, and I believe will be supported ultimately by a highly pragmatic Labor Party.
MINISTER HUNT:
It's precisely because of my work 23 years ago that the lesson I learnt was that it's about choosing the right market mechanism for the right problem. That work on zinc, cadmium and lead, gave me the building blocks for where we are now. The message from that is that this is a fundamentally inefficient tax and the reason it's inefficient is it taxes electricity. What is the carbon tax? It's an electricity tax, it's an electricity tax, it's an electricity tax.
Electricity is an essential service. It's a fundamental good. In economic terms, it's inelastic, but in household terms, it is essential and taxing an essential service hurts families, hurts businesses, hurts jobs and simply ends up diverting funds from other elements in a family's budget. For Australian businesses, the one place where it does have effect is it sends vulnerable businesses overseas. You can see that in terms of leakage with regards to manufacturing and with regards, in particular, to the heavy metal sector. So, this is the worst of all possible worlds. We have a situation where the price of electricity goes up, but under the ALP's own figures, which they released last year and again gave to the United Nations just days before the election, between 2010 and 2020, our domestic emissions go up, not down, under the carbon tax. So it does do damage. It doesn't do the job. That's why it fails its fundamental test and I would say this – every day that Mr Shorten votes for the carbon tax is a day that he votes for higher electricity prices. The ball's in his court.
QUESTION:
Just to go back to Phil's question before, if the ALP doesn't do what you say they should do, and you do have to wait to the new Senate to get this repeal through, does that mean that the tax applies for another whole year or is there some mechanism in this repeal legislation that gets around that?
PRIME MINISTER:
I'm just not going to speculate on the distant future. What I am going to say is that every day the Labor Party tries to block this measure is a day when the Labor Party is going to get the Australian public more and more angry about the fact that they are giving them power prices and gas prices which are higher than necessary and they are giving them, the Labor Party are giving the people of Australia, job insecurity that we just don't need.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, Michael Williamson, he has pleaded guilty today to fraud charges, sentencing is still to come. But each of those charges carries hefty jail terms potentially. Is this not evidence that the law as it currently exists is sufficient to ensure that there are proper potential punishments for union criminals?
PRIME MINISTER:
I'm not going to comment on the particular case which is still before the courts. Obviously if there is a fraud charge, that attracts penalties under the ordinary criminal law. But in terms of breach of the governance rules, there should be the same penalties for dodgy union officials as there are for dodgy company officials.
That's the position we took to the election and that's the position that we will be implementing in good time.
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, can I ask, did your plans to abolish the carbon tax come up at all during your talks with leaders at APEC or the East Asia Summit, the Chinese leaders in particular? And secondly, can you confirm when Parliament will resume?
PRIME MINISTER:
Look, yes, they did come up in different contexts overseas, and I think the general reaction was that people are pleased to see that Australia is determined to be a low-cost business environment, not a high-cost business environment. Obviously the carbon tax and the mining tax help to make us a high-cost environment, help to deter investment, help to damage job growth and the last thing we want is restrictions on job growth here in Australia.
Now, as for Parliament, as you know, Parliament can't return until we’ve got the return of the writs. My strong expectation is that the Electoral Commission will get that job done as quickly as it can, that it will get the job done in time for Parliament to come back on November the 11th*. So, that's my strong expectation, and subject to the writs coming back as they should, we will have Parliament sitting on November 11.
QUESTION:
For how long this year?
PRIME MINISTER:
Look, Parliament will sit sufficient to make a good start on the Government's legislative agenda. I don't want to comment beyond that, other than to say that I do expect that there will be some additional budget estimates in the course of the parliamentary sittings between now and Christmas.
QUESTION:
Mr Abbott, can I just get your views on the latest warnings from the IPCC on climate change, particularly as it pertains to Australia - the greater risk of death by heat stroke and greater risk of catastrophic bushfires, and sea level rises threatening 250,000 homes? What do you see as the risk confronting Australia through climate change and are you confident that your policies will be adequate to meet that risk?
PRIME MINISTER:
The fact that there is this ongoing issue, the ongoing challenge is a very good reason to tackle it effectively rather than ineffectively. As Minister Hunt has just pointed out, under the carbon tax measures of the former government, our economy was damaged, but our emissions wouldn't actually reduce. So, we'll have direct action measures – you are all very familiar with them – that we are confident will bring about a five per cent reduction in our emissions by 2020.
QUESTION:
Mr Abbott, [inaudible] the election promising to reduce the foreign investment threshold to up to $15 million, do you still stand by that or is there room for compromise there?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well again, we are committed to the policies that we took to the election and, yes, we did have a discussion paper out there, which was a very good paper, which represents our view, our position, that the threshold for agricultural land purchases being reviewed by the Foreign Investment Review Board should be reduced from the current $240-odd million down to $15 million. I think it is a very reasonable position. I think it’s strongly supported out there amongst the Australian people, and yes, we will proceed with it.
QUESTION:
Mr Abbott, is it your intention to have the Senate vote on the carbon tax repeal before Christmas? Given you control the numbers in the Reps, I assume it will go through there relatively swiftly. Would you like to see a Senate vote on it before the end of this year?
PRIME MINISTER:
The short answer, if you like, Phil, is yes. But I'm only the Prime Minister. I realise that the Senate operates in accordance with its own rhythms and patterns. I would like the Senate to consider this matter as quickly as possible, but the last thing a mere Prime Minister does is try to give instructions to the Senate, because they do things their own way, and I don't think anything is likely to change about the Senate any time soon.
Who hasn't had a question yet?
QUESTION:
Prime Minister, did any of the leaders you talked to at the recent forums raise concerns about Australia scrapping the carbon tax?
PRIME MINISTER:
I'm trying to remember all of the various conversations that I had, and there were a lot of conversations with a lot of people in a lot of different contexts. I don't have any specific recollection of anyone raising concerns. The point I made throughout my conversations with the people I was talking to overseas is that we are determined to put Australia in the strongest possible economic position and that means eliminating, as far as we can, anything which is an obstacle to economic growth and to job creation and what I said to all of the leaders that I was able to talk to on my recent trip is that Australia’s focus, particularly in our year as G20 Chair, is going to be strategies for economic growth and that fundamentally means getting the Budget under control, it means reducing taxes generally, but abolishing unnecessary taxes. It means cutting red tape and it means building economic infrastructure. I’ve got to say, that was a very welcome message with the leaders I was talking to.
Thank you so much.
[ends]
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