Mr TURNBULL (Leader of the Opposition) (3:57 PM) —For the past seven weeks the opposition has been trying to get a straight answer out of the Prime Minister on the subject of jobs. We have asked question after question on the effect of his policies on jobs, and all we get is blather, waffle and words, words, words—most of them referring to redundancy. That seems to be his fixation. I can give just one example. On Thursday, 12 March the shadow Treasurer, the member for North Sydney, asked the Prime Minister about the impact, the jobs consequences, of the so-called stimulus packages. The Prime Minister’s answer was:

One of the things working families are interested in the most is remaining working families. The Prime Minister seems to be determined to make them redundancy families. He has so incompetently assembled his economic policies that he is deliberately putting Australians out of work at a time when we face real economic challenges. When we need a government that supports the economy, supporting employment, he is putting Australians out of work.

Yesterday we raised with him the very concrete example of Xstrata, one of Australia’s largest mining companies. It has said that, if the Rudd emissions trading scheme is enacted into law, it will close three or four mines, approximately 1,000 jobs will be lost right now, future investment of up to $7 billion will be cancelled and 4,000 future jobs will no longer be established. That is the evidence from Xstrata, one of the largest mining companies in the world, one of the largest employers in the mining industry in Australia. We put this to the Prime Minister and he waffled as usual. Words, words, words—endless words but no understanding of his own scheme. What he said was that Xstrata would be compensated as an emissions-intensive trade-exposed sector. But, in fact, the coal mining industry has been left out; instead, they have to scrabble for a bit of random compensation out of a fund. They are not going to be given free permits, as other elements in the emissions-intensive trade-exposed sector will be.

So we have the Prime Minister with an emissions trading scheme which is going to put Australians out of work—we have the word of this large employer saying the Prime Minister’s policy will put thousands of Australians out of work. We raise it with him in the parliament, and he does not even understand his own scheme. He cannot even explain the consequences of his own scheme. He does not know the damage he is doing, because he does not understand the scheme he is demanding that everybody sign up to. It is bad enough asking us to sign up to it sight unseen, but it is sight unseen by him too. Who has read it? Senator Wong, perhaps—nobody else, that is for sure.

Today, we raised another concrete example—a company called Envirogen, which is in the business of creating renewable energy from the burning of waste coalmine gas. At the moment, it gets compensation under the New South Wales Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme. Under that scheme, it gets financial incentives in the form of NGACs. That scheme will come to an end with the beginning of the Rudd emissions trading scheme, but, as Envirogen writes to us:

in other words, by creating more emissions. They go on:

What is going to happen? More emissions, a current investment of $455 million and a hundred jobs at risk as well as new investment of $345 million and more than 300 new jobs at risk. There is a concrete case—a practical example—of the problems of a poorly designed emissions trading scheme.

I asked the Prime Minister about this in question time today, and all he could offer us was a meaningless, rambling lecture on consistency. Indeed, consistency is a major problem—he has as much difficulty with being consistent as he does with being relevant. Let us not forget that this is a man who said, when he was trying to get elected—and successfully getting elected in 2007—that he was an economic conservative. On the other hand, when he was trying to become leader of the Labor Party, he said he was an old-fashioned Christian socialist. And then, at the end of 2006, shortly after he had become leader of the Labor Party, he said to the Age—which announced this almost in mourning and almost with a black border around the front page—‘I am not a socialist. I have never been a socialist and I never will be a socialist.’ The readers were obviously very upset to read that! Now, of course, he has got a new guise. The Christian socialist who then ceased to be a socialist and became an economic conservative to get elected has now become a social democrat, based on his latest essay in the Monthly magazine!

Mr Hockey —He is a chameleon on steroids!

Mr TURNBULL —One of my colleagues here describes him as a chameleon. That is very unfair, and I am disappointed. It is very unfair to chameleons—chameleons are only one colour at a time! The Prime Minister seems to adopt every political colour simultaneously. He is a highly evolved form of chameleon, if a chameleon he is at all! But he claims to be a social democrat, and, of course, the question is: ‘What is a social democrat?’ We all know that the difference between social democrats and other democrats is that social democrats are socialists. One of the Prime Minister’s fellow social democrats—one of his brethren in the international assault on neoliberalism—is, of course, Hugo Chavez. He is a very distinguished political leader, and the Prime Minister has obviously modelled himself on him. I just note that, not so long ago, Hugo Chavez was asked by journalists about the differences between him and Fidel Castro. Hugo Chavez said: ‘Fidel is a Communist. I am not. I am a social democrat.’ The time has come for the Prime Minister to rule out being a communist, but it was probably only a matter of time. He will have a go at that at some stage!

We have seen, over the last two months, labour force figures where the number of Australians without jobs has risen by 83,000. The unemployment rate has risen from 4½ per cent to 5.2 per cent—the highest in four years. And, I might say, youth unemployment is at its highest since 2001. We have seen a sharp contraction in GDP of one-half of one per cent during the December quarter. That has left Australia on the brink, at risk of a Rudd recession. We have seen evidence from one company after another, and I have cited just two today, that the Rudd government’s emissions trading scheme is going to cost them jobs. They are addicted to this emissions trading scheme as a matter of ideology. The reality is that there is no virtue in an emissions trading scheme per se—it has to be well designed. You can have a well-designed emissions trading scheme which does not cost jobs or you can have a badly designed one, such as the one the Prime Minister is proposing to foist on Australia.

The fact of the matter is that so many jobs in Australia depend on industries which are emissions intensive and whose competitors are in countries which are unlikely, for the foreseeable future, to put a carbon cost on their emissions-intensive industries. If you take the export of thermal coal, for example, the largest exporter of thermal coal nowadays—it was not always so—is Indonesia. If, as a result of the Prime Minister’s emissions trading scheme, we export 100 million tonnes less thermal coal, Indonesia will just export 100 million tonnes more. Thousands of jobs are lost in Australia, and there is absolutely no benefit to the environment. That is why we have always opposed the Rudd government emissions trading scheme. We have always opposed it because it is bad for jobs and bad for the environment, whereas the scheme we proposed several years ago was protective of emissions-intensive trade-exposed industries, recognising that economic reality.

Of course, this lack of competence in economic management is inherent in the Rudd government. We saw at the very outset of their government the way in which they talked up inflation for purely political purposes. They talked up inflation and talked up interest rates. That was the great challenge. We used to get lectures from the Assistant Treasurer all the time about the evils of inflation, and we were described as economic idiots because we dared to suggest that there was a global credit crisis and there might be more than enough tightening and contraction coming from the international credit squeeze. It turned out that we were right on that point—very right, as it turned out—and the Australian businesses that suffered from interest rates being too high for too long should blame the Rudd government for the way in which they talked up inflation.

Then, of course, we saw the extraordinary bungle of the unlimited bank deposit guarantee. How much damage has this done? This, of course, is part of the reason why the government are now rushing to establish Ruddbank. They have dislocated the financial markets without any precedent. There is no comparable country in the world with a strong, well-regulated financial sector—courtesy of the coalition in government, I might add—that has done so. There is no precedent of a country like Australia going for an unlimited bank deposit guarantee. Why would the country with the most secure banking system go for the most unlimited, extensive and comprehensive bank deposit guarantee? For a political headline. It is all politics and no economics. That was the Prime Minister’s objective. And what have we seen? The finance companies that underwrite the motor vehicle industry and equipment sales cannot raise money. Cash management trusts cannot raise money. Mortgage trusts cannot raise money. A quarter of a million Australians’ savings have been frozen. Now we see, as the government rush to try to patch up the damage they have done, that they have come up with this misconceived Ruddbank, probably the most misconceived exercise that the government have put forward to date. I will speak about that in speaking on the bill in a moment.

The government was left the strongest hand of economic cards it could possibly ask for. It was left with a national government with no debt, with cash in the bank and with a Future Fund that was established to take the burden of the previously unfunded liabilities to public sector pensioners off the shoulders of future generations. It was left with strong surpluses. It was literally the envy of the world, described by the Economist magazine as the ‘wonder down under’. That strong economic management had created jobs—2.2 million jobs—and, when we left office, the lowest unemployment rate for a generation. We pursued those policies that create jobs because we are passionate about employment. We recognise that the best form of social welfare is employment, to give everybody the chance of a job and to make it possible for Australians to live their lives as they wish, because we believe passionately that the job of government is to create and foster the economic environment where Australians can do their best. We now have a government led by a social democrat Christian socialist who, in his own words, wants to put the state at the centre of the economy. He wants to put an activist state at the centre of the economy. He really is a worthy companion of Mr Chavez.

Our opponents pretend to have compassion for the unemployed, but at the same time they are legislating for unemployment. They are, in fact, the party of unemployment. In 1996 the coalition inherited an unemployment rate of 8.4 per cent from the Keating Labor government. It took us a decade to lower it, just as it took us a decade to pay off their debt. Increasingly it looks, tragically, as though history will repeat itself under the Rudd Labor government. It is delivering us the classic old Labor trifecta, that terrible trifecta of more unemployment; more debt that will burden generations to come with higher taxes and higher interest rates; and, as we saw last week, more strikes. We cannot afford a government that is so careless about the economy and so ready, in pursuit of its own ideology, to send thousands and thousands of Australians onto the dole queues.