Transcript, Alan Jones Program, 18 July 2012
July 18, 2012
TRANSCRIPT
2GB SYDNEY- INTERVIEW WITH ALAN JONES
18 JULY 2012
E&OE….
Topics: Carbon Tax
ALAN JONES: Greg Hunt is the go-to man on this issue for Tony Abbott; full bottle I think you’d have to say, and he recently said that if we were to meet Julia Gillard’s so-called emissions targets, $57 billion will be required to purchase overseas carbon credits by 2050. Thank god she won’t be here. $57 billion, 1.5% of GDP. He’s with me here in the studio. Greg, good morning.
GREG HUNT: Good morning Alan.
ALAN JONES: Thank you for your time. This is beyond belief isn’t it?
GREG HUNT: Well the amount of money that Julia Gillard wants to spend overseas, this is over and above the Carbon Tax, is almost equivalent to the Australian defence budget, so what she wants to do is to spend the Australian defence budget almost completely, each year, every year forever on foreign carbon credits from Kazakhstan, from the Middle East, from China and there’s been massive fraud already and when you’re spending $57 billion or almost the Australian Defence Budget, it is a fiscal death sentence for our grandchildren.
ALAN JONES: You’re absolutely right, good expression- a fiscal death sentence. Now the United States, Canada, India, China, Japan have all made it clear, they’re not moving to a broad-based Carbon Tax model, we’re out there on our own.
GREG HUNT: The world is running in completely the opposite direction to what Australia’s doing and when I say Australia, it’s Julia Gillard, and it’s the Labor Party. It’s her and it’s the rotten core of people around her.
When you look at the US, they are going as fast as possible in the other direction. Canada has just had an election in which the centre left party was all but wiped out because they were promoting a Carbon Tax equivalent. Japan’s going the other way, and as for Europe, the truth about Europe is that they tax about, or have taxed about $1 per head of population. We’re going to be taxing $400 per head of population.
ALAN JONES: Yeah, of course, she says Europe’s got an Emissions Trading Scheme. For a start it doesn’t cover the whole economy. Is this woman just a compulsive liar or something? I mean there is a European Emissions Trading Scheme, it doesn’t cover the whole economy and many industries there have free emission permits don’t they?
GREG HUNT: That’s exactly right, what happens is the Australian price is dramatically higher…
ALAN JONES: …Sack this woman…
GREG HUNT: …but it is dramatically broader as well. The best example here is, over the first five years the European scheme raised about $500 million a year but that’s on a population of 500 million, so a $1 per person. The Australian scheme, year one, $400 per person, 400 times heavier on a per-person basis.
ALAN JONES: We’ll raise more in three months than Europe’s raised in five years.
GREG HUNT: Correct. 100% correct.
ALAN JONES: How the hell can our economy cop that in this environment?
GREG HUNT: Look it is a reverse tariff as you quoted, this idea of a python squeeze, it gets tighter and tighter. The people who cop it are the very folks that are listening now, mums and dads, pensioners, self-funded retirees and small-business people. We’ve met so many small-business people, whether it’s from the Hastings Pizza Shop or Stockade Pies, Simon the Pieman in High Street of Campbelltown. He’s got to make 8000 more pies a year, he makes them all by hand, just to cover the costs of the Carbon Tax. He thinks of everything in terms of how many pies do I have to make, small local businessman, great job, but he’s got to work all these extra hours just to keep his head above water.
ALAN JONES: If I can just say to my listeners you see, this is an issue that the public are not made familiar with. Everyone says well, what about Abbott? What about the team? Are they going to be any better? People have these concerns and I keep saying to you, oppositions very rarely get any oxygen. Just listen to this bloke here, he’s sitting here beside me, there’s not a note in his hand. This is the go-to man for all this rubbish and an outstanding exposition, he’s talking about a bloke in Cambelltown. How many more pies has he got to make?
GREG HUNT: 8000.
ALAN JONES: 8000 more pies. Now another lie, Julia Gillard says China is acting to reduce its carbon emissions. That’s a lie.
GREG HUNT: Well Chinese emissions are growing at the fastest rate of any country, at any point in history. That’s because they’re developing. They’re trying to bring people out…
ALAN JONES: … With our coal I might add!
GREG HUNT: Well they’re buying our coal, they’re buying our gas and they’re…
ALAN JONES: …So they can have cheap power and we can’t…
GREG HUNT: …they’re converting our iron-ore into steel to build their cities and that’s a good thing that China is growing and developing and pulling people out of poverty and it also helps Australia enormously but their coal is going from 1.4 billion tonnes in 2002 to 4 billion tonnes in 2015. So in other words they are increasing their coal consumption massively, completely the opposite of what Julia Gillard and the sort of rotten core around her are trying to tell Australia.
ALAN JONES: Well they’re lies, they’re lies. She says China is closing its coal fired power stations, that’s what she says! Well she doesn’t say they they’re replacing them with larger ones.
GREG HUNT: Well that’s exactly what is happening. They’re getting rid of the old inefficient ones and they’re building bigger ones so as they can have more electricity. There’s a little province in Inner Mongolia and within that there’s a prefecture called Xilingol. Xilingol is this area of just over a million people. It is going through a massive growth and the growth in coal in that one prefecture, in that one province, is rivalling the growth in Australian coal consumption. And that’s one small part of China.
ALAN JONES: Part of their five year plan! China is going to exclude power generation. If they were to have an Emissions Trading Scheme, power generation is excluded from it.
GREG HUNT: China has a couple of tiny little projects which have nothing to do with the economic development of the country. What’s happening is China is building more coal, more gas, more nuclear, more wind, more solar, wherever they can get more electricity, they are generating more electricity. But the truth is, their emissions are soaring and their coal consumption is growing at a faster rate than anything the world has ever seen.
ALAN JONES: So it’s OK to export this dreadful coal to China, where they can have cheap electricity, but we can’t have it here?
GREG HUNT: Well that’s exactly what the Government’s proposing. You ask the Prime Minister do you want to sell more coal to China? Yes. Do you want Australia to use coal? It’s not a case of no, it’s complete confusion, the Government doesn’t know what it wants to achieve in Australia.
ALAN JONES: No it doesn’t. One breath she says oh- depending on the audience- she said the other day we’ll always be relying on fossil fuels. Hello? What does that mean?
GREG HUNT: I suspect that she was probably talking to an audience that may’ve had some people that cared about cheap electricity.
ALAN JONES: Absolutely, well another lie. She said India is taking - her words- national action through I quote ‘clean energy tax on coal’.
GREG HUNT: The coal tax in India is a dollar per tonne. In Queensland the long standing equivalent of that, the royalty is $20 a tonne, which has had nothing to do with being a climate tax or anything else, it’s just the royalty. So the long-standing Queensland tax is about 20 times heavier than what is happening in India. It’s just a minor revenue item and in just the same way, India is trying to grow its economy to give their people a chance to come out of poverty, that’s also good for Australia.
ALAN JONES: Where she’s got her foot on the economic throat of the nation.
GREG HUNT: Well if you go from small business to small business you’ll see chicken farmers, I’ve got asparagus growers, you’ve got farmers everywhere who are saying, hey I’m the bunny that’s going to have to cop this Carbon Tax because I can’t pass on the costs to the big guys, I’m being squeezed by them. I met chicken growers in Mangrove Mountain up on the Central Coast of New South Wales a couple of weeks ago with Lucy Wicks and Karen McNamara who are our candidates up there and these chicken growers said look we’re going have about $9000 of extra costs because of electricity and gas. We can’t pass those on, we’re being squeezed. We’re the ones that are going to have to decide whether we keep going.
ALAN JONES: I know and of course this is at $23 a tonne. It goes to 29 in 2016.
GREG HUNT: Well it goes a lot further than that. It hits $37 in 2020 and then it keeps going to $350 by 2050. What does that mean? It means that the pain that starts now just gets tighter and tighter and higher and higher.
ALAN JONES: Every poll that comes out has got the Greens at about 10 or 11% of the vote. Sarah Hanson-Young says that she wants a Carbon Dioxide Tax of $100 a tonne.
GREG HUNT: Well I’ve got to say on this occasion, Sarah Hanson-Young is being modest because the Gillard plan, the Rudd plan, the Labor plan is to take it to $350, not on anything that we’ve said, but on Treasury modelling. That’s what they’ve put out there, and then on top of that Carbon Tax they then spend, as we said at the start, almost the defence budget on foreign carbon credits because the whole Australian Tax doesn’t even work.
ALAN JONES: But then we’re also contributing to the United Nations Green Climate Fund. They want to raise $100 billion by 2020, how much are we tipping into that?
GREG HUNT: Well they won’t tell us. We have asked, I’ve written to Greg Combet. ‘We’ve made no decisions’…
ALAN JONES: My understanding is they’ve made $599 million contribution to that already.
GREG HUNT: They made an initial contribution, but they won’t tell us what’s coming next and so if you think you’ve been paying a high price so far, wait until you add that in.
ALAN JONES: This is $100 billion by 2020.
GREG HUNT: No answers. We’ve written, we’ve asked questions through the Senate process, silence. It’s all in the bucket of we haven’t made a decision yet. Well I can bet you that there’s a decision out there somewhere.
ALAN JONES: Well of course she was telling people in Perth that Tony Abbott will not repeal the Carbon Tax. She’s lied about introducing it, now she’s lying about Tony Abbott repealing it. How difficult will that be?
GREG HUNT: It’s not difficult and I can guarantee because it’s my job to do this. We will do it, we’ve got a plan, we start on day one and all we have to do this: we simply have to pass legislation which says, the tax stops. It’s not difficult, we’ll do it and the difference here is I think just because the Prime Minister doesn’t believe that she’ll carry out her word, she assumes everybody else is the same. We’re not the same. We are different, we will repeal it, we will do it, we’ll start on day one.
ALAN JONES: Good on you, great to talk to you. Thank you for coming in.
GREG HUNT: It’s a pleasure.
ALAN JONES: And thank you for the hard work you’re doing on behalf of people out there who are really, really down on the bare bones of their backside. That’s Greg Hunt, the man in charge of all of this for the Opposition. It’s half past seven.
(ends)
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