Ron Boswell asks: Where are all the “green” jobs coming from, Minister?
Senator Boswell
Nationals Senator Ron Boswell issued this media release today:
Penny Wong needs to explain where the new green jobs are to come from under the emissions trading scheme because Treasury does not have any idea according to evidence before today’s Senate Committee on the Renewable Energy Bill,” said The Nationals’ Senator Ron Boswell.
“The states have researched the impact of the ETS and produced alarming unemployment figures for numerous industry, regional and local government areas.”
“The Commonwealth has done no work on anything but aggregate employment figures over time and used the assumption of full employment so there is a complete denial of the obvious problem of unemployment hitting various regions and industries very hard.”
“The Rudd and Wong line has always been that there will be new green jobs to make up for the loss of jobs that comes with the ETS, but no one can tell us where these green jobs will be located or how many there will be or how much money they will pay.”
“This serious flaw in public policy cannot simply be papered over by continual reference to Treasury modelling which is based on unrealistic assumptions and fails to include lack of global coordination on emissions targets and the global financial crisis.”
“The Council for Australian Federation, composed of all state and territory governments commissioned reports from Access Economics that detailed severe employment effects of the ETS in key regions including in Qld, the Fitzroy (2,822 jobs foregone), Mackay (2,185) and Mt Isa (1,170) regions.”
“I asked what sort of green jobs were going to replace the thousands of jobs to be foregone in these regions and was dismissed with the assertion from the Department of Climate Change that these ‘estimates are not reliable’.”
“The state governments have done their research which broadly agrees with findings by the Minerals Council but the federal government just flicks these away without producing any relevant figures of their own.”
“If the federal government says the states are wrong and the Minerals Council is wrong, where are the federal government’s figures to disprove them?”
“The government has not done the sums for the regions because they know the findings are bad.”
“The Rudd government is deliberately hiding the job losses associated with the ETS and that is unacceptable.”
