Tony Abbott says an election on Rudd’s ETS will be a tax election

“A political party that’s frightened of an election is a political party that’s doomed to stay in opposition,” Tony Abbott told the NSW Liberal Party’s Millennium Forum in a keynote speech today.

“An election fought over the emissions trading scheme will be an election on tax. It won’t be an election on the environment. Mr Rudd’s policy will be to save the environment by raising the cost of living. Our policy will be to save the environment by taking direct action to improve it with specific measures to be announced before the parliament returns in February,” the Opposition Leader said.

This is the transcript of Tony Abbott’s address:

Although the last two years have been difficult for the Liberal Party, better times eventually come to those who keep the faith and who are determined to make their opponents the issue rather than themselves. Since November 2007, our best times have been when we opposed the Government’s $42 billion stimulus package as “too much too soon” and since we opposed the Government’s emissions trading scheme as a tax policy masquerading as an environment policy.

In the past fortnight, the Liberal Party has finally shifted from being a government-in-exile, unsure of its role, to being a fair dinkum opposition determined to hold the government to account. We have remembered that the job of an opposition is to scrutinise the government, not just agree with it. The first rule of politics is that oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them. The second rule of politics, which the Liberal Party has just rediscovered, is that governments can’t lose unless they actually have an opposition. As a consequence, even people who don’t normally vote for us seem relieved because they know that it’s impossible to have good government without also having a strong opposition.

For many months, the conventional wisdom has been that we couldn’t oppose Mr Rudd’s emissions trading scheme because we couldn’t risk a double dissolution election. For a time, I even subscribed to this notion myself. The truth is that a political party that’s frightened of an election is a political party that’s doomed to stay in opposition; it’s like a sports team that’s cancelled Saturday’s game for fear that it might lose. Oppositions should live for elections because they are the only way to become a government. So I have a clear message for Mr Rudd about the early election that he has threatened us with: bring it on and we will be ready for you.

An election fought over the emissions trading scheme will be an election on tax. It won’t be an election on the environment. Mr Rudd’s policy will be to save the environment by raising the cost of living. Our policy will be to save the environment by taking direct action to improve it with specific measures to be announced before the parliament returns in February.

When it comes to environmental credentials, I am more than happy to match mine against the Prime Minister’s. My first big local campaign, as an MP, was to prevent Telstra from installing a mobile phone base station next to a kindergarten. My first public disagreement with the former Prime Minister, Mr Howard, was over my proposal to drain Lake Pedder. Our second spat was over my proposal to bury the overhead cables which are such an eyesore (and which, incidentally, make a significant contribution to greenhouse gas emissions). In government, my first big initiative was the Green Corps, a traineeship scheme that gave tens of thousands of young Australians six months of practical work in environmental restoration. I have always thought that there was a natural fit between the conservationist movement and a conservative political party. Both appreciate what we have and understand that we trifle with it at our peril. I’d welcome any election that the Prime Minister called as a referendum on his emissions trading scheme because Australians have always been suspicious of governments that try to bully people into change on the argument that it’s our one and only chance to get things right.

Even on the Government’s own figures, Mr Rudd’s emissions tax will add $1100 a year to the average family’s bills at a time when many think that the good times are gone and that Mr Rudd has no plan to bring them back. Of itself, it won’t actually cut any emissions at all. It will just make energy and transport more expensive. It’s the immediate equivalent of about a two and a half percentage point increase in the GST and that’s just what’s needed to reduce emissions by five per cent within a decade.

Now, Mr Rudd has taken a blank cheque to Copenhagen, offering to pay for further cuts in emissions but without saying precisely how this might be achieved and how much more it might cost. He seems to have forgotten that the people he has to persuade are the ones who elected him, not foreign activists more concerned about the planet at large than with the real individuals who have to make a living on it.

As a “friend of the chair” at Copenhagen, Mr Rudd presumably thinks that it make sense to scare people into accepting his position using film clips of children fleeing a scorched earth. By contrast, the Coalition prefers hope to fear and incentives to taxes and would rather encourage businesses to find smart solutions to environmental problems than hit them with the need to buy $120 billion worth of licences.

I want to support businesses like MBD Energy in Townsville which can use carbon dioxide and waste water from power stations to create stock feed and bio-diesel reducing emissions by up to 80 per cent. This is a project that I visited last week but that Mr Rudd wouldn’t go 500 metres to see because it didn’t fit his mantra that only an emissions tax can tackle climate change.

The former self-proclaimed “old fashioned Christian socialist”, who then said that he’d never been a socialist, who then pretended to be an economic conservative, before becoming the self-styled scourge of “free-market fundamentalism”, now seems to think that the only way to save the planet is to create an artificial market that will be dominated by derivatives traders. He is as prodigal with words as he is with other people’s money. How else could he describe climate change as, no less, the “greatest moral challenge” of our time, as if war, want and man’s inhumanity to man, let alone more prosaic concerns such as balancing the family budget and running decent schools and hospitals, hardly mattered any more?

I have always been an enthusiastic supporter of responsible measures to improve the environment. As a local surf life-saver and volunteer firey and as a keen cyclist, let alone as the father of three daughters who one day will want to have children of their own, how could I be indifferent to the fate of the planet? I have reserved my scepticism for Mr Rudd’s emissions trading scheme that’s basically a great big tax, to produce a giant political slush fund, to generate endless wealth transfers to the Labor Party’s favoured constituencies, supervised by a newly-minted carbon police. When Mr Rudd boasts that “most” low income earners will enjoy 120 per cent compensation for their increased costs he demonstrates that this is redistribution policy dressed up as climate change policy. The Liberal Party, by contrast, doesn’t like new taxes, doesn’t like politicised handouts and doesn’t like new bureaucracies. That’s why it only took someone to name Mr Rudd’s policy for what it really is for the party’s natural disposition to reassert itself.

I am not a Liberal “to the manner born”. My maternal grandfather was a lifelong unionist. My father reckons that, as child in the north of England during the depression, he went to a kind of communist Sunday school where they sang the Red Flag instead of hymns. My first political mentor was BA Santamaria whose economic concerns were for workers and for small business people but who was certainly no free-market economist. As a journalist at The Bulletin, I once moved the strike resolution after the photographic department had been sacked at a moment’s notice. Little did I realise, back then, that we would do a full week’s work in half the time for half the pay and that most of former staff photographers would end up earning much more as freelancers. I have become a Liberal because it has been more and more apparent to me that only flourishing businesses can pay workers more and that only a strong economy can sustain a vibrant and cohesive community. My convictions are strong because at university, in the media and in the parliament I have had to defend them. A few, I’ve changed, but those that have withstood the acid scrutiny of public life, I deeply believe in and will fight for.

The Liberal Party that I lead will be a recognisable descendant of that of my predecessors. I acknowledge the debt that I owe them all, including Brendan Nelson who steadied us after the election loss and Malcolm Turnbull who began the fight against Labor’s debt and deficits. They’re big shoes that I must now try to fill.

As employment minister in the Howard Government, I was proud to be associated with the Job Network and the improvements that its members achieved on the performance of the old Commonwealth Employment Service. There was the massive expansion of Work for the Dole that gave unemployed people the chance to focus on what they could do, not just on what they couldn’t. There was the Australian Building and Construction Commission that restored the rule of law to an industry subject to union thuggery. These were all historic reforms which Mr Rudd is now trying to undo.

As health minister, I had more than $40 billion a year’s worth of Commonwealth government health programmes working well because I took people’s concerns seriously and addressed them in ways which respected mainstream values. I made a start on tackling the problems of state government-run public hospitals by seeking to establish local management boards to take the bureaucracy out of patient care. This is the one reform that public hospitals really need but it’s the reform that the unions and the state Labor governments will never allow Kevin Rudd to make.

As the Prime Minister who presided over more than 2 million new jobs, a 20 per cent plus increase in real wages and a doubling of Australians’ real net wealth per person, John Howard is rightly regarded as the greatest Liberal since Sir Robert Menzies. Our challenge now is to learn from the Howard Government, not to copy it. We won’t support an Emissions Trading Scheme, especially a unilateral one. We won’t support a return to AWAs or the extension of unfair dismissal exemptions to businesses with 100 staff; but we will make Labor’s individual flexibility agreements more flexible and Labor’s individual transitional employment agreements less transitional and get the unfair dismissal monkey off the back of small business in accordance with our mandate at four successive elections. These are the sorts of measures needed, not Labor’s return to one size fits all industrial rules, if people’s jobs are to be protected during the next downturn and if their wages are to rise sustainably during the next boom.

I hope to be John Howard’s political heir, not his clone. He found problems and created solutions. Kevin Rudd generates process that makes problems worse. Our borders are no longer secure because people smugglers have taken advantage of Mr Rudd’s anxiety to appear compassionate. The Northern Territory intervention is being wound back, to the detriment of Aboriginal people, because Mr Rudd can’t stand up to the rights lobby or to an incompetent NT government. With Mr Rudd, more government is the answer to every problem. The answer to the Global Financial Crisis was more bank regulation even though Australian banks were not in trouble. Under the guise of responding to climate change, he is now considering the most pervasive extension of government regulation since the Second World War.

Never let it be said, though, that I have nothing good to say about our Prime Minister. It’s good that Australia seems to have avoided the worst consequences of the Global Financial Crisis: except that this success owes much more to the previous 25 years of economic reform than it does to the last 25 months of financial fiddling. It’s good that Mr Rudd signed the apology to Aboriginal people and the Kyoto protocol; I just wish he weren’t so addicted to signing cheques on borrowed funds for pink batts that have been amateurishly installed, for instance, and for halls in schools that are set to close. It’s good that he has been prepared to risk jetlag for our country even if his real object seems to be establishing credentials to be the next secretary-general of the United Nations. It may even have been worth taking a 114 strong delegation to Copenhagen – much bigger than Britain’s, almost as big as America’s and, on a per capita basis, 100 times the size of India’s – because you just never know when an extra photographer might be needed or someone to carry the hair dryer.

The question that the Australian people are starting to ask, though, is how much is there to show for the first two years of the Rudd Government apart from newly empowered unions and a rejected emissions tax? Well, there’s the 150 plus reports and enquiries that have postponed hard decisions; there’s about $200 billion in extra debt; and there’s been three interest rate rises in just three months as the Reserve Bank’s monetary policy counteracts Mr Rudd’s fiscal policy. He might even end up having to recycle another Labor election slogan: “more to do but we’re heading in the right direction”. Remember that? To the extent it’s true, due only to the good work of governments with far more courage than his. Morris Iemma wouldn’t mind the steal but whether the Australian people really want their first federal premier now that they’ve seen him in action is another matter altogether.

I should finish by congratulating the members and supporters of our Party for recalling Liberal MPs, including me, to our shared values and principles. It was the tens of thousands of calls and emails to MPs’ offices as much as the votes of Coalition senators that have saved Australia from Mr Rudd’s premature and ill-considered emissions tax. You have reminded us that we are the party of low tax, small government and economic freedom. You have forced us to consider more intelligent ways of protecting the environment than slapping a new tax on the essentials of modern life.

As long as I am leader, no one will be in doubt about what our party stands for: we will support families in all their diversity, especially families with children; we will foster a strong economy where government does not readily put extra burdens on small business; we will value the contribution that older people have made and will not let them down in their vulnerable years; we will respect the institutions that have shaped our country and won’t lightly change them; we will ensure that Australia’s voice is heard wherever there is an Australian value to uphold or an interest to defend; we won’t forget that the great Australian value of a fair go requires people to have a go too; above all else we will try to ensure that government does what it can to foster individuals’ and communities’ capacities to be their best selves.

I cannot guarantee political success but I give you my pledge that the next election won’t be lost through lack of courage, conviction or energy.