Stanford EricaERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Madam Speaker. Well the brevity and the repetitiveness of the Government's backbenchers' and even Ministers' speeches do indicate that while they may have read their debate notes they do not understand the complexities of this bill. It is not straightforward and it is not simple. It's evidenced by the fact that the Minister of Climate Change knew about this potential problem a year ago and thought for the best part of last year that actually it wasn't a problem. And here we find ourselves a week or so out from the very first auction tinkering around with the rules of that auction. In fact it looks like this bill will be potentially passed two days before that first auction. It is a highly complex bill. There are a number of things that we need to traverse which we haven't had time for given the urgent nature of this debate. The Minister would have been told—he would have been told—by his advisers or maybe even Treasury that any time you interfere with an auction he will increase the risk more than he will take risk away. The more that we play with the rules of an auction the more we will find ourselves in serious difficulty. That's why I have tabled an amendment in my name that we will debate later to review this confidential price mechanism to ensure that it is actually working because we haven't had enough time in the very short period of time that we've had to debate this bill to make sure that we properly consider the risk. It is my great concern that there will be errors there will be mistakes and we actually need to come back and make sure that this has been dealt with properly.It has long been the National Party's position for many years that the primary policy tool for dealing with climate change should be a well-designed pure emissions trading scheme (ETS). It was the National Government in 2010 that introduced the emissions trading scheme. We knew it was the most effective and efficient tool for reducing our emissions and for fulfilling our climate change obligations. It was this ETS that enabled the National Party to lift our renewable energy production from 65 percent to 85 percent during our time in office a trend that I would note has stalled and probably actually gone backwards under this you know greenest Government ever. But it is our view that the emissions trading scheme is the most effective tool.It is important to make a distinction between the emissions trading scheme a pure emissions trading scheme and a carbon tax. An emissions trading scheme sets the amount of carbon that can be released and lets the market decide the price; whereas a simple carbon tax just sets the price and doesn't worry about how many emissions we're emitting. Now it's really important to make this distinction because over time with this Government while we've been tinkering around we've been moving closer and closer from a pure ETS to a carbon tax. With the setting of a price floor a price ceiling and now a secret reserve at auction we are moving further and further away from this pure emissions trading scheme where the price is left to the market and closer and closer to a tax—which let's face it is what the Greens and Labour actually always wanted. So they can't help themselves at every possible moment to tinker with the ETS to make it look more and more like a tax. The reason that is significant is because there is a long-established principle that goes all the way back to the Bill of Rights Act that this Parliament has the power to tax—not the Government and not the climate change Minister.The scale of this ETS revenue that we're talking about is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It's not chunk change; this is a lot of money that we're talking about. If you change the ETS to make it look more like a tax that is involving such a massive amount of revenue then it is our view that there must be more checks and balances on those pricing tools—in this case the formula that the Minister uses to effectively set the price at auction. So we'll introduce a tabled amendment to flesh this out and to have a look at this and we will debate it later on.The truth is that the emissions trading scheme will put people's power bills up it will put the price of fuel up it involves hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and it is no different than an excise tax which requires the validation of this Parliament—or at the very least some more checks and balances across the House. So while we commend the bill to the House at the moment we look forward to debating those tabled amendments.