Julia Gillard’s announcement she will legislate a carbon emissions trading scheme next term would turn Mackay into a ghost town, LNP Dawson candidate George Christensen and Senator Ron Boswell said today.

Ms Gillard has technically stuck with Labor’s promise to not implement carbon trading in the next term - by saying it would not operate until 2013 - but Mr Christensen said Labor’s move to bring in carbon trading ahead of the rest of the world would be a massive disaster for Mackay, Queensland, and Australia.

“It will simply make the costs of operating in Mackay and throughout Australia so great that each and every energy intensive industry in the country, and the hundreds of thousands of jobs they support, will be in grave and immediate danger.

“Industries and jobs will simply go where there is no tax on carbon and the way things currently look, not one of our major competitors will follow Julia Gillard’s economically suicidal lead.

“There is a real danger industries and jobs will begin to go immediately if Labor is re-elected, because companies won’t want to become disadvantaged in finding new sites in Indonesia, or elsewhere in Asia and around the world to re-establish themselves.  They won’t wait for Labor’s carbon axe to fall. They’ll just go.

“This is a Labor attack not just on companies, but on blue collar workers and their communities.”

Mr Christensen said Ms Gillard’s election eve commitment was a reflection of Labor panic about Saturday’s election, with polls showing it on a knife-edge, driving Labor towards ever more dangerous deals with the Greens to get their support, and help them over the line.

The Greens demand a carbon tax AND a carbon trading scheme.  They also want a pie-in-the-sky 40% reduction in emissions by 2020, a 50% Resource Super Profits Tax, no new coal mines, no expansion of existing coal mines, and no refurbishment of coal fired power stations.

Ms Gillard’s announcement also follows a strong public appeal by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for Labor to “do more in Australia by putting a cap on carbon pollution and developing a market mechanism to deliver a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.”

“Climate change is too important to be ignored,” Mr Rudd pleaded in a letter to constituents in his Brisbane seat of Griffith, distributed in the dying days of the campaign.

“This is utter, destructive, madness,” Mr Christensen said.  “It shows that Labor is prepared to destroy the Mackay, Queensland, and national economies simply to hold on to power by pandering to extreme green sentiment.”

ENDS