Gladstone: Queensland's biggest loser under Rudd's ETS

Monday, 29 March 2010 00:47 |

Gladstone would be Queensland’s biggest economic loser under the Rudd Government’s Emissions Trading Scheme because of its massive reliance on coal fired power, Senator Ron Boswell and Liberal National Party Flynn candidate Ken O’Dowd said today. Senator Boswell and Mr O’Dowd cited power price increases of up to 64% in New South Wales announced late last week as “a job destroying sign of things to come” for Queensland and Gladstone. The independent price setting agency in NSW that announced the increases cited the Rudd Government’s ETS as a major factor in the increase. It also blamed the need for massive new investment in power infrastructure: investment that Senator Boswell said had stalled because of uncertainty about the Rudd Government’s plans to tax carbon emissions. Senator Boswell said Queenslanders could expect similar price impacts and that would hit Gladstone’s industrial base, and jobs, hard. “Industry here, especially but not only aluminium refining and smelting, are very big users of power, and their future would be in serious doubt if we get power price increases of the sort that are being mooted,” Mr O’Dowd said. “The impact will be even worse than it might have been because Kevin Rudd is determined to make Australia go it alone, and move on putting a price on carbon before it happens anywhere else in the world.” Senator Boswell predicted big users of power would simply leave Australia and go where there is not a price on carbon – which will be to just about any other country on the planet. “Kevin Rudd is prepared to throw Gladstone and every job in the city to the wolves, just so he can hold his head up when he’s in the company of climate change fanatics on those overseas trips he loves to take.” Senator Boswell said a new cost burden for big power users was emerging under changes to the Government’s renewable energy programs which would force them to buy an open ended number of the expensive renewable energy certificates.

< Prev		Next >