Senator advises Corporate Australia to Reject Government’s ETS

A SENIOR Nationals senator has called on corporate Australia to join his party's rebellion against carbon emissions trading in direct defiance of the Liberals.

Senator Ron Boswell has also rejected Malcolm Turnbull's negotiations with Labor on the ETS legislation, claiming they are short-sighted. The veteran Queenslander has also backed claims that Liberal MPs are spurning the Opposition Leader on the issue to back the Nationals.

Senator Boswell describes the ETS as unacceptable and warns it will drive food prices up by 7 per cent and smash jobs and business profits. He writes that the Nationals are unconcerned that the ETS legislation, rejected in the Senate earlier this month, could trigger an early election if rejected again later this year. And he says the Nationals want the business community to stand up and be counted.

"A strong and public show of support of leadership from business will seal the fate of the ETS," Senator Boswell writes.

"If business fails to hold the line that enabled us to block the ETS the first time, then the Labor-Green alliance will carve their investments up one slice at a time like salami."

Despite the strengthening push for a tactical shift, Mr Turnbull stuck to his guns on emissions trading yesterday, saying he remained prepared to negotiate amendments to Labor's legislation to correct deficiencies.

The Nationals have been progressively sharpening their anti-ETS rhetoric in recent weeks, culminating with the party's federal council adopting an anti-ETS policy last weekend.

Explaining the change on Sunday, the party's Senate leader, Barnaby Joyce, said the Nationals were leading community opinion against the ETS and also winning supporters among the Liberals. Early yesterday, senior Liberals told The Australian that Senator Joyce was a hothead and that "wiser heads" within the Nationals were more conciliatory.

But in today's opinion peace, Senator Boswell, a long-time coalitionist and inter-party peacemaker, goes further than Senator Joyce, blasting "zero-carbonites" and urging business to join the fight or risk losing control to anti-business forces.

"A post-ETS world is one in which everything costs more," Senator Boswell writes. Price increases would apply to everything: "tickets to the big games played under energy-spewing floodlights, concert tickets and theme park entry fees, higher rents in the massive airconditioned malls, also schools, restaurants, your local pub or club".

Senator Boswell writes that "vested interests" want to create an expectation that an ETS could be negotiated before November but insists the Coalition has no need to fold to Labor.

"The ETS has been rejected once," he writes. "If the numbers are right it can be rejected again.

"There is something to the argument that the all-powerful ETS regulations would still need to face a potentially hostile Senate. It's in the hands of business now -- whether they want to see Australian industry eaten away inch by inch through a Senate-controlled ETS or whether they will stand firmly against it.

"The Nationals are not alone on this. We have many Liberals on side."

Speaking in Geelong yesterday, Mr Turnbull said the shadow cabinet backed the creation of an ETS, but not before next February. By that time, the Copenhagen global climate change meeting in December would have established what other nations were prepared to do to reduce carbon emissions, the Opposition Leader said.

Mr Turnbull said that if Kevin Rudd required the Senate to vote on his legislation before Copenhagen, the Coalition would have to be pragmatic and seek to make amendments in co-operation with Labor.

Mr Turnbull also appeared to concede that not all Liberals agreed with his view, defending the right of his colleagues to "exercise individual conscience".