It is unjust and unworkable to expect a political party representing this regional constituency to support such a plan.

We will lose markets, lose exports, lose jobs here at home: hardly helpful for setting funds aside to bring emissions down.

Production will be curtailed, that's all. The slack in supply from Australia will be filled by other countries with no such carbon market. Their dirtier emissions will go up. All we will have done is forfeit our prosperity as well as our ability to help the world and ourselves with cleaner technology.

How neo-liberal of Rudd to send Australia out ahead of the world armed only with a domestic market based policy. He will take the government jet to Copenhagen and offer round a menu of our businesses to foreign countries to take their pick of the industries they could supplant and relocate. Self sacrifice is hardly the weapon, as Rudd puts it, 'to secure our nation's future in a tough, competitive and unsentimental world'.

Rudd professes to be part of a great tradition that brings the people along with reform, especially workers. The nation wants a response to climate change that has integrity. This ETS does not.

If you don't have rural and regional Australia on side with a massive structural change like this, you do not have a mandate to proceed. Labor is running into every shed, holding paddock and harvest with a new tax collector to rip thousands of dollars from every family on the land.

Workers dependent on farms, mines and downstream processing are at risk. Rural Australia says no to that kind of contract with their government. And so they should.

Rudd has claimed for years to have an obsession with productivity.

Yet the ETS creates a new marketplace where the output per worker is immediately and significantly reduced because power costs suddenly jump.

If he was consistent in his own neo- liberalism Rudd would also put a dollar cost on food security and on the human cost of hunger.

That would make for a more perfectly informed market. We produce enough food every year for anywhere between 60 million and 100 million people - many more than our domestic population of 21 million.

Loading extra costs on agriculture means that not only do we lower export capacity but we won't be feeding so many people.

No economy can withstand a shock like this ETS and simply carry on as before.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Labor's approach to climate policy will affect our ability to keep on feeding so many people.

Maybe Rudd is happy to abandon Australia's Millennium obligations des-pite a further estimated 50,000 people in our immediate region suffering from malnutrition already as food inflation hits.

I have long believed that we need to reduce reliance on fossil fuel energy as insurance against global warming and the end of cheap oil.

With our current technology we are utterly and hopelessly dependent on oil for food production and transport.

It is estimated that the average western family pours as much oil into their fridge every year as they do into the family car. Climate change asks the core question of how we change that equation.

The answer does not lie in punishing those countries and industries that are the most efficient fuel users and investors in clean technology like Australia.

The answer lies in rewarding them and facilitating their efforts here and abroad.

Once Rudd's 'harsh and forbidding world' starts eating our ETS afflicted industries alive, the world loses a climate change leader, it doesn't create one.

Australia is a leader in many environmental technologies, particularly conservation farming.

We can't keep winning if we are weighed down with costs not born by our competitors across the world.

Many have pointed out that the Coalition went to the election on a platform with an ETS.

It is inconceivable to me that the Coalition would have brought in an ETS that would damage industries that are global leaders and our major export earners, particularly where our humanitarian objectives i.e. feeding people, were also at stake.

Further, we would have taken proper account of the need to ensure competitor nations were similarly bound to a global agreement before closing the ETS design door.

Rudd's ETS and its modelling stand entirely on fanciful hopes that our competitors will price carbon as we do, when we do.

The Coalition should never be on the policy side of delivering export industries to those of our competitors who cannot produce as cleanly as we can.

Rudd's policy puts all its faith in a market operated system to bring down emissions.

There is no bringing the community along, there is no provision of climate change public good.

A prime minister keen on genuine reform would insist on a policy approach with the proactive support of major stakeholders.

No Coalition that respected its own ability to govern better would support radical policy without regional Australia onside.

The ETS is like changing the nation's economic constitution - you don't do that without all players' support.

If The Nationals are left alone on the other side of the chamber on the ETS, it would be a historic breach of trust with seven million regional Australians. It would so damage the Coalition contract with Australia that it might never be mended.

In government we pursued neither a Brutopia nor a Utopia. We were guided by what was best for Australia.

It can be that simple. It has to be. For the Coalition has never been 'prepared to accept hundreds of thousands of Australians as collateral damage as a consequence of a 'market correction' as Rudd is now doing.