Peter Costello (Higgins, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Because numerous reports have been done on it by the Department of the Environment and Heritage, the Australian Greenhouse Office, the CSIRO, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and the Bureau of Meteorology. The Treasury, of course, has not constructed a model in relation to climate change, but as part of its role in advising the government it has undertaken extensive qualitative analysis of all the global literature in relation to this matter, including the UK government’s Stern review and the IPCC assessments. The Stern review uses an integrated assessment model to make projections of the global impact of climate change. As far as the Treasury is aware, no country has developed a model of national consequences. All of the models that have been developed are in relation to global consequences. The Stern review itself says:

Making such estimates is a formidable task … It is also a computationally demanding exercise, with the result that such models must make drastic, often heroic, simplifications along all stages of the climate-change chain. What is more, large uncertainties are associated with each element in the cycle.

That does not mean that it is not worth doing, and I think the Stern report was worth doing, although, as I have previously informed the House—

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