Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Throsby for the question and acknowledge her interest in the issue. There was a rally today, I know, from a group called the Climate Sceptics, a group calling itself the world’s first political party to be upfront about its doubts on anthropogenic global warming. I presume the member for O’Connor attended. He seems to have gone strangely quiet.

The concept that a price on carbon is something brand new in one sense is wrong. There has always been a price on carbon. The problem has been that people have been willing to forward that bill to the next generation. What we had today was an attempt from the government to change the way we deal with that in the future, while we have an opposition, with people like the member for O’Connor, willing to remain in the neglect of the past. The member for Higgins, on radio, has referred to the report that has been thrown about but not adopted by the opposition and said:

Technically speaking, if you build in particular assumptions you can get any outcome you want.

In the same way that he used to question modelling that he was provided with, he said:

I would take the same caution in relation to Frontier Economics.

One of the assumptions that is in that report is that you can easily include agricultural offsets at the moment. There are real challenges in the science of doing that at the moment, and Australia is in quite a different position to the United States on this, for a number of reasons. First of all, the fact that the United States have not ratified Kyoto means that they are not bothered by the concept that their agricultural offsets will not be internationally tradeable. We want to have a system where offsets are internationally tradeable.

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