Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment) Share this | Hansard source

Pretty well, thanks mate. How about you? According to Joel Fitzgibbon, none of you guys know what the truth of it is. We will continue an emissions reduction fund which has delivered four times the emissions reduction of the entire carbon tax and electricity tax experiment. We delivered 47 million tonnes at $13.95 per tonne of abatement contracted by the Clean Energy Regulator in an independent auction by an independent agent of government, and that could not have been a better outcome through a better process.

By contrast, what we saw on the other side was a policy which delivered abatement at well over $1,000 per tonne. It is not the cost of carbon; it is the cost per tonne of abatement. Twelve million tonnes at $15 billion—that is the reality. Right now what we want to know is: how much will your carbon tax cost, how much will it hurt Australian families and how much will electricity rise? These are the figures which their own modelling shows from their own time in government about their own policy: $600 billion at a carbon tax of $209 per tonne, $5,000 per household and a 78 per cent increase in wholesale electricity prices. We used their modelling. We drew on their modelling, published in the climate change mitigation scenarios prepared by the Treasury and the Department of Industry, Innovation, Climate Change, Science, Research and Tertiary Education when Labor were in government. It was not us; it was them. It was not our modelling; it was their modelling, done by the Treasury and the department of industry. They are hoist on their own petard.

So Australian families and Australian pensioners will pay higher electricity prices because of this 50 per cent renewable aspiration, and I say that knowing that they know that it will not be achieved. What it will lead to, as we saw last time, is a massive carbon tax equivalent. More than that, they then add on top of it an emissions trading scheme, which is a carbon tax by any other name, and they do that against a target of minus 40 to 60 per cent. Those are their policies. What we have done is what a government should do: we have modelled, we have planned, we have prepared, we have released, we have briefed, we have consulted. We have done all of those things. They created a 50 per cent figure out of thin air. As Joel Fitzgibbon said—how much will it cost; no-one knows. That is the truth of it. They have not done the modelling, and they will not do the modelling. What did Joel Fitzgibbon say about their emissions trading scheme? He said, 'You can call it a tax if you like'. What do we see at the end of the day? We see a tax of households; we see a policy that they have not modelled, but we know that it is an $85 billion capital cost and a $600 billion economic cost for the two together. (Time expired)

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