Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last night in Senate estimates, Senator Kim Carr managed, against the odds, to extract some information on the funding of the Bjorn Lomborg Australia Consensus Centre. The key of the snippets, reluctantly provided, was that the decision to provide the $4 million of Commonwealth funding was not a decision to fund a particular university but a decision to fund a methodology, well in advance of any academic institution in this country agreeing to host such a methodology. So a decision was made to fund Dr Lomborg and his methodology, and Dr Lomborg was then told to go out and hawk the $4 million to any university that was prepared to provide the program. Again, I stress that when the funding was approved it had not had any involvement of any university.

How did the government manage to assess this methodology, particularly in light of its cuts to science and a constrained science budget? The methodology involves holding a conference of invited economists where they do cost-benefit analysis of possible solutions to various global problems and then rank them in order for money. The consensus conferences have always included climate change as a global issue, but, surprisingly, every time the responses to climate change have ranked very, very low on their priorities. Things like spending on vitamin supplements and promoting global trade are ranked as issues of much higher importance than climate change action.

The academics' critique of this methodology is that the attending economists systematically undervalue the economic risk of climate change and, hence, reduce the benefits of climate change action and upscale the costs. Academics have also criticised the selection of panel members, saying they largely comprise right-wing climate change sceptics. There is such criticism of this methodology that the Danish government has decided that it will no longer fund the Copenhagen Consensus Center; yet our government made the decision, presumably at cabinet level, that it would fund this methodology. What we want to know is: where was the scientific input; where was the analysis of the value of this methodology, particularly given these are constrained economic times?

We heard references to Labor's funding to a number of organisations from Senator Birmingham, desperately trying to defend the government's decision. He mentioned the Whitlam Institute about 10 times. The Whitlam Institute, established in 2000 within the University of Western Sydney, was a pre-existing organisation that, yes, certainly received funding from the Rudd government. Likewise, The Conversation was quoted as a funding exercise. Definitely, funding was given by the federal Labor government to this collaboration between the CSIRO and four leading Australian universities to make academic writings more accessible. Finally, there was the Australian National University's Australian Centre on China in the World—funding for some of the world's leading Sinologists at Australia's national university.

So, there is no comparison of that funding to the lack of process that went on in this regard. This is not a question of academic freedom. No-one would suggest that we fund the Flat Earth Society just because someone ran into the Prime Minister. We need information on what the process was that led to this centre being funded.