Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

One of our problems in understanding what the impact of this legislation will be is that there was no modelling offered to assist us in that respect. We did ask Treasury when they appeared before us in the committee inquiry and they clearly stated that this was a policy decision—therefore a decision of ministers, presumably—and that no modelling had been done. All we can do is take the currently best advice we have in terms of what the price is for diesel and biodiesel now and then extrapolate that over the next few years. There are some givens: the amount of the rebate and the energy credit scheme rebate. We know that the fuel tax credit is zero for biodiesel and 18c a litre for diesel. And we roughly know, as I said, the gate price at the present time. Why was no modelling done so that we could better understand what the impact is likely to be? You have just produced two tables that show the trends, and that has at least given us some clue, although I would warn against going back to 1985, given that we have had a huge peak in oil.

Can the minister also comment on what we were told during the hearing by people who made submissions that effectively biodiesel will continue to track oil because it is now a globalised commodity. The feedstocks are pretty much the same around the world in terms of price and so is the product. Just like oil, it is likely that biodiesel is increasing as a share of the total market—it is hardly even on the Richter scale here in Australia but in other countries that is certainly the case. I think it is reasonable for us to have assumed that the prices will not get too disparate over the next five or six years. Why did you conclude otherwise—that this was not possible to model—if in fact you did? Why was there not a range of options modelled so that we would have some idea of the impact under various scenarios?