Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to go back to the cost of this, because it is very important that we know what the costing of this proposed amendment is. We have certainly worked out at this point in time that it is not going to change how much it costs the Treasury. We have proven that, because we know that in the future, under standard diesel that has a five per cent biorenewable component, they will be getting both the production grant and claiming the full excise. And we know it is going to change who gets it, because now the person who gets it is going to be the major producer proximate to the oil company or the oil company itself that produces it. We do not know how much is being produced, yet we have come up with the fact that it is going to cost $1.5 billion in so many years time—we do not know how; we just plucked that figure out of the air and put it in the preamble here. Seeing as we know the eventual cost is going to be nil, no difference, and we know that all that is going to change is who produces the biodiesel, can the Treasury give any estimation whatsoever of what is the current cost of supporting this new biorenewable fuel industry in biodiesel?