Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Health Administration) Share this | Hansard source

Labor’s emissions trading scheme has become a complete dog’s breakfast. The Rudd Labor government has come up with a scheme that will do nothing for the environment and will put even more pressure on the economy and jobs. Senator Moore just said how we need to focus on the needs of the planet and address the challenges of global warming. The Labor government’s emissions trading scheme will do nothing to address the needs of the planet and will do nothing to address global warming. It could well be argued that it will make things worse. Given that it could well make things worse, Australians are well entitled to ask the questions: why do we have to make these sacrifices? Why do we have to lose our jobs? Why do we have to put additional pressure on the economy, particularly at a time like this, if it is not going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at a global level, which the government is telling us that it wants to achieve?

The government has put out a green paper, it has put out a white paper and it has done some Treasury modelling. As the Senate, obviously it is our responsibility to scrutinise what the government is proposing in this area. The Select Committee on Fuel and Energy, over the past seven or eight months, as Senator Macdonald has mentioned, has done a lot of scrutinising of the government’s proposals for an emissions trading scheme. The government has not provided access to any of the modelling information it has been trying to keep secret. I am going to raise a few issues here. You might all recall the Treasury modelling that was released on the government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. We as a committee commissioned Dr Brian Fisher to conduct a peer review of that Treasury modelling and the conclusion he came back with was that this Treasury modelling was seriously underestimating the impact of the government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme on the economy and jobs. Why? Are Treasury officials to blame? Have they done the wrong modelling? No, it is the government that is to blame, because the government directed Treasury on how to conduct its modelling. The government said, ‘You don’t have to assess the impact of the global economic crisis on how the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is going to play out in terms of the economy and jobs,’ even though the current circumstance is the worst economic crisis we have had since the Great Depression. The government did not model the most realistic scenarios such as the scenario that other parts of the world do not take action as fast as we do. These are the reasons Dr Brian Fisher expressed his concerns.

Since then, the committee has had evidence from Mr Paul Howse, the National Secretary of the Australian Workers Union. He also said that the Treasury modelling was inadequate. Jennie George, the member for Throsby, and Senator Glenn Sterle—a whole range of Labor members of parliament—have expressed concerns about the impact of the government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme on the economy and jobs. Given that fact, it is quite proper for a Senate committee to want to apply some proper scrutiny to what the government is proposing.

In order to be able to do this, we needed to have access to unpublished modelling information that Treasury is keeping secret on the assumptions, the model codes and databases and all the other underlying information that the government has fed into the process. The committee wrote to the Treasurer on 9 December. For two months the Treasurer of Australia did not respond to a request of a committee of the Senate. Then we had an order of the Senate passed on 4 February, and the government refused to comply with it. The government came into this chamber and claimed that commercial harm could be incurred by the external organisations that they have contracted to assist them with their modelling. One of those organisations is Monash University. We as a committee bent over backwards and changed the motion to see whether we could accommodate Monash University so that our committee could do our job and apply proper scrutiny but also could protect the interests of Monash University. Still, the government came back into this chamber and said, ‘We are not going to give you the information.’ But do you know what? They were hiding behind Monash University by saying they could well be exposed to commercial harm.

Monash University has written to the Treasurer. I will seek leave to table the letters written to the Treasurer and I will seek leave to table the letter that I, as Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Fuel and Energy, have sent to the Treasurer since then in response. It has got absolutely no concerns about this information being released, so it is time that the government stops hiding and starts to release the information that the Senate select committee needs to apply some proper scrutiny to this flawed emissions trading scheme. I call on the government to table the information the committee has asked for by close of business today, and I seek leave to table the correspondence that I have mentioned.

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