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

I am aware of budgeting and, unfortunately for me, I am an accountant. There are a whole range of baseline assumptions that are made. You cannot make a model out of a range of assumptions. You have to be specific if you want to come to a specific price. Otherwise, you must deliver a range of outcomes and a range of prices. If America are as advanced in the action as you presumed then the demand for permits will be higher. If they are below expectations then the demand for permits will be lower. If there was a presumption in the 2008 modelling that Copenhagen would be successful then the demand for carbon will be higher, the price will be higher and the assumptions about what you will gain on the income side of your budget will be extensively advanced from where it will be if there is not a successful outcome at Copenhagen and you have to purely rely on a domestic set-up.

This is why it is so important to find out exactly what the correlation currently is between the assessments of Treasury and where the world actually is at this stage. The answer that there are a range of assumptions seems to deny us the capacity to hear in this chamber exactly what the assumption was about this point in time. You stated that you are not happy with where the United States is at this point in time in your quote—without verballing you—that you ‘would like them to have been further along’. Is that also the view of the Treasury modelling?