Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

I made the point that this was probably one of the largest modelling exercises anywhere in the world in terms of other countries deserving or not deserving to know. Senator Milne, I understand you have a different policy position; I respect that. I do have to put on record my objection, every time there is a difference of policy position that the government takes, that you impute it is because of some base political motive. It seems to escape the Greens that fair-minded people might come to a different view because they come to a different view. It is not because we have been corrupted. It is not because we have been got to. It is not because we somehow do not care about the environment. We just have a different view about what the best way forward is. There is no great conspiracy associated with it. We simply do not have the same view as you about what the appropriate policy is. We do not have to personalise this. I just disagree with the policy proposition you are putting. I again say my recollection—and I would like to hedge this because we are talking about things which occurred last year—is that in fact Professor Garnaut looked at what an ambitious global agreement would look like and then considered what Australia’s reasonable share of that would be, and that was the 25 per cent that he included in his report to the government. Then the government did choose to model a range of scenarios other than 25 per cent.

In relation to the comments about the carbon price, I put those on the record, as you know, Senator, in response to your earlier proposition—and I might be paraphrasing here—that there was virtually no difference in economic cost. I was making a policy point that the difference in GNP is there, but that is not the only issue that you need to look at when you consider the policy implications of different carbon prices. That was the only point I was making.