Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you for your response, Minister, but the point is that it is not a judgment about whether people come down on different sides of a policy question; there has to be a basis for coming down on a different side of a policy question. That is why I am asking the question: how did you choose 25 if you did not know what 40 was going to cost? That is the point that I am making. I am just trying to understand. As I said earlier, given that with five, 10, 15 and 25 there was not very much difference in the GNP out to 2050, what I tried to understand and what the Greens wanted to know was whether there was a point between 25 and 40 per cent in which there was a major step change, in which case you could clearly see that at that point there would be a significant difference in the GNP ramifications over time and you could logically say that was the point at which we could not manage it et cetera. But we do not have anything. All we have got is that the government made a decision not to model it. In the context of the 25 to 40 per cent Bali road map, it is actually an insult to the rest of the world that we did not model the road map. That is what we came home from Bali with. That was the ask from the developed countries—to make that cut, 25 to 40, and I simply do not understand when the government made the decision to just jettison what the world had asked for in Bali and not model it so that you would not know. It is not that you chose a different figure; it is that there is no basis on which to have chosen it.