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

I just make the point—Senator Xenophon and I have talked about a lot of modelling—that this should not be just a battle of the modellers. There have been an enormous number of different modelling reports commissioned by industry, by Senator Xenophon and by the government through Treasury. They are important but they are not determinative in the sense that government still has to make a decision about what it thinks the right policy outcome is.

At the front of the Treasury modelling which was released last year, it is clear the way this was approached by Treasury and Professor Garnaut was to look at where you want to get to—that is, to 450 or 550 parts per million; I think we also looked at 510 parts per million, from memory, which was the CPRS minus 15—and then to work back and ask what a reasonable share is for Australia at 2020. I again emphasise that there is a political debate here about whether the target should be 15, 25 or 40. I have made the point that we have to get to 40. We are actually having an argument about whether that should be on the table now, through this legislation, for 2020—Senator Milne says yes—or is that something that Australia would achieve some years later, perhaps around the middle of the next decade. So some time around 2025 you would assume, if we have a linear reduction, you would get to that level of reduction, if you achieve 25 per cent at 2020.

This is not about a milestone; it is about a path downwards. The question is what is the judgment about the appropriate path for the nation, bearing in mind that this is not an easy adjustment. I wish it were. I wish that we had a no-emissions source of energy for baseload tomorrow, but we do not. I wish we were able to work out how we could quickly transition so many emissions intensive industries to being much more efficient. I wish we could simply develop clean energy, low pollution industries quickly, but these things are inherently an economic transition. This is fundamentally a discussion about how we best make the economic transition, because it is the economic transition which will deliver the result for the climate.