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

Mr Abbott and Senator Joyce have confirmed that their climate change con job will in fact cost Australian taxpayers some three times more than the government’s policy. It will cost three times more over the next 10 years. In fact, Mr Abbott’s own apparent adviser, Mr Price from Frontier Economics, confirmed that this would involve either changing taxes or changing expenditure. I note that Mr Abbott has refused to rule out cutting funding to hospitals and cutting funding to defence, and Senator Joyce has refused to rule out cutting funding to schools. The challenge for the opposition, for a policy that is three times more expensive and that ensures that emissions keep rising, is to tell the Australian people which school, which hospital or which defence program they are going to cut to pay for their policy—a policy that slugs taxpayers and lets polluters off scot-free.