Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

This is, of course, where the rubber hits the road, and where it becomes very obvious that Senator Milne and the Greens do not understand what a true market based mechanism actually is. The thing about auctions, the thing about the market at work, is that the outcomes of those auctions will be determined at the auction. So you cannot speculate in the way that Senator Milne is suggesting that we should speculate on what projects will win and on what basis. You are assuming that what you know is all there is. The truth is that the market at work will always generate so much more. The reason you have an auction is that you want to unleash those market forces. You want to unleash the ingenuity in the market, and that is what we are doing through our Emissions Reduction Fund. We are unleashing the creative juices of businesses across Australia in order to come up with the best possible ways, the most effective possible ways, of achieving emissions reductions. That is clearly a fundamental point that Senator Milne does not accept.