Garth Hamilton (Groom, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Net zero comes at a cost, and we need to talk about it. In doing so, I want to be very clear: I am criticising policy settings, not criticising the phenomenon of climate change. I am not questioning the science; I'm questioning the government. Despite constant requests of the government asking what the full cost of net zero might be, they've refused to answer at every opportunity. However, some very smart people at the University of Queensland, the University of Melbourne and Princeton University have got together and come up with some costs. They have come up with a cost estimate of between $1.2 trillion and $1.5 trillion just for us to get to our 2030 targets. That's a lot of money. It's very hard to picture what that looks like. To break that down, it's $20 billion a month, every month. What does that look like? At $2.5 billion per hospital, which is our going rate, that gets you eight hospitals a month. I'd ask Australians across the country: Are you seeing ambulance ramping? Are you seeing services out of date? Are you seeing overcrowding? These are things that can be fixed if we get our priorities right. When we started down this path of net zero, I think we all believed that it was free—that there was no cost. But there is a cost. It's significant. It's $20 billion every month. It's time we started asking more questions about what the real cost of net zero is.

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