John Murphy (Lowe, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On 15 February 2007, in response to a question from the member for Kingsford Smith about the failure of the government to model the potential impacts of climate change on Australia, the Treasurer answered:

As far as the Treasury is aware, no country has developed a model of national consequences. All of the models that have been developed are in relation to global consequences.

The Treasurer also claimed:

The Treasury of course has not constructed a model in relation to climate change ...

In his haste to ridicule the member for Kingsford Smith, the Treasurer has misled the parliament, because a 10-minute check on the internet would have revealed that many countries have created national impact models and the governments of those countries are actively using the results of those models to make important policy decisions.

For a start, the United States government’s National assessment of the potential consequences of climate variability and change was issued in 2000. The assessment reported on projected climate change resulting from human activities and identified a range of likely adverse societal and environmental consequences. In the United Kingdom, the UK Climate Impacts Program, a division of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, regularly reports on the effects of climate change in the UK on the built environment, transport and utilities, spatial planning, water resource management, countryside and the rural economy, marine and terrestrial biodiversity, soils, health, finance and business—costing the impacts of climate change—and tourism and the visitor economy. Singapore has a national climate change strategy that sets out the impact of climate change in the areas of vulnerability and adaptation, mitigation, competency building, and public awareness. The German Institute for Economic Research predicts economic damages caused by climate change in Germany alone of €137 billion by 2050. Needless to say, the Germans are actively responding to this warning.

The admission by the Treasurer that the Treasury has ‘of course’ not produced a quantitative study on the effects of climate change directly undermines the Prime Minister’s claim that responding to climate change in an effective fashion would be too expensive. I ask today in this chamber: how can the Prime Minister know this if his government has not bothered to work out the figures?