Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the minister for regional development. The Business Council of Australia's recent modelling shows that in dollar terms regional Australians will be three times better off from a transition to net zero by 2050 than people in cities. Does the minister agree with that modelling? What does the government's own modelling show?

Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

One part of that question is very simple. I don't agree with the Business Council of Australia's modelling—if you want a straight answer there it is—and nor should I have to, because that's the Business Council of Australia's modelling. They're entitled to their modelling. Modelling is not a letter from God. It is no more than the opinion of people. Maybe the member for Grayndler is an expert in nonlinear regression analysis. I'm certainly not. So I'm not going to say—

Honourable Member:

An honourable member interjecting

Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, you certainly are not. At least I did econometrics. He didn't. I doubt whether the skill sets for things such as regression analysis reside in many corners of this chamber at all. Maybe it does. Maybe I'm confounded in my ignorance about who is expert in that. When we talk about modelling and when we talk about: 'Have I been aware of modelling?' I have to say the people with the capacity to do a deep dive into modelling, to get to the bottom of it, would be a very, very small group indeed. What I am interested in, though, are the results of modelling. The member for Hume, the minister, has shown us sections of that. So we are aware of that. On that premise, we have used the time, one week, to deal with something that will go for decades into the future and to do our very best to make sure that we are able to correspond with our people in our electorates on our best analysis so that we can give them the best deliberations on an incredibly important decision.

The Liberal Party, and obviously the Prime Minister, as leader of the Liberal Party, has had the capacity for analysis of this. But the Labor Party have told us that, in the last eight years, they have been calling for something—and in eight years, they have not come up with a plan. We don't know what they have been doing. They have not given us any costings. What they have said is that there is something they will buy. They don't quite know what it costs, they don't quite know what it is, but they are going to buy it.