Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I will not labour the point, but I think it is another example of the government not being willing to engage on the specifics of this proposal. We are told that this is the most extensive modelling ever undertaken, and that we should rely on it, yet within a matter of 12 months the official figure for our population has blown out from 33 million to 35 million—and that is just to be discarded and ignored as being of no consequence. If the modelling was so good, how did they get it so wrong, by miscalculating Australia’s official population projection by a factor of two million people? That is, in anybody’s language, a pretty significant figure. But I accept that the folded arms and the look on the minister’s face indicate that we will not get a response to that, so we will move on.

I ask the minister, given that cooperative federalism has broken out, whether the New South Wales government has shared with the federal Labor government the results of its review in relation to electricity prices, which has found that about 50 per cent of the projected increase in power prices for the state of New South Wales will be directly related to the CPRS?