Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment) Share this | Hansard source

I will keep my responses brief, as I promised. For Senator Brown's interest, I will quote from the green paper released on the Emissions Reduction Fund:

The latest estimates of Australia’s future greenhouse gas emissions reflected in Australia’s Abatement Task and 2013 Emissions Projections confirm that on current trends, Australia faces a cumulative emissions reduction task of around 431 MtCO2-e from 2014 to 2020 …

This is significantly less than the coalition built its Direct Action policy on, and we are confident we will be able to deliver on the funding for the Emissions Reduction Fund. I reject outright the assertions made in some of the statements that Senator Brown was relating, some of which she attempted to relate to Mr Kohler. He can speak for himself. The coalition built a budget which we stand by and which we believe will achieve the abatement challenge required, which is now less then when we originally developed that budget.

The white paper will be released in due course, in the coming weeks or so I would anticipate, but it is going through the proper processes. However, we are committed to the Emissions Reduction Fund being ready to commence next year, and that means progressing through that white paper process relatively quickly. The 20 Million Trees program guidelines will properly be developed around that, unlike Senator Brown's government, which asked for the full costings proposal of the home insulation program in two days, it was revealed in the Royal Commission into the Home Insulation Program today. We will go through the proper process, and I expect you will hear more about that in the budget context.