Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for the Environment and Heritage (Senator Ian Campbell) to a question without notice asked by Senator Mason today relating to greenhouse gas emissions.

I refer to the minister’s response to the initiative taken by the states in releasing a discussion paper proposing a carbon tax and a carbon trading scheme, effectively, around Australia. It would certainly be my preference that the Australian government take on this initiative and establish a cap-and-trade system for Australia, but that has not been the case. The government absolutely stubbornly refuses to take this action in spite of the fact that Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions in the electricity and transport sectors are rocketing out of control. The only reason that Australia will come in on its Kyoto target is that there has been a one-off benefit achieved by changes to land use and land clearing in Australia. It has nothing to do with initiatives that have been taken to reduce our emissions in the energy and transport sectors.

Ian Campbell (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is totally not true.

Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Campbell is saying that that is not true. I would like him to inform the Senate what the current level of emissions from both the transport and the electricity sectors are in terms of the 1990 levels. We heard from Minister Macfarlane today that there would be an absolutely horrendous cost to the Australian economy if anything was done about greenhouse in terms of a national trading scheme. In fact, Minister Macfarlane went on to talk about the enormous impacts. He spoke about the costings done by ABARE and continually referred to ABARE. What we have to recognise here is that ABARE has been a disaster in advising government on climate change for the entire period of discussion about global warming.

In fact, I would like to remind the Senate that Brian Fisher from ABARE travelled the world back in 1997 to attend conferences on the costs of Kyoto. He offered basically blanket dismissals of the scientific evidence for climate change and predicted staggering economic costs for any policies aimed at restricting emissions. What Australians did not realise at that time was that ABARE, whilst it is an Australian government funded economic forecasting agency, had a number of funding sources behind their research. For a contribution of $50,000, corporations could buy a seat on the steering committee overseeing its work. Contributors to ABARE’s global warming modelling included Rio Tinto, Texaco, Mobil Oil, Exxon, the Australian coal industry, the Australian Aluminium Council and Statoil, the Norwegian oil company. All told, ABARE was receiving, at that time, more than half a million dollars a year from the fossil fuel industry, and they were having a direct input into the modelling.

I am not in the least bit surprised today that the government is touting this ridiculous modelling ABARE have put out on the likely impact of an emissions trading system. They have added on a carbon tax, the costs of a trading system, to existing taxation and they have not done modelling on the likelihood that you would reduce some other taxes accordingly. For example, in Sweden, when they introduced a carbon tax, they took the excise off fuel so it actually ended up relatively cost neutral but was a mechanism that forced down demand. That is one of the ways in which it can be done.

At the time ABARE was coming out with this nonsense, something like 131 economists came out strongly and said that the economic modelling studies on which the government is relying to assess the impacts of reducing greenhouse gas emissions overestimate the costs and underestimate the benefits of reducing emissions. They go on to say that economic instruments such as carbon taxes and trading emission permits within and between countries will be an important part of comprehensive climate change policy.

The point I want to make today is that the Australian government is persisting in undermining any efforts that are being made, in relation to setting a target for reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions, on the basis of advice from ABARE, which has been consistently wrong on predicting the price of oil. And it is now completely wrong, and inexcusably so, on economic modelling in relation to this issue of carbon trading, and I think it is about time that the Australian community got some accountability—(Time expired)

Question agreed to.