Extract from The Guardian Website:
The
opposition leader won't accept the financial modelling for his
unworkable Direct Action policy. He must, then, produce his own.
It’s not that “direct action” can’t work to reduce carbon emissions.
It’s that the Coalition’s Direct Action plan – cobbled together in a
couple months after Tony Abbott took the Liberal leadership and ditched
the Coalition’s support for emissions trading – can’t work for the money
that’s on the table.
And almost no one thinks it can. Not the business groups that have for years now been unsuccessfully seeking detail. Not academic experts who have studied the various sources of carbon abatement it proposes. And not anyone who has sought to model it.
The Coalition has responded to the latest effort – from Sinclair Knight Merz/MMA and Monash University's Centre of Policy Studies – by shooting the messenger, suggesting the modellers and the Climate Institute who commissioned them are not “objective”.
But exactly the same question has been raised by pretty much everyone who has looked at Direct Action. The Treasury actually calculated the shortfall would be much bigger than the $4bn the new modelling has estimated by 2020.
And, as Abbott’s own frontbencher Malcolm Turnbull explained in 2011, continuing with Direct Action would become prohibitively expensive in future years.
On 4 February 2010, Abbott wrote this about his newly minted Direct Action plan: "Our policy is also much cheaper. We have estimated that it will cost $3.2bn over four years ... Our policy has been independently costed. A team of economists at the respected firm Frontier Economics says our policy is both economically and environmentally responsible."
But the managing director of Frontier Economics, Danny Price, said at the time it only made sense as a transitional plan, a precursor to either a more developed set of “Direct Action” regulations, subsidies and “reverse auctions”, or, more likely, some version of an emissions trading scheme.
As Abbott’s anti-carbon tax campaign took hold, any chance of Direct Action transforming into something more workable before the next election evaporated and all the big questions remained unanswered.
Now, supremely confident ahead of polling day 2013, Abbott airily dismisses the latest modelling by saying only that he “simply doesn’t accept it”. He doesn’t feel any need to answer the sole question on its content at his morning press conference. (A far more pressing issue apparently was the Coalition leader’s radio discussion with singer Katy Perry.)
Well here’s another question for the Coalition.
If it won’t explain the detail of its policy before the election, as any political party should, will it at least promise to commission its own modelling when it fleshes out the Direct Action plan after the poll?
Surely – in the interests of budget certainty as well as the climate – it would be smarter to know straight away rather than waiting to see whether everyone has been right all along when the policy fails to meet Australia’s targets and the government comes under pressure to stump up billions more in federal money?
And almost no one thinks it can. Not the business groups that have for years now been unsuccessfully seeking detail. Not academic experts who have studied the various sources of carbon abatement it proposes. And not anyone who has sought to model it.
The Coalition has responded to the latest effort – from Sinclair Knight Merz/MMA and Monash University's Centre of Policy Studies – by shooting the messenger, suggesting the modellers and the Climate Institute who commissioned them are not “objective”.
But exactly the same question has been raised by pretty much everyone who has looked at Direct Action. The Treasury actually calculated the shortfall would be much bigger than the $4bn the new modelling has estimated by 2020.
And, as Abbott’s own frontbencher Malcolm Turnbull explained in 2011, continuing with Direct Action would become prohibitively expensive in future years.
On 4 February 2010, Abbott wrote this about his newly minted Direct Action plan: "Our policy is also much cheaper. We have estimated that it will cost $3.2bn over four years ... Our policy has been independently costed. A team of economists at the respected firm Frontier Economics says our policy is both economically and environmentally responsible."
But the managing director of Frontier Economics, Danny Price, said at the time it only made sense as a transitional plan, a precursor to either a more developed set of “Direct Action” regulations, subsidies and “reverse auctions”, or, more likely, some version of an emissions trading scheme.
As Abbott’s anti-carbon tax campaign took hold, any chance of Direct Action transforming into something more workable before the next election evaporated and all the big questions remained unanswered.
Now, supremely confident ahead of polling day 2013, Abbott airily dismisses the latest modelling by saying only that he “simply doesn’t accept it”. He doesn’t feel any need to answer the sole question on its content at his morning press conference. (A far more pressing issue apparently was the Coalition leader’s radio discussion with singer Katy Perry.)
Well here’s another question for the Coalition.
If it won’t explain the detail of its policy before the election, as any political party should, will it at least promise to commission its own modelling when it fleshes out the Direct Action plan after the poll?
Surely – in the interests of budget certainty as well as the climate – it would be smarter to know straight away rather than waiting to see whether everyone has been right all along when the policy fails to meet Australia’s targets and the government comes under pressure to stump up billions more in federal money?
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