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Monday, 19 September 2011
Page: 10502

Mr ROBB (Goldstein) (15:45): My two colleagues have shown how the current process is devoid of integrity and credibility and has been grossly politicised. I experienced that firsthand after the last election. The parliamentary secretary opposite is yet to provide one decent argument on amendment (1). We will start with amendment (1); that is what we are debating at the moment, right? He has not provided one argument why the PBO and all the rest of us should be hogtied to the numbers, figures, forecasts and analysis of Treasury. Why should that be the case?

I will give you an example. Over the last four years we have been debating perhaps the biggest structural adjustment that will ever be considered by any of these parliamentary members: the imposition of a carbon tax and, subsequently, an emissions trading scheme. There has been endless modelling for four years of the impact of this, but not once has the model that has generated all of these numbers, all of these outcomes, all of this rhetoric and all of these forecasts by the government been revealed. They are all part of a black box in Treasury. We have asked endlessly to see the modelling; never have we seen one line of code from that modelling—not one assumption. We have deduced that one assumption built into the model is that there would be no unemployment by 2050. Surprise, surprise! When they got the outcome of the modelling there was no unemployment by 2050. If you put in that assumption, it is not a surprise.

What if you changed that one assumption and made it a floating variable in that model? What would be the outcome? What is the sensitivity to fixing that particular variable? We will never know. What would the Parliamentary Budget Office do if they were given that model? They would do some of that sensitivity analysis. We would be better informed; the public would be better informed; the nation would be better informed—especially when we are going it alone on this carbon tax. We are ahead of the world. No-one else is doing it. Yet we have been tied to this situation with Treasury. This is why we need credibility and integrity restored to the process. Treasury has been politicised in this whole exercise. We need the capacity for an independent body to analyse such critical matters as the modelling—the detailed, exhaustive, massive modelling—that has been undertaken.

We will get results this week again, but I can assure you they will just be outcomes. Out of this black box again will come a whole series of outcomes around which you will make the most ambitious statements. You will hold everyone hostage to this black box. Having come to government and said that transparency was at the heart of the way in which you would run government, since then we have had nothing but obfuscation, no benefit-cost analyses and a refusal to provide any of the analysis that sits behind all of this. No wonder we need to go to the next election and debate policy based on independently assessed analysis—not only our policies but the policies of the government. The policies of the government need to be scrutinised and analysed. They have not been, and that is why this process is heavily politicised. It is why you need integrity and credibility to be restored to this process.