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Monday, 21 November 2011
Page: 12928

Carbon Pricing

Mr TRUSS (Wide Bay—Leader of The Nationals) (14:09): Given that the Centre for International Economics using more realistic assumptions than the government's has found that electricity prices will rise by 30 per cent under her carbon tax and not the 10 per cent that the government modelling suggests, will she guarantee that if prices rise by more than 10 per cent her promised compensation will also rise?

Ms GILLARD (Lalor—Prime Minister) (14:09): I thank the Leader of the National Party for his question. First and foremost, I would caution the Leader of the National Party against misrepresenting the modelling from the Centre for International Economics the way that the Leader of the Opposition commenced question time today by misrepresenting the Treasury modelling. I do understand that, when you have got no policies and you are addicted to negativity, you need to do these things, but I would caution the Leader of the National Party against it. What is very clear is that those opposite have been citing the Centre for International Economics study to support their claims about lack of US action. That claim has been repudiated by the Executive Director of the Centre for International Economics, David Pearce.

Opposition members interjecting—

Ms GILLARD: They never like it when facts are on the table, but these are his words:

Our modelling had nothing to do with whether the US had a carbon price. It did not test the impact of the US being in or out of the market.

The very modelling that Leader of the National Party refers to is modelling that has been misrepresented in the public domain by those opposite.

On the question of compensation for Australian families, what the Leader of the National Party may not understand is that for the compensation package we have Treasury modelling, which deals with the impact of electricity prices and deals with the impact therefore on CPI, uses a figure of 0.7 per cent—

Mr Pyne: Mr Speaker, on a point of order: the Prime Minister was asked a very straightforward question, which was that if prices go up by more than 10 per cent will the compensation rise by more than 10 per cent.

The SPEAKER: The member for Sturt will resume his seat. It was an element of the question and, whilst I do not pretend to be an econometric expert, it would appear that the Prime Minister's response is directly relevant to the question.

Ms GILLARD: What I was saying is that Treasury has modelled this package and that modelling has been used to advise Australians that the expected price impact, the CPI impact, is 0.7 per cent. What the Leader of the National Party fails to understand is that a key part of the compensation mechanism here is the indexation of benefits that Australians receive, including family payments and the pension. Of course, CPI rises make a difference to that indexation. The Leader of the Opposition wholly fails to understand the model of carbon pricing and the opposition has been wholly misrepresenting the modelling of the Centre for International Economics. I would say again to those opposite that we have seen these claims about carbon pricing all made before. Firstly, claims about astronomical price rises are completely untrue. Then we had the Leader of the Opposition claim the coal industry was going to shut down, only to be mugged the next day by the fact that the biggest investment into a coal company in the nation's history happened and he had been standing at that mine the day before. We have seen ridiculous claims about job losses and we have seen the hypocrisy of the opposition refusing to support the jobs of steelworkers. We have seen false claim after false claim after false claim, and it is clear from the first two questions from the opposition today that the false claims will continue, because the opposition is absolutely locked in a mode of just saying no.