Updated Treasury modelling on the Carbon Tax is worthless.
The revised modelling, released only minutes before today’s Join Select Committee on the Carbon Tax legislation continues to rely upon the assumption that the United States will be part of a global trading system by 2016.
Yet the chance of the United States having a cap and trade or equivalent system by 2016, is now zero.
This assumption about the world is a fantasy. It comes at the very time that the Government has conceded in its UN submission ahead of the Durban meeting, that there is little chance of a binding international agreement until 2015, six years after Copenhagen.
The prospect of economy wide carbon taxes, only a year later, in the US, India and China, is utterly unrealistic.
Contrary to headline claims in the document, the detail shows Australia’s emissions will still go up by 43 Million Tonnes between now and 2020.
This continues the deception by the Government and the Prime Minister that the Carbon Tax will reduce Australia’s remissions.
Australian firms will still be spending $3.5bn overseas in 2020 and still be spending $57bn overseas in 2050 to purchase foreign carbon credits.
Strangely though, cutting the access to foreign permits from 100% to 50% doesn’t seem to increase the cost of the Carbon Tax, which does not square with the Government’s criticism of the Opposition’s policy.
The only policy which will have a real impact on cleaning up Australia’s emissions is the Coalition’s Direct Action Policy which will achieve the 5 per cent reduction without the need for an ineffective and costly tax of $105 billion.