4. Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn) Link to this
to the Minister of Finance
Does he agree with the Prime Minister’s views on economic policy?
Hon BILL ENGLISHHon David Cunliffe Link to this
Does he agree with the Prime Minister’s views of his Treasury’s estimates that the fiscal costs of the Government’s emissions trading scheme is $110 billion, or 14 to 17 percent of GDP, dismissing it as nonsense; if so, why?
Hon David Cunliffe Link to this
Can he confirm that the assumptions underlying his Treasury’s $110 billion estimate are, in fact, quite reasonable given that the $50 per tonne carbon price is in line with that used in Australia, is half the cost that Nick Smith used when criticising his opponents, and is Treasury’s mid-range scenario?
I think, as the Prime Minister said yesterday, that Treasury has trouble predicting what will happen by Christmas let alone what will happen by 2050. It made a guess on the basis of a range of highly contestable assumptions.
Hon David Cunliffe Link to this
If that is the case, how does he then reconcile his statement that Treasury’s projections and the long-term fiscal outlook “highlights the stark choices New Zealand faces if it is to avoid an explosion of public debt”, and how does that wear with the Prime Minister’s dismissal of Treasury’s long-term forecasting?
Treasury did some long-term fiscal forecasts based largely on the policy settings left behind by the reckless previous Labour Government, which managed this economy incompetently and missed the opportunity of a generation to step up economic performance.
Hon David Cunliffe Link to this
If the Minister does not consider his department’s advice on the fiscal impacts of the emissions trading scheme to be reliable, what, then, is the advice—which the Government is relying on—that underlies the figure of $3,000 by 2030, which Mr Key gave Federated Farmers yesterday; and does it do better than the advice that Treasury’s regulatory impact assessment unit criticised as being too flimsy to support the bill before Parliament?