On this day, November 26, 1996 an Australian politician ripped into the “official” modelling on which Australian governments (BOTH LABOR AND LIBERAL) had relied to say “oh, no, can’t do anything that might reduce the acceleration of our coal mining and coal exporting, or else the sky will fall.”
Leader of the Democrats, Senator Cheryl Kernot stated in the Senate:
“Let us not forget who ABARE is. It is the ideological cousin of the Industry Commission and it never misses an opportunity to slip the boot into environmental or social causes, churning out statistics from its largely discredited macro-economic modelling, showing how much better off we would all be if only we mined more coal, produced more electricity and puffed more carbon dioxide every day. I am willing to bet that if ABARE existed 150 years ago, it would have produced a whopping great spreadsheet proving that the economy could not afford to ban child labour in the coal mines”
(Senate Hansard 26.11.96 p 6014).
On ABARE, see also “High and Dry” by Guy Pearse and “Scorcher” by Clive Hamilton.
On economic forecasting – I recently learnt the brilliant John Kenneth Galbraith quote – ““The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable,”
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 362ppm. At time of writing it was 417ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this –
Australian governments were looking for excuses to do nothing to slow down the acceleration of Australian coal exports. ABARE helped to provide those excuses.
Why this matters.
The way economic modelling is used to justify all sorts of horror (usually the continued enrichment of the already filthy rich, and/or the galloping desolation of our being-murdered planet), is a) by now very obvious and b) never-ending, despite a).
What happened next?
ABARE and its “MEGABARE” nonsense was thoroughly exposed and discredited(see here). Which did nothing to stop the Howard Government from continuing to use it.
