Dr. Pete Lunn:

Embarrassingly enough, the honest answer to the question is that I do not know. I am not aware of anyone in the ESRI doing work on EPICs. It is possible that one of my colleagues is and I am unaware of it. That does happen; we are a large enough organisation. Somebody might be but if they are, I do not know about it.

One thing is important here, though, and this goes back to the report we published earlier in the year that I mentioned in response to Senator McGahon. We looked at carbon taxation. Senator Boylan is right to worry that punitive measures might not be as good as strong, positive incentives. I understand that logic. We were surprised how much support there was for carbon taxation, however. In that representative sample of adults, a higher proportion of that sample wanted to see the carbon tax go up than go down, which for a tax is pretty unusual. It gives a real sense of what people think the urgency of the problem is and what they want. We were genuinely surprised. We told people and explained the tax to them. We explained to some of them where it went. It did not matter that it was a hypothecated tax; it made no difference to what they wanted.

We gave them a slider, we told them what the tax was now and we even translated that into how much it added to a bundle of briquettes or the cost of heating your home. We translated all four and asked those we sampled what they thought should happen and more people wanted to push the slider up than wanted to push it down.