Climate economist Brian Fisher’s home egged

Brian Fisher is considering walking away from economic modelling after his home was egged.

Economist Brian Fisher.

An unnerved Brian Fisher is considering walking away from ­future independent economic modelling after his analysis of Labor’s climate policy led to his family home being egged when prominent clean energy activist Simon Holmes a Court posted his address online.

The managing director and chairman of BAEconomics, who has worked as a bureaucrat for Labor and Coalition governments, told The Australian yesterday it appeared ­“extreme­ly difficult” to have ­rational, economic debate about climate change in today’s political environment and his family felt disturbed by what had happened to their Canberra­ home yesterday.

It is one of the more extreme examples of intimidation during an increasingly nasty federal ­election campaign and came on the same day caricatured posters of former PM Tony Abbott appeared in his ­electorate of Warringah covered in expletives and the word “Pell”.

The egging of Dr Fisher’s porch and front wall took place soon after Mr Holmes a Court suggest­ed on Twitter that the media “send a camera crew around to film” Dr Fisher’s offices, linking to his home address. He also posted a photograph of the Fisher home.

Bill Shorten also ridiculed Dr Fisher yesterday, likening him to “doctors that the big tobacco companies used to roll out in the 70s and 80s to say that smoking was healthy for you”.

It is not the first time Dr Fisher has been threatened. After his initial modelling on Labor’s climate policy was released­ in March, strangers hung outside his house “just being genera­lly annoying”.

He was also sent a bullet in the mail in the early 1990s when he worked for the commonwealth and conducted modelling on how the government should extract itsel­f from the collapsed wool buffer stock scheme.

“The environment in which this one (the egging) has ­happened is a fair bit different ­because in the past we’ve been able to identify exactly who has been involved and they were all mental­ly disturbed,” Dr Fisher told The Australian.

“I’ve been doing this sort of modelling for 25 years because I have an interest in the area and, secondly, I thought there wasn’t any rational, transparent debate about the cost of these (climate) policies, whether it be Coalition or Labor.

“I thought it’d be useful to ­attempt to inject a bit of rational debate. I’m not claiming to have all the facts, I just wanted to get some sort of economic discussion going.

“It appears in today’s world that is extremely difficult. I’m having ­serious second thoughts about whether I’ll ever do this again. It’s hopeless.”

Mr Holmes a Court, son of the late mining entrepreneur Robert Holmes a Court and a supporter of independent Warringah candid­ate Zali Steggall, removed his tweet promoting Dr Fisher’s address­ yesterday afternoon.

i have removed a tweet from earlier today where i posted the cover page of a report from BAEconomics’s website that clearly showed the address.

— 💧simon holmes à court (@simonahac) May 2, 2019

Bill Shorten made his comments about Dr Fisher yesterday after his modelling found the best-case estimate of Labor’s 45 per cent emissions ­reduction target on 2005 levels by 2030 with open access to inter­national permits would result in a GDP loss of $53 billion.

The Opposition Leader has ­defied calls to put a price on his signatur­e policy and declared his party did not believe the “scary numbers” in Dr Fisher’s report. He questioned who paid for the ­report and who had been involved in the modelling, and said it was full of wrong assumptions.

“This fellow and his report ­remind me of the doctors that the big tobacco companies used to roll out in the 70s and 80s to say that smoking was healthy for you. We will file this report under ‘P’ for propaganda,” Mr Shorten said.

Hitting back, Dr Fisher challenged Labor to provide more ­details of its cap-and-trade carbon policy to enable full modelling of the proposal and said he had not been “hired” to conduct the report.

“The government has never asked me to do this modelling,” he said. “I’ve done it myself.

“That’s ­really not a sensible comparison to draw. I’m happy to provide advice to any government and in fact I have. I worked as a bureaucrat for the Hawke-Keating government, I worked as a bureaucrat for the Howard government. I provided the same sort of economic advice to both sets of governments. I probably annoyed both of them equally.

“In the end, for me, this is about trying to provide advice on the best way to do things and to me the best way to do things are the ways that get the job done in the cheapest possible way, from an economic perspective.”

Dr Fisher conceded that some of his assumptions may turn out to be wrong because there was missing­ detail. “The Labor Party hasn’t explici­tly said exactly how it’s going to implement this. We don’t know the details of the shielding for emissions-intensive, trade-­exposed industries,” he said.

“Each of those industries may have to negotiate with an incomin­g government. I’ve got no magical way of knowing what the outcome of those negotiations will be. ”