Surely you can just take our word for it?
THE Baillieu government has been accused of using ”laughable” excuses to block the release of economic modelling it used to attack the Gillard government’s carbon tax.
The government cited public interest and privacy issues as reasons it will not hand over calculations behind a media release by state Energy Minister Michael O’Brien last July.
We don’t need to back up our bullshit numbers! They must be true! They were published in the Herald Sun!
QED.
This transparently stupid waste of the department’s time and your taxpayer money brought to you by Ted Baillieu’s “Liberal” Victorian Government. Thanks, guys.
Moved On 
Goodbye, hated wordpress account, hello, facebook account.
Yeah, governments. Trying to do the “release figures without releasing supporting data” spin trick, on other governments? Surely they realise that has the potential to end badly for them.
A couple of things about this nonsense:
1. The release does not report a change in consumption of electricity resulting from the price increase. An assumption that that demand for electricity will not change in the face of a price change (ie. is inelastic ) is inaccurate, misleading and stupid. For example, Fan and Hyndman (2011) estimate that, the demand elasticity (the percentage change in demand divided by the percentage change in price) in South Australia ranges between 0.363 and 0.428. The result of this is that the cost increases for the different scenarios in the press release are overstated by between 35 and 66 per cent.*
2. The press release also says that the tax will cost public transport an extra $14.1 million, or 1.42 million fewer passenger trips per year. This shows that they have counted each trip as costing around $9.93, which is ludicrous even if you factor in recent fare increases .
* And I am willing to send you my spreadsheet once I receive your FoI request.