Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Flinders continues to interject. I would say the member for Flinders actually needs, together with the Leader of the Opposition, to summon some political courage to finally take on the climate change sceptics in the Liberal Party—led by the member for O’Connor up the back there—but also, most acutely, to take on the climate change sceptics in the National Party, the home of all climate change deniers in the Australian parliament.

The Sydney Morning Herald tell us today what sort of a rabble we have in the opposition on this question at the moment. The report says that the right wing of the party are bristling at the Leader of the Opposition’s new-found commitment to an emissions trading scheme on Sunday. The quote I will read to you is:

Conservatives and Nationals who oppose a trading scheme thought that when the Coalition voted last week to delay a scheme, it was implicit the Opposition would never support one.

That is what the Sydney Morning Herald says today. It also reports an outrage on the part of the sceptics in the party room, and our old friend the member for O’Connor, and Senator Boswell. Again, the SMH revealed that the member for O’Connor, who is smiling at the gallery—they must have got this one right, Wilson—complained that they had been locked into a new position, and Senator Boswell complained that just one week before ‘he had never consented’ to supporting a trading scheme of any description. So, obviously, there is an outbreak of party unity on their part on the question of the future of the CPRS.

But how do we know these reports out of the party room to be true? Again, we turn to reports, this time by Annabel Crabb and Tony Wright, who have alerted us to the fact that the coalition has had to ban mobile phones from its joint party room meetings. There’s a measure for you! As the member for Farrer reportedly said in the party room yesterday:

“In the interests of not having it leaked, I am now not going to say what I was going to say,”

What was the member for Farrer going to say? I would be rather taken by that. But this is hardly a well-kept secret. Of course, we have had Senator Joyce—he was back at his best yesterday at the doors—contradicting the Leader of the Opposition comprehensively on the emissions trading scheme debate. Just three days earlier, on 2 June, he said the ETS ‘is an absolutely ridiculous, stupid scheme’. This is the ETS that the Leader of the Opposition says that we must have.

The Leader of the Opposition said on one of the weekend programs, I think it was Insiders, that he supports an emissions trading scheme. Have I got that right?

See this speech in context