Greg Combet (Charlton, Australian Labor Party, Minister Assisting the Minister for Climate Change) Share this | Hansard source

Uncle Wilson has come to the wedding. That is the first camp. The second camp is the one populated by the climate change sceptics. No lesser political figure than the Leader of the Liberal Party in the Senate, Senator Minchin, sees the global efforts to combat climate change as some form of international left-wing conspiracy—a new communist front. This is what he had to say on the Four Corners show:

For the extreme left it provides the opportunity to do what they’ve always wanted to do, to sort of de-industrialise the western world. You know the collapse of communism was a disaster for the left, and the, and really they embraced environmentalism as their new religion.

This is the leader of the Liberal Party in the Senate carrying on about a communist conspiracy that is the basis for taking action against climate change. This puts all the major world leadership, including other political figures and including the Leader of the Opposition, in a communist conspiracy. That is what climate change is all about, according to Senator Minchin.

But we have the other side of the spectrum represented in the Liberal Party as well. The member for Hume had a different take on this issue in his second reading contribution on the bills. Instead, he suggested that climate change science is the modern equivalent of Nazi science. This is what he had to say:

The climate change debate is not new. On 4 June 1940, Sir Winston Churchill warned of the perverted science of national socialist ideology when he uttered the words:

… the whole world—

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