Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I presume that that question was about pricing carbon and about the cost of living. On the issue of pricing carbon, I remind the Leader of the Opposition that around a year ago—in fact, it was on 2 October 2009, so the one-year anniversary of these remarks is coming up very soon—he said:

We don’t want to play games with the planet. So we are taking this issue seriously and we would like to see an ETS …

That is, an emissions trading scheme, which of course is about pricing carbon. That was Tony Abbott on 2 October 2009. On this question of pricing carbon, all I can hope is that the Tony Abbott who is with us on 2 October 2010 is the same man who made that statement, because if the Leader of the Opposition was able to show between one year and the next that he could say and believe the same thing then on 2 October 2010 presumably he would accept my invitation to work in good faith on a multiparty committee to work through options for pricing carbon. But I am not optimistic on this. I am generally an optimist, but I am not optimistic on this because, as we know, the Leader of the Opposition has had every position possible to have on pricing carbon, causing the member for Wentworth to describe him as a ‘weather vane’—you have to look out the window to work out what he believes today.

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