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

I had a distortion of Professor Garnaut's words put to me. I am correcting that distortion. No-one should believe it to be true. It is not true. I am pointing out the truth of what Professor Garnaut said. You can see examples of the kind of arrangement that he is thinking about around the world, including in the United Kingdom, where Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron very recently received recommendations from a climate commission and determined to act on those recommendations. I did not hear the Leader of the Opposition say at that time that he thought his Conservative counterpart was not behaving appropriately as Prime Minister, so let us not listen to any of this nonsense.

I think the Australian people will increasingly be asking themselves: why is it that the Leader of the Opposition can never engage in the climate change debate by dealing with the facts? Why is it that he always has to rely on falsehoods and fear? You rely on falsehoods and fear when you do not have a rational argument, and that is the Leader of the Opposition's problem. He has no rational argument, no rational policy, no rational belief in the science; all he is peddling is fear and falsehood, and every Australian should understand that.

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