Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

that he could not fulfil the contract that he had already signed with the Australian government to deliver the Australian Consensus Centre because the Australian Consensus Centre would provide a rigorous research project for Australia. The Australian Consensus Centre, modelled on the Copenhagen Consensus Center, would have brought together Nobel prize winners from around the world to talk about the major issues facing Australia and the world. Bjorn Lomborg is a world-famous academic with a very rigorous background, and the outrageous slurring on Bjorn Lomborg as a climate denialist by the Labor Party, the Greens and academics across Australia is completely and utterly false.

Bjorn Lomborg has made it absolutely clear that he believes climate change is occurring. But he has said that we need to put that in the same perspective as all the other challenges that the world faces and that perhaps there are better economic ways of dealing with climate change and with coal fired power et cetera than the ones that have been put forward by the Greens and others around the world.

I would have thought that universities and academics would not have been frightened by somebody in their midst who has a different view. One of the purposes of universities—

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