John Murphy (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As some may know, North Carolina had recently intended to introduce laws to prohibit state agencies from acting on scientifically valid warnings of sea-level rises driven by global warming. Fortunately, national and international ridicule has caused that state's legislature to abandon plans to introduce such ill-informed regulations. Yet, in Australia, we still have the Leader of the Opposition continuing to ignore the reality of global warming and climate change, driven by carbon dioxide emissions.

I now digress for a moment to look at two examples of scientific ignorance in other countries in less enlightened times. Scientific ignorance as the basis of policies of political parties has a baleful history, perhaps nowhere more recently evident than in the actions of former president of South Africa Thabo Mbeki, who in the face of all evidence denied that HIV was the cause of AIDS, a position that is thought to have resulted in the death of over 300,000 people, according to a study conducted by Harvard University.

We also have the earlier unedifying example of scientific ignorance in the practices of the eugenics movement, a philosophy that had its origins in the turbulence following the American Civil War. In the early decades of the 20th century, eugenics was based on a popular proposition that was motivated by the theories of social Darwinism, the idea that genetics rather than circumstances such as poverty largely determined success or failure in life. I raise these two examples to show that policies based on ill-informed or scientifically invalid theories can have serious consequences for individuals and indeed for nations.

I now return to our country at the present time. There is plenty of evidence that a dangerous scientific ignorance is well entrenched in the opposition. This ignorance has been frequently shown by the Leader of the Opposition, and here I will quote from the public record. In regard to a question about how carbon dioxide emissions are calculated, he said:

It's actually pretty hard to do this because carbon dioxide is invisible and it's weightless and you can't smell it.

On the John Laws show, he said:

See, one of the things that people haven't quite twigged to is that carbon dioxide is invisible, it's weightless and it's odourless.

Further, he said:

I mean, how are we going to police these emissions? This carbon cop is going to be an extraordinarily intrusive instrumentality, running around trying to make sure that all these businesses aren't actually emitting given that you can't actually see, smell or touch what's going on.

On another occasion, he said:

Whether carbon dioxide is quite the environmental villain that some people make it out to be is not yet proven.

And in an interview in 2009, despite all the evidence, he said:

The fact that we have had if anything cooling global temperatures over the last decade, not withstanding continued dramatic increases of carbon dioxide emissions, suggests the role of CO2 is not nearly as clear as the climate catastrophists suggest.

There is one word for the depth of ignorance exposed by these statements: extraordinary. It is extraordinary that in 2012 the leader of a major political party in a country that has a fine tradition of excellence in scientific research and education should be exposed as entirely ignorant of the science underlying one of the most important issues confronting humanity. And it is extraordinary that he should, on the basis of this proud ignorance, be prepared to attack any reasonable measures that would start to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, the pollutant that is without any significant doubt driving global warming, climate change and the acidification of the oceans. One has to ask: how much longer will the better-informed members of the opposition allow themselves to be seen as the compliant followers of a leader who plainly lacks any understanding of even the most basic details of this vital issue?