Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Minister Wong, the ‘high priestess of climate change’, I once heard her called. You hear it from her language. It is the language of old. It is the language of some 12 months or so ago when extremism was the politics of the day. If science, or if anyone, dared question climate change, they were in fact burnt at the stake.

But what they have missed is that in the last 12 months the politics of this has changed dramatically. The public has started to wake up and they want a far more moderate approach to this. They want to know how this will affect their jobs and how this will affect the economy. You talk about science—hello, to earth, Senator Carr—and what is to be believed in science. Did you know, Senator Carr, that the Antarctic in fact is not shrinking at all, and that is a scientific fact which no-one denies? But Peter Garrett still gets out there and tells us—doom and gloom—that the Antarctic is shrinking and polar bears are falling off the edge. That sort of extremism is not happening and Minister Wong is still getting up in this chamber and using the old language of extremism. She has missed the political shift in all of this.