David Feeney (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am sorry; the Leader of the Opposition. In considering the Leader of the Opposition’s spectacular rise to power at the end of last year, the whole of Australia, and most specifically we senators, was privy to an extraordinary series of events where those forces inside the Liberal Party who had laboured for so long to deliver a reasonable position, a position that accepted the reality of climate change, were struck low. They were undermined and ultimately brought down by the determination of a Liberal majority, and that Liberal majority does not believe climate change is real. In fact, to quote the Leader of the Opposition, it believes climate change is crap.

Since becoming Leader of the Opposition, we have now seen Mr Abbott deliver three clangers in this critical area. In November, the Leader of the Opposition claimed that the CPRS would cost average households about $1,100 each, and only one week later he was forced to admit that that number had been produced by the opposition on the basis of a Google News search rather than any true and exacting research on the part of the opposition. As we all know, Treasury found that the CPRS would cause prices to rise by 1.1 per cent by 2013, on average costing a household $624 a year, and of course, as the government has made clear again and again and again, there is an expensive compensation program at the heart of the CPRS which makes sure that working families are compensated for those increases.

But, undeterred, the Leader of the Opposition pressed on and in December of last year he made a $250 billion blunder in his climate change costings when he claimed that the total cost of permits to achieve a 15 per cent target to 2020 would be up to $400 billion. In fact, Treasury modelling released in 2008—that modelling that those opposite often cry for—suggested that the total cost of permits to achieve the government’s 15 per cent target over the 12 years to 2020 would be around $150 billion—$250 billion less than the Leader of the Opposition claimed. Finally, in December, we had that magical moment when the Leader of the Opposition declared that global warming had stopped. This is the kind of flat-earth viewpoint which is now prevailing amongst those opposite.

We perhaps should not be surprised that that view is prevailing amongst those opposite, but it does give pause to reflect on some of the utterances of the former Leader of the Opposition, Mr Malcolm Turnbull. In recent times Mr Turnbull’s blog has become a source of inspiration for many of us on this side, and today should be no exception. Malcolm Turnbull has said on his blog:

So any suggestion that you can dramatically cut emissions without any cost it is, to use a favourite term of Mr Abbott, ‘bullshit’. Moreover, he knows it.

...                                 ...                                 ...                                 ...

The Liberal Party is currently led by people whose conviction on climate change is that it is ‘crap’ and you don’t need to do anything about it. Any policy that is announced will simply be a con, an environmental figleaf to cover a determination to do nothing.

There we have it, from the former Leader of the Opposition—that the coalition’s con job of a policy on climate—