John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

Let me say again to the Leader of the Opposition, through you, Mr Speaker: don’t you come in here with your puffed up hubris and start lecturing this side of the House about accountability under the Westminster system when the very budget paper itself contained a full disclosure of the intention of this government to spend a sum of $52.8 million over a period of five years. This is meant to be the kernel, the very core, of the censure motion moved by the Leader of the Opposition—that we are behaving in a cavalier way towards the parliament, that we are unaccountable, that we do not disclose what we are doing. Yet in the budget papers it says:

The Government will provide $52.8 million over five years to increase community understanding of climate change and assist households and small businesses to reduce and offset their greenhouse gas emissions.

That is the first reply that I make to the Leader of the Opposition. Most of his speech was about the politics and the policies of climate change. I will come to that in a moment, but let me deal with one or two things along the way. Let me deal with his fervid attempt to drag into this debate criticism of my conduct in relation to AWB and my conduct in relation to the war in Iraq. Let me remind the Leader of the Opposition that it was the Leader of the Opposition who went to the Zionist Council of Victoria and said it was an empirical fact that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Let me remind the Leader of the Opposition that, despite the fact that he deliberately and calculatedly accused me of being a liar in relation to AWB—

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