Greg Combet (Charlton, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change) Share this | Hansard source

At least they seem to have come to life over there. They gagged top scientists in the CSIRO from reporting on the impact of climate change in Australia. There are very curious views held within the coalition. For example, Senator Joyce was quoted in the Australian newspaper on 14 January this year as saying:

The view across the National party is that the reasons put forward to justify an emissions trading scheme are just a load of rubbish …

Senator Minchin, leader of the Liberal Party in the Senate, has said:

There remains an ongoing debate about the extent of climate change, about the extent of human activity’s role in the climate changing.

And later of course Senator Minchin made the observation: ‘Carbon dioxide I think is not a pollutant’. In a speech on 27 January this year Senator Bernardi said:

But exactly what is causing climate change and what—if anything—should we be doing about it should remain the subject of debate.

Plenty more quotes can be harvested but they all underline one thing: the difficulty that the coalition has in accepting the fact that we need to act on climate change—that there are sound scientific reasons why we need to act to protect the environment and to make the transition to a lower emissions economy.

It is fair to ask what is the coalition’s policy on this area, because it appears to be somewhat incoherent. The Leader of the Opposition, a former environment minister of course, is on the record as supporting an emissions trading scheme. We are now not sure whether or not that remains the case or what the Liberal Party’s position on an emissions trading scheme is. But it appears from the MPI today that there is opposition to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. Mr Robb, the shadow minister and the member for Goldstein, who spoke a moment ago, has posited a number of things. For example, perhaps a carbon tax might be the way to go. We do not know at what level the tax might be levied, what costs are involved, the complexity of it, what impact it would have and in particular how it is going to reduce carbon dioxide levels and carbon dioxide equivalent in the atmosphere.

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