Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

How ludicrous is it for the shadow minister to put a question about delaying passage of legislation when they themselves cannot bring themselves to even have a policy about this particular issue? All the failures and the weaknesses of the Leader of the Opposition and the chaos and confusion of the Liberal Party have been in evidence in this past week and are in evidence in this parliament today. They do not even have a policy position on an emissions trading scheme. The predominant public policy debate in this parliament for the last decade about how to deal with climate change has been to have a price in the marketplace through an emissions trading scheme which will enable industries to get on with investing in low-emissions technology, drive the jobs and employment and bring emissions down. They did that work on that side of the House, and the Leader of the Opposition was a part of the process of doing that work when he came into this parliament. Yet, despite all of that, there is no authority whatsoever—

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