Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am going to go easy on him because, fortunately, I have been out of my electorate often enough to know that the vast majority of people in the electorate know what absolute nonsense that is. A couple of days ago I attended a meeting with the climate change scientists and they made a remark which was incredibly relevant to today, and I am just going to report back on it. One of the members of the opposition asked a question about whether climate change was real and suggested that over a particular 10-year period, which was quite recent, the temperature had not risen and therefore that proved climate change was not real. The scientist responded that, if you went a year earlier or a year later, it would prove that climate change was actually occurring, and that would be as silly as suggesting that a quarter per cent interest rate rise meant there had been no global economic crisis. On this side of the House we laughed a little, knowing that it was only a matter of time before that argument was actually made in the House, and here we have it, of course, being made right now. It is a case, yet again, of the Liberal Party trying to simplify the argument down to areas that people are afraid of and working as hard as possible with the most simplistic concepts to frighten people.

In my electorate I do between eight and 10 mobile offices every month. I doorknock between 500 and a thousand houses—

See this speech in context