Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the Deputy Leader of the Opposition for her question and believe she must be suffering some form of short-term amnesia, because of course the thing that wrecked the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was the action of the Leader of the Opposition. The thing that prevented the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme going through this parliament was the Leader of the Opposition, as a weathervane without any convictions on the question, going outside, putting his finger up in the political wind and saying, ‘Which way is it blowing today?’ and then deciding, having done that, that the time was right for him to unseat the then Leader of the Opposition on the basis that he would run a scare campaign about climate change. Now to the extent that you can diagnose any underlying beliefs of the Leader of the Opposition in this coming and going, this set of inconsistent statements, this weathervane conduct of the Leader of the Opposition—and weathervane is not my term; it is the term of one of his most senior frontbench colleagues, the member for Wentworth—they appear to be that climate change is not real.

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