Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence Materiel) Share this | Hansard source

As you will recall, I was just quoting from the thesis of the member for Flinders. It says that a pollution tax is desirable and that even if Liberals respond to it negatively a pollution tax needs to be introduced to properly serve the public interest.

I think that if he were true to himself he would admit that today. Unfortunately, because of the extremists that have been involved in getting rid of the member for Wentworth and taking over the Liberal Party, he has now got to put together another plan, which will cost taxpayers $10 million, and to be effective would cost $30 billion. It would mean that the taxpayers that we represent would end up paying an extra $720 a year on their bills because of an ineffective, badly designed, carbon pricing mechanism.

What is clear—and you only need to see what the member for Wentworth said on Q&A the other night—is that no-one supports the opposition’s plan on carbon pricing. He was asked if there were any economists that support it and he could not mention any of them. No wonder economists do not support the opposition’s plan, because it is a carbon plan designed by One Nation. The same people who sent the emails to the Liberal MPs about the flood levy and Indonesian schools are from the same One Nation that sent emails to try to scare the pants off the Liberal Party to get rid of the member for Wentworth.

If you go to the One Nation website and you hear them talk about times when Greenland was ice free and now you can grow melons in England and in the 1600s London’s Thames River froze over, and then you go to 2009 and you see Tony Abbott saying the same things, what is clear is that they are now more One Nation than they are one Liberal Party. That is why when they were interviewed by Phil Coorey they were saying that they were now being run by One Nation. Another member said that they were in the thrall of right-wing nut jobs. That is what they are saying about their own side to the journalists. Robert Menzies would not recognise this party if he were alive today, and one thing you can be sure of, Malcolm Fraser would not vote for it. It is a party so right wing now that it makes John Howard look like Che Guevara. John Howard did a lot of things but he never took advice from Pauline Hanson.

See this speech in context