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

As my colleagues have observed, the Leader of the Opposition has already grown bored with discussion of the economy and he is back to the only thing he knows how to do, which is to distort things in pursuit of a fear campaign. What he is doing today is distorting the words of Professor Ross Garnaut in an incredibly irresponsible way. To anybody who has listened to the Leader of the Opposition's question let me say this to them very clearly. The Leader of the Opposition has misrepresented Professor Garnaut. We always see the Leader of the Opposition do this because he cannot mount an argument that deals with the facts. It is impossible. He knows he cannot mount an argument that deals with the facts. He can never discuss the facts. He never wants to hear the facts because as soon as the facts are on the table his fear campaign falls away. So at every opportunity, including every opportunity in this parliament, he walks in with distortions.

Professor Garnaut did not say what the Leader of the Opposition put into his question. That did not happen. What Professor Garnaut talked about was the kind of climate commission they have in the United Kingdom where a body makes recommendations to government, which then performs its democratic role in the way that governments do. Of course, our democracy is filled with bodies that make recommendations to government. The Productivity Commission is just one such body that makes recommendations to government. If we look at the way that works in our democracy, it has worked for years without anybody taking the kind of silly political point we are seeing the Leader of the Opposition take today. I have never heard the Leader of the Opposition walk up to the dispatch box or indeed any other microphone and say that his Conservative counterpart David Cameron is not exercising an appropriate democratic—

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