Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, I am sure that you, like me and a lot of other members of this House, received a lot of emails starting last year about Lord Monckton and his views on climate change. I am speaking here tonight to draw attention to an excellent article by Mike Carlton in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald. I must say, when I first got an email suggesting that at Copenhagen the first draft of the agreement was one that would impose world government on all signatory countries, I was a little alarmed. So I made some inquiries. Was this so? Did the first draft of the Copenhagen agreement contain, as Lord Monckton had suggested, this draft? Of course it did not. At Copenhagen there were lots of submissions—from, I think, about 160 countries—and in fact there was no draft, and no such proposal. Copenhagen has been and gone, and we still do not have world government and nor will we.

Lord Monckton claims to be a mathematician. As the article points out, that is:

Baloney. He has a Cambridge degree in Classics, ie Latin and Ancient Greek, and a diploma in journalism … from Cardiff.

So he is no expert on mathematics, as he suggests in his interviews. He also claims that he was a ‘science adviser’ to Margaret Thatcher. As the article points out, this is incorrect:

Thatcher has a science degree herself; she hardly needed—

it says, and I agree—

a science adviser who didn’t.

Lord Monckton was hired in 1982 as a low-level policy adviser in her policy unit, working on public housing and the like—nothing to do with the environment; nothing to do with climate change.

Lord Monckton claims that he is a member of the House of Lords. He is a lord; he is a hereditary lord. There has been a change in the UK and hereditary peers no longer automatically have the right to sit in the House of Lords. At a by-election that he contested for the Lords in 2007, he got not one vote—not one vote!

Lord Monckton also claims that he has received a Nobel Prize—that he is a Nobel Prize winner. This is on the website of his grandly titled Science and Public Policy Institute, which states:

His contribution to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 … earned him the status of Nobel Peace Laureate.

It states he has received a:

… Nobel Prize pin, made of gold recovered from a physics experiment …

This, of course, is utterly false. Al Gore and the committee received the prize. Lord Monckton does not have a pin. There is no such honour as a Nobel Prize pin. So I guess the point I am making is that this guy has tremendous form in making claims about his own background. I noticed that Andrew Bolt on Insiders said, ‘But Al Gore has made mistakes.’ Well, Al Gore has not falsely claimed to have received a Nobel prize. He has not falsely claimed that he was Vice President of America. He has not falsely claimed that he ran for the presidency. There seems to me to be a world of difference between that and lying about your background and then seeking credibility.

What disappoints me, I suppose, is that so many people have actually put their faith in what he has to say as being gospel. It is true that Barnaby Joyce has come under some criticism in his role as shadow finance minister, but he had this to say about Lord Monckton:

Obviously I and my constituency have some doubts (about the science) but when you find yourself waltzing with the fringe you should take a step back …

Regrettably, last Wednesday night, the Leader of the Opposition did not take a step back; he took a step forward. He met with Lord Monckton. And what a fraud Lord Monckton is.