Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

What is extraordinary is that the suggestion he might have been wrong seems to be coming from the people who were once his strongest supporters. It was John Howard who finally, in the face of the evidence, did confirm that global warming, or climate change, was occurring and that carbon pollution was contributing to it. So it is somewhat bizarre, one would have thought, that those opposite, some of them his strongest supporters—and I note their heads are down now—are no longer out there backing the Howard legacy. I thought Senators Minchin, Bernardi and Abetz were those who were the diehard Howard legacy defenders—but not on the issue of climate change, only on the issue of Work Choices.

I note that the current Leader of the Opposition reinforced this point in a speech to the Sydney Institute, where he said:

… climate change is a fact, not a theory.

He did not check with Senator Minchin before he said that. This is the same Mr Turnbull who on Friday said, ‘It would be smug on the part of the climate change lobby to say that the science is beyond doubt.’ Isn’t that extraordinary! What an extraordinary— (Time expired)