David Feeney (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It will come as no surprise that I intend to speak against the motion. Once again, the Senate’s time is being wasted by another tedious opposition motion concerning the Oceanic Viking. In the last fortnight of the Senate sittings for this year, when we have a raft of legislation waiting to be debated, waiting for passage through this place, and, most importantly, when we have had the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme bills before the Senate, the opposition has chosen time and time again to burn up our valuable time with lengthy tirades concerning asylum seekers such as the one we have just heard from Senator Cash. Senator Cash’s speech was mostly a rehash of some of her earlier contributions this week, but it does invite me to rehash some of the points I have made in earlier contributions concerning what this debate is really about and the departure of the parliamentary Liberal Party from fact and reason.

Ultimately it has to do with the worsening and growing divisions within the Liberal Party and within the ranks of the opposition over how they deal with the great political issues confronting this parliament and this nation at this time. This morning we heard yet another extraordinary speech from Senator Minchin, the Leader of the Liberal Party in this place, who once again flatly and openly contradicted his leader Malcolm Turnbull and contradicted the purported policy of his own party on the issue of climate change. Senator Minchin said quite flatly that not only is he opposed to the CPRS bills currently before the Senate but he is opposed to any emissions trading scheme at all because, he says, anthropogenic climate change is only a theory. He told us that literally thousands of eminent and highly qualified scientists in Australia and all over the world do not accept the IPCC’s hypothesis that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are the main cause of global warming—