Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I am participating in the debate on this document, but I, unlike the previous two speakers, want to actually speak on the document. You can understand why the Labor Party cannot manage government, because they do not even understand the rules of the Senate which require senators to speak on the document listed on the Notice Paper. The document we are talking about is a report from the Department of Climate Change. The previous two speakers from the Labor Party spoke about anything but the report. Clearly, they cannot even manage their own thoughts of what they should be talking about in this chamber, and they are very sensitive to the mismanagement of their government.

In talking about this report from the Department of Climate Change, I want to ask the Labor Party where we are in dealing with what was labelled ‘the greatest moral change of our time’. We have not heard about it. It seems to have completely disappeared from the lexicon of Mr Rudd. Yet earlier this year and all of last year Mr Rudd and Senator Wong spoke of nothing else. They kept talking about Copenhagen. They set up this department with almost $82 million for it to deal with climate change. But what has happened now? We do not even hear a squeak about what Mr Rudd labelled ‘the greatest moral challenge of our time’. Quite clearly, Mr Rudd’s interest in climate change was, as with everything else, entirely political. He is all talk and no action. That is why people around Australia are describing him as ‘Prime Minister Blah Blah’. They say that he is just blah blah blah—never any action and all talk.

Indeed, in relation to climate change, apart from setting up a bureaucracy costing the Australian taxpayer $82 million to do absolutely nothing, they will not even bring the legislation before this chamber so that the parliament can deal with the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. And why not? Because it has finally got through to Mr Rudd—it got through to his backbench long before this, but they were all without the intestinal fortitude to tell him, but we all knew—that this was a lemon of a policy. It would have destroyed the jobs of Australian workers, it would have cost Australia competitiveness overseas, and it would not have made one iota of difference to the changing climate of the world. And yet Mr Rudd has wasted $82 million of taxpayers’ money setting up this department to do absolutely nothing, and he is rushing around now trying to try find something for this department and all of those new bureaucrats to do because they are not doing anything about climate change because Mr Rudd does not want to talk about it any more. (Time expired)