Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, '97 per cent'—that is when you count them, Senator Ludlam! We have had in this chamber the vilification of anyone who did not happen to agree with Ms Gillard or Senator Wong or Senator Milne. If you had a different view to them, you were clearly—well, I will not go into that, but you were clearly, in their view, someone of lesser understanding, if I could put it politely. And they were loud in their vilification of anyone who had the temerity to have a different view.

I know any number of highly qualified scientists who have a different view but, because they have a different view, under the Greens-Labor regime they were never able to get a grant for research out of the Labor-Greens government. I can give you the names of two, and I know there are hundreds more whose university careers were destroyed simply because the research grants that are so important in the careers of university academics would never come their way because they had a view that the Gillard government and the Greens political party did not like. That in itself is a scandal. I wonder where the Human Rights Commission and all those other groups that are so vocal when it suits them were when this little piece of information came around? I have an answer to a question on notice back in 2009 from the good Senator Kim Carr here, when he was the relevant minister, listing pages and pages of research grants that had gone to people who were trying to prove the political case of the Labor Party and the Greens political party, the alliance in government. I could not identify any grants—I believe there were one or two—in these dozens of pages of grants that went to anyone who was trying to question the orthodoxy.