Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Labor Party, clearly, has not learnt the lesson of the last election. The Labor Party and the Greens trumpeted the last election as 'the climate change election', at which the Australian people would be able to determine whether or not they accepted the Labor-Greens view of the world or the coalition view. Can I remind honourable senators opposite that the people of Australia very wisely adopted the coalition policy, in relation to climate change, on 18 May. They spoke. The quiet Australians spoke. Let me be very clear: the Australian people made a very commonsense decision. They asked one question: 'What is the pain-to-gain ratio? What is the pain going to be on my power bill, on jobs, on Australian wealth, in exchange for any potential benefit to the world environment?' Mr Shorten and the Labor Party were unable to answer either part of that question, of the pain-to-gain ratio.

What we do know, and what Senator Scarr so very eloquently put to Senator Wong—who then of course had to use the racist card to try to overcome it, though everybody knew what Senator Scarr was referring to—is that the Australian Labor Party has deserted the Australian worker in favour of inner-city Greens. That is where the Labor Party are in a cleft stick. They do not know whether they support coalmining. You had Mr Shorten going up to Queensland during the election campaign and saying he supports coalmining and then, when in Victoria, saying, 'Well, I'm not sure I really support Adani.' Guess what? The Australian people didn't believe you, and for very good reason.

Senator Wong and Senator Keneally refer to the experts time and time again. I've been listening to the experts now for 30 years telling me that there's going to be a tipping point in 10 years time. Well, after 30 years, the Australian people have a right to ask: 'Why is it that these predictions over 30 years have failed to materialise?' Why is it that, when experts assert quite loudly and blandly—Professor Tim Flannery, by the way—that the Brisbane River would never flood again and it's flooded twice since, they are never brought to account for those false prophecies? Similarly, they've asserted that the Murray River would never flow out to sea again. Yes, it has—another false prophecy. Yet, we're supposed to rely on these experts without question.

The Australian people are more clever than the Australian Labor Party and their inner-city Green friends would like to think. Indeed, Senator Keneally just referred to the bushfires. Today we have an opinion poll that tells us that the Australian people are smarter than Senator Keneally and the Labor Party—because 56 per cent of the Australian people acknowledge that the bushfire problem that we had this year was not as a result of climate change but as a result of the failure of fuel reduction.