Tom Switzer on the election and Labor’s climate change
Tom Switzer, editor of The Spectator Australia, returned from a three-week stint in the US and went straight on to Monday night’s Q&A – as the lone conservative. There wasn’t a hint of jet lag in his performance.
Switzer’s co-panellists were former Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, the Greens’ senator Christine Milne and ALP power broker Graham Richardson.
The first question put to the panel was: Beyond the superficial motherhood statements, is there any real difference between Labor and the Coalition this election?
TOM SWITZER: Well, on the issue of the real difference, well, I think there is a difference. Tony Abbott is sincere about his conservative credentials, whereas Julia Gillard is trying to be a conservative. She is. She’s running as a centre right candidate. She quickly distanced herself from Kevin Rudd’s unpopular mining tax. She’s gone way out of her way to toughen up or try to pretend to toughen up the nation’s borders. In many respects she’s browner than John Howard. She’s completely distanced herself from the emissions trading scheme and she’s talking a very muscular, hawkish language about the war in Afghanistan. So I think that the difference between the two is in the sincerity. They’re both running as centre right candidates. Abbott is sincere. Gillard, she’s a lady of many masks. Who can say they’ve seen her real face?
The next question attacked Labor from the Left on climate change: Why has the Government abrogated its leadership responsibility on climate change action – an issue on which it had a clear election mandate – to a “citizen’s assembly”? And what is it you expect these citizens to tell you that the IPCC, Ross Garnaut, Tim Flannery and others can’t?
A clearly uncomfortable Penny Wong waffled on.Tom Switzer nailed it with this:
TOM SWITZER: The problem with this lot in the Labor Party is they rang this scare campaign for two whole years, saying the delay was denial, that people like Brendan Nelson and Nick Minchin and Barnaby Joyce were deniers and radicals and extremists and that they must sign up to the climate change legislation by 3.30 on a certain Friday afternoon or else double dissolution. But when Tony Abbott called their bluff, what did they do? They went to water. They lacked leadership. Gutless, weak and hypocritical.
Read the transcript or watch the program in full at the Q&A website.
