Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I am not quite sure, but I think the Leader of the Opposition is attempting to put to me the proposition that Senator Wong was opposed to pricing carbon because she was worried about Australian jobs. I say to anybody who has ever listened to Senator Wong when she held the climate change portfolio, or indeed since she has held the portfolio of minister for finance: in Senator Wong you find someone with a deep understanding about the need to price carbon, a deep understanding about the benefits for the Australian economy and a deep understanding about the benefits for Australian jobs.

I will check the quote used by the Leader of the Opposition, but my experience this week has been that, when quotes are produced by the opposition, the sentence is clipped to give a misleading impression. A direct question to me from the Deputy Leader of the Opposition had that flaw, and it goes as part of a misleading campaign.

On the premise of the Leader of the Opposition’s question about rising prices: it was he in this parliament yesterday who was chiding the government for not giving sufficient information so that you could work out what price rises were going to be. So let us not have any of this hypocrisy from the Leader of the Opposition. Out of his own mouth yesterday, he said to this parliament he was critical of the government because he did not have enough information to know what price rises were going to be, and now, a short 24 hours later, he is back to making figures up and asserting price rises. I say to the Leader of the Opposition—

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