Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

As much as I would like to take that question seriously, I just wonder whether I should just say that we will have to agree to disagree. If you go into the community and say, 'Because we want to grow a stronger economy, that's why we are causing bushfires,' and we say, 'We want to build a stronger economy because we want the young people of Australia to have an opportunity to get ahead,' you can get whoever you can convince to vote for you and we will get whoever we can convince to vote for us. Why don't we just leave it at that? The truth is that your policy, the policy that you and the Labor Party put in place in the last period of government, actually made the global emissions problem worse. In the context of 'a continuing demand for certain products and services', you shifted the supply, you shifted the manufacture, you shifted the creation of those products and services into areas around the world, along with the jobs that go with it, to where the emissions intensity was higher than it would have been here in Australia.