Climate sceptic clinches Australia opposition leadership

Australia’s main opposition Liberal party appointed a climate change sceptic as its leader on Tuesday in a move that all but kills plans by Kevin Rudd, primer minister, to have an emissions trading scheme passed into law ahead of the Copenhagen climate change summit.

Tony Abbott ousted Malcolm Turnbull to become Australia’s fourth leader of the Liberal party in just over two years but only after securing 42 votes against Mr Turnbull’s 41.

Mr Abbott, who earlier this year said the argument for climate change “is absolute crap”, used his first press conference to take on Mr Rudd’s Labor government over the proposed ETS.

A final vote on the ETS has been held up for days in the Senate, Australia’s upper house, where the government needs the support of at least seven non-Labor senators to have its legislation passed.

Mr Turnbull last week said the Liberal party backed amended legislation after the government agreed to more than A$7bn (US$6.4bn) of additional compensation payments to polluting industries and excluded the agricultural sector from the scheme.

However, Mr Turnbull’s move back-fired as hard-line climate change sceptics within the Liberal party sought to force him from office over the issue.

Mr Abbott, a former health minister in the previous government who trained to be a Catholic priest before entering politics, said on Tuesday he would demand the government’s ETS legislation be referred to a Senate committee.

If that demand was refused, the opposition coalition, which also includes the junior National party, would vote down the ETS in a move that would provide Mr Rudd with a trigger to call an early election.

On current polling, the opposition would suffer a bloodbath in an early election, a fact that will not be lost on Mr Rudd who will be angry that his attempt to take a leadership role at Copenhagen has been undermined by the Liberal party’s decision to renege on its deal to back the ETS.

Labour party figures said Mr Abbott’s elevation had exposed the Liberal party’s “jugular”. They also noted that Mr Abbott had failed to put forward any original themes during his first press conference as leader.

Mr Abbott said the ETS was an energy tax that would cost the Australian public A$120bn.

He claimed that Mr Rudd simply wanted to “take a trophy” to Copenhagen and there was no point bringing in the ETS prematurely.

“At times I have stuffed up but I believe when you become a new leader you make a new start.”

He tried to distance himself from his comment that climate change arguments were “crap”.

“That was a bit of hyperbole and it was not my most considered opinion,” he said.

“I think that climate change is real and that man does make a contribution,” he said.

He also claimed the Liberal party would have a “strong and effective” policy on climate change but provided no detail.

Mr Abbott’s rise is a surprise even to himself, who until Monday night said he would not stand in the event that Joe Hockey, shadow treasurer, put his name forward.

However, Mr Abbott changed his mind after Mr Hockey, seen as the front runner, indicated he would allow Liberal party parliamentarians to make a “free” or “conscience” vote on the ETS in the event he was elected.

Senator Penny Wong, Australia’s climate change, said “extremists” were now in control of the Liberal party.

“We will not tackle climate change without a global agreement but we will not get a global agreement if Australia is not prepared to stump up.”

Australia has had close to a dozen inquiries into climate change and the ETS in the last two years.

The MSM Boycott of Climategate

The MSM conspires to suppress stories harmful to the left-wing globalist agenda. Here is irrefutable proof.

Thanks to Google or other search engines, you can easily see how a story is promoted/reported... or not. The MSM can decide what is news, and they have decided that Climategate is definitely not.

This test searches a number of leading news sites for the term "climategate". This test is quite revealing, for on the left-wing sites where it appears - which are very few - it is either in an opinion column, where it is disparaged or in a blog comment that somehow escaped the notice of the censors.

One might argue that they may use a different term for the fraud, which is, perhaps fair observation... however, for that reason, I included the "Huffington Post", a left-wing Liberal site/forum/blog where the term has been published THOUSANDS of times - all of which makes it more conspicuously absent from thousands of stories published daily by the MSM. The Huffington Post left-wingers are using the term very freely amongst one-another - but you wouldn't know that such a term even existed if you relied upon the MSM for your news.

See the chart below which shows actual numerical results according to Google site searches done earlier today.

Using Google, you can do a simple test to immediately expose such blatant press bias by searching each site individually for the term, and simply counting the results pages.

For example, to search CNN for the term "climategate" simply type the following into Google and see:

site:www.cnn.com climategate

Here are the results of this press bias test:

Site	Search Term	Results
CNN	site:www.cnn.com climategate	0
BBC	site:www.bbc.com climategate	0
NY Times	site:www.nytimes.com climategate	5 (in comments mostly)
PBS	site:www.pbs.org climategate	0
MSNBC	site:www.MSNBC.com climategate	0
CBS (See BS)	site:www.cbs.com climategate	0
ABC News	site:www.abcnews.com climategate	0
Wall St. Journal	site:www.WSJ.com climategate	1
Financial Times	site:www.FT.com climategate	8 (comment/Opinion)
NY Post	site:www.NYPost.com climategate	36
Sky News (UK)	site:news.sky.com climategate	68
Huffington Post	site:www.huffingtonpost.com climategate	6,530
Fox News	site:www.foxnews.com climategate	855
Free Republic	site:www.freerepublic.com climategate	13,400

While CNN has ZERO pages on Climategate, they have more than 100 about the Whitehouse Gatecrashers.

There are about 39 hits in a search for Newsweek, but they are all people arguing about it in forum/comment posts or disparaging it.

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