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Turnbull bats away climate committee challenge
Updated 1 hour 8 minutes ago
'Not my decision': Malcolm Turnbull (AAP: Dean Lewins, file photo)
Opposition frontbencher Malcolm Turnbull says it is not up to him to decide whether he should sit on the Government's new climate change committee.
Mr Turnbull, who lost the Liberal leadership over the issue of climate change, said during the election campaign that the Opposition's direct action policy was "less than ideal".
Prime Minister Julia Gillard has urged Opposition Leader Tony Abbott to allow two MPs to sit on the cross-party committee, but he has refused to do so.
And during Question Time yesterday she challenged Mr Abbott to put forward Mr Turnbull.
But Mr Turnbull says it is not his decision to make.
"It's a decision for the Coalition and in particular its leader, so it's not a decision for me," he said.
"I've been on many committees and had many discussions about climate change and there are few people in Australia whose views on this issue are better known than me.
"I don't know that I'd be revealing a great deal to a committee of that kind that the members don't already know."
Mr Abbott spent much of yesterday attacking Ms Gillard for putting the option of a carbon tax back on the table after ruling it out during the election campaign.
Ms Gillard says Labor has recognised the changed circumstances in the Parliament but Mr Abbott says her argument does not stack up.
"Just one person, the Green, was elected saying yes to a carbon tax and now the Prime Minister is politically intimidated by the Greens ... so she says that that one person in the Parliament somehow trumps the 144 who were elected saying no to a carbon tax," he told AM.
Where has she been for so long?) 
Has their media section been infiltrated? "Stable" as in a bunch of heads that wouldn't look out of place hanging over a feed trough? Surely they could have found a photo slightly more flattering? Or am I just looking that this through anti-rose coloured glasses. Whatsisname from the Nats looks stoned. The rest look like Oakeshott just walked in the door and farted. Only Chris Pyne manages to look affable, and it would take that much soft focus to transform the human weasel.
I happened to be passing the liberal party's web site (ask nicely and I tell you why)
The passion and patriotism of leaders
By Barrie Cassidy
Posted Wed Oct 6, 2010 3:31pm AEDT
To plead jet lag as a reason not to accompany Julia Gillard to Afghanistan is one of the silliest things Tony Abbott has said over the years. (AAP: Mark Graham)
Tony Abbott has said some silly things over the years. But to plead jet lag as a reason not to accompany Julia Gillard to Afghanistan is right up there with the silliest of them.
The insensitivity is compounded because he wanted to arrive "wide awake" for what was essentially a political event in the United Kingdom.
Unsurprisingly, the parents of two soldiers killed in Afghanistan condemned him for the remarks. One of them, Jennifer Ward, whose son Benjamin was the 11 Australian killed, said Afghanistan is a "hell of a place" and the troops morale is "knocked down pretty easy" so "it hurts when people say they can't be bothered."
Another, Felix Sher, whose son Gregory was killed in January, last year, described the comments as "a slap in the face".
The Herald Sun editorialised that he could not have offered a greater insult to Australian troops "by not going there because he didn't want to miss his beauty sleep.
"The enormity of what is a moral misjudgement and a political dereliction of duty will not be easily forgotten," the Herald Sun said.
"The Opposition Leader has let all Australians down by his inexcusable sense of political priorities. He may carry it as a fatal wound when the nation next goes to an election."
The comments are all the more bizarre because they don't reflect the way the man thinks. He is enormously patriotic and passionate about the welfare of Australian soldiers. He once considered pleading a case to John Howard to be defence minister. So why did he not simply explain that he had his own trip planned and that, in his view, was the most appropriate way to go? Security is no excuse because he didn't have to be specific about when he intended to make the visit. Perhaps the only excuse for the lack of judgement, given that he had just arrived in Birmingham, was... jetlag.
For those who think Abbott has been harshly judged, consider the situation in reverse. Imagine the public outrage that would have erupted had the Prime Minister knocked back an invitation to visit Afghanistan, flown straight to Brussels, and then told the media she had done so because she didn't want to meet world leaders jet lagged. She would never have recovered from the comment.... <cont>
So...how's it all going in Oz?
I am going to be back in a week or something.....what should I be prepared for?
:par·a·digm (pr-dm, -dm)
n.
1. One that serves as a pattern or model.
2. A set or list of all the inflectional forms of a word or of one of its grammatical categories: the paradigm of an irregular verb.
3. A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline.
