Senator Eric Abetz

Did anyone notice how the “Greatest moral challenge of our time” was not mentioned by the Labor leadership at the launch of the Tasmanian Labor election campaign yesterday?

I think even the Labor spin doctors now know ‘the great big tax on everything’, the Emissions Trading Scheme, is electoral poison.

Tasmanians know that job losses would flow, the devastation for the manufacturing sector, not to mention the impact on every day living like the cost of power and groceries.

Mr Rudd is desperate to distance himself from the climate change debate in fact so much so that a whole paragraph in the Prime Minister’s homily was devoted to the lights at Bellerive Oval in Hobart, but of ‘climate change’ ‘the greatest moral challenge of our time’ according to Mr Rudd, not a word.

The Liberals have a direct action plan on climate change that we are willing to talk about and promote.

Labor has gone silent on the big new tax and for very good reason because it is fatally flawed and won’t help the environment.