Ms GILLARD (Lalor—Prime Minister) (14:27): As my colleagues have observed, the Leader of the Opposition has already grown bored with discussion of the economy and he is back to the only thing he knows how to do, which is to distort things in pursuit of a fear campaign. What he is doing today is distorting the words of Professor Ross Garnaut in an incredibly irresponsible way. To anybody who has listened to the Leader of the Opposition's question let me say this to them very clearly. The Leader of the Opposition has misrepresented Professor Garnaut. We always see the Leader of the Opposition do this because he cannot mount an argument that deals with the facts. It is impossible. He knows he cannot mount an argument that deals with the facts. He can never discuss the facts. He never wants to hear the facts because as soon as the facts are on the table his fear campaign falls away. So at every opportunity, including every opportunity in this parliament, he walks in with distortions. Professor Garnaut did not say what the Leader of the Opposition put into his question. That did not happen. What Professor Garnaut talked about was the kind of climate commission they have in the United Kingdom where a body makes recommendations to government, which then performs its democratic role in the way that governments do. Of course, our democracy is filled with bodies that make recommendations to government. The Productivity Commission is just one such body that makes recommendations to government. If we look at the way that works in our democracy, it has worked for years without anybody taking the kind of silly political point we are seeing the Leader of the Opposition take today. I have never heard the Leader of the Opposition walk up to the dispatch box or indeed any other microphone and say that his Conservative counterpart David Cameron is not exercising an appropriate democratic— The SPEAKER: The Prime Minister will resume her place. The Manager of Opposition Business. Mr Pyne: Mr Speaker, I raise a point of order. The Prime Minister was asked a very specific question. These needlessly negative debating points that she is making are quite out of order, and I ask you to draw her back to the question she was asked. The SPEAKER: The Manager of Opposition Business will resume his seat. No matter how he characterises the argument in the response, in the standing order the only requirement is that the response be directly relevant, and the Prime Minister is aware of the need to be directly relevant. Ms GILLARD: I had a distortion of Professor Garnaut's words put to me. I am correcting that distortion. No-one should believe it to be true. It is not true. I am pointing out the truth of what Professor Garnaut said. You can see examples of the kind of arrangement that he is thinking about around the world, including in the United Kingdom, where Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron very recently received recommendations from a climate commission and determined to act on those recommendations. I did not hear the Leader of the Opposition say at that time that he thought his Conservative counterpart was not behaving appropriately as Prime Minister, so let us not listen to any of this nonsense. I think the Australian people will increasingly be asking themselves: why is it that the Leader of the Opposition can never engage in the climate change debate by dealing with the facts? Why is it that he always has to rely on falsehoods and fear? You rely on falsehoods and fear when you do not have a rational argument, and that is the Leader of the Opposition's problem. He has no rational argument, no rational policy, no rational belief in the science; all he is peddling is fear and falsehood, and every Australian should understand that.