When we let senators out to play overseas strange things can happen.........

Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi is being a bad, bad, boy by blantantly misrepresenting the Rudd Government stance on its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) emissions trading bill if reporting on 23 October 2009 by The Washington Independent is true:

Cory Barnardi, a Liberal Party senator from South Australia, is in Washington for meetings with some stateside conservative groups. (The Liberal Party in that country is the conservative opposition to the ruling Australian Labor Party.)
I talked with him briefly and asked about the impact of the House vote on cap-and-trade legislation back in Australia.
The prospects for a climate bill had stalled out, but then the U.S. House moved on cap-and-trade and the ball began rolling again.
"It's a problem," said Bernardi. The Labor Party's principles on climate change, he explained, call for a vote if and after the United States passes its own bill. There is a movement afoot to change that, he said, but it's not changed yet.
And if the U.S. Senate passed a climate change bill? "That would make things more difficult." [my bolding]

For all the flack that will come Cory 'lose with the truth' Bernardi's way, he didn't even get his name consistently spelt correctly over those nine short lines.

Just for the benefit of American readers - the Australian Federal Labor Government is trying very hard to get its climate change bill creating an emissions trading scheme (aka cap-and-trade) passed into law before the beginning of December 2009 and had its re-introduced CPRS bill read a second time in the House of Representatives on 22 October 2009.

It has consistently refused to tie the carriage of this bill to anything other than domestic considerations and a desire to have legislation in place before the COP15 climate change conference being held in Copenhagen at the end of the year.

Here is the Minister Assisting the Minister for Climate Change on his feet in the Australian Parliament:

I would like to address at the outset some of the major arguments of those who oppose action on climate change.
It is sometimes said that because Australia is responsible for a small proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions, we should not be 'acting ahead of the rest of the world' by unilaterally committing to reduce our emissions—that this would impose costs on Australia without solving the global warming problem.
We are not acting ahead of the rest of the world—in fact 27 EU countries, the US, Japan, Canada, New Zealand and Korea all have, or are developing, cap-and-trade systems.
And there is no need to wait until after Copenhagen as there is nothing in the Bill which makes its passage contingent on Copenhagen outcomes.

A consistent government position of which Senator Bernardi is well aware, but obviously one that he was determined not to convey to readers of The Washington Independent.