And this man is the preferred Prime Minister

'Weathervane' Abbott targeted over support for price on carbon | The Australian

From the Tony Abbott "Just Say Anything" tour of Australia (it has the asterisked subtitle "Consistency and logic are for mugs") we get the following story:

The Opposition Leader made the claim on Gippsland's Star FM yesterday, saying: “I've never been in favour of a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme.”

But in October 2009 Mr Abbott, under then-opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, publicly backed an emissions trading scheme in an interview on the ABC's Lateline program.

“We don't want to play games with the planet. So we are taking this issue seriously and we would like to see an ETS,” he said at the time.

He made a similar comment on radio 2UE in November that year. “You can't have a climate change policy without supporting this ETS at this time,” he said.

Earlier this week, Mr Abbott criticised a proposed 5 per cent carbon emissions cut as “crazy”, even though the Coalition supports the target.

UPDATE: Tony Abbott says he forgot to add "as leader" to the end of his claim that he has never supported an ETS. I'm sure he'll allow Julia to explain that she forgot to add "no majority Labor government I lead will have a carbon tax".

But Tony Abbott's career of just making it up as he goes along continues with this:

TONY Abbott now says he does not want any of Victoria's brown-coal-fired power stations to close or switch to cleaner fuels, despite the Coalition having repeatedly said it expects to pay for one of the generators to shut and convert to gas under its $10.5 billion Direct Action policy.

''I know that burning brown coal is a high emissions form of energy production, but I think the smart way forward is not to fail to use brown coal. It's not to close down these power stations, it's to try to ensure that we use technology better to reduce the emissions,'' Mr Abbott said yesterday as he prepared to visit the Hazelwood brown coal plant....

But as recently as Tuesday, Coalition Finance spokesman Andrew Robb had claimed Labor's proposal to pay to close a brown coal generator had been stolen from the Coalition.

''Despite all the fevered claims that Direct Action won't work, the single biggest abatement measure in the Government's scheme happens to be a Direct Action proposal - namely, the closure of Hazelwood power station.''

And after last year's election, the Coalition climate spokesman Greg Hunt said: ''One of the ironies of the election is that if the Coalition had formed government, we would be negotiating with the owners of Hazelwood and Yallourn power stations about converting either or both from brown coal to gas.''

But yesterday Mr Abbott said: ''There will be no act of policy from the next Coalition government or from any Coalition government that I'm associated with that artificially foreshortens the life of these power stations.''