The Liberal senator Eric Abetz has compared the Conversation website to Hitler, Stalin and Mao, after it announced a zero-tolerance approach to climate change deniers.
The academic news and analysis website has said it will remove comments and lock accounts that put forward those views, outraging the Tasmanian senator.
“Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong couldn’t have put it better themselves. They’d be so proud,” he told parliament.
“To so superciliously and arrogantly deny a voice to an alternative point of view is reminiscent of totalitarian regimes.”
In a blog post, the Conversation’s editor Misha Ketchell said people shamelessly peddling pseudoscience were perpetuating ideas that would ultimately destroy the planet.
Abetz, who describes himself as a climate change agnostic, said environmental prophets of doom had been getting it wrong for half a century.
“This ugly, unscientific, totalitarian, arrogant approach taken by the Conversation is the exact opposite to the principles of scientific endeavour.”
He said the lesson of history was that truth would ultimately prevail.
“The Conversation can stop the conversation, but it cannot stop the march of inquiring minds that will ultimately determine this issue,” Abetz said.
