If nine out of 10 doctors said unless you underwent chemotherapy you were going to die, what would you do?
That's how former prime minister Julia Gillard tried explaining the importance of pricing carbon to individuals when it came to fighting climate change.
"We've got an overwhelming majority of scientists telling us our planet needs to do this. Are you really going to be the one who bets that the vast majority of them are wrong with something as important as the planet's future?" Ms Gillard said during a forum with Anne Summers in Melbourne on Tuesday.
"If you could get them one at a time, you could make a difference."
However, she came unstuck when faced with the task of explaining its importance to groups.
"There is this weirdness that goes around climate change science," she said.
"In groups brought together, the toxicity that can be in social media, it just got this bizarre and explosive carry on around it that I think was hard to explain and is still hard to explain."
In just her second major public appearance since being dethroned on June 26, Ms Gillard admitted she also made a political error in conceding the scheme she had introduced was a "carbon tax".
"It is an emissions trading scheme with a fixed price for the first three years, and any iteration of an emissions trading scheme basically starts with a price that someone fixes," she said.
Ms Gillard also touched on the infamous "Ditch the Witch" anti-carbon tax rally featuring Tony Abbott outside Parliament House in 2011.
She said while the crude signs at the rally did offend her, it was the benign media response to the incident that she found really amazing.
"If someone was there with a sign that said `Ditch the black -insert bad word here-', if that happened there would be a huge outcry about how disgusting that is," she said.
"Yet when it was gender, it just didn't get that reaction and that shocked me as much as the signs themselves."
Ms Gillard also expressed frustration at the coalition having just one woman in the current cabinet, saying it was not only disheartening, but hopeless.
"Here we are having gone back, back decades in time," she said.
"What made me a little bit more optimistic than that statistic was that the reaction to it happened in the media and the community conversation for days and days."
With the majority of the questions focused on misogyny and sexism, Ms Gillard had to laugh when an 11-year-old girl asked her if she actually had any fun while serving as prime minister.
"I don't want the whole thing to sound Dickensian, like I was in some dark, satanic mill," she said.
"I wasn't. I was living at The Lodge, surrounded by wonderful people and we had a lot of laughs."
She singled out retired independent MPs Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, as well as retired Nationals whip Kay Hull, as giving her the most support from outside the Labor Party.
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