Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker Rick Wilson. I'm pleased to see you in the chair during my contribution to the address in reply to the Governor-General's speech. My first job, of course, is to thank the people of Hughes, who put their trust in me to represent them in this place in Canberra to stand up for their interests. I'm very pleased that they returned me with an increased margin. So I again represent those people without fear or favour to make sure that I stand up for their interests in this place.

During the election campaign it was very important to stand up for their interests, because we truly dodged a bullet as a nation. If the result had gone the other way, what would have happened to those self-funded retirees, people that had worked hard all their life, that had invested under the rules of the day and that were going to have their franking credits simply stolen? I was privileged to be part of the economics committee that heard some of the evidence in this. What came across loud and clear was that members of the Labor Party and the Greens simply didn't understand the principle. They thought it was their money. They didn't understand that if you are a shareholder of a company you own that company, just like you do if you're a sole trader or if you have a business investment in a partnership. And the profits that that business or partnership or sole trader makes belong to the owner of the business. Then those profits are taxed at the applicable marginal tax rate. That was a concept completely devoid of the Labor Party's understanding. They went after those self-funded retirees at this last election, and we then had the Shadow Treasurer telling them, 'If you don't like it, don't vote for us.' Well, they did that in droves.

The other bullet that this nation dodged was about negative gearing: again trying to drive a wedge of class warfare through and again a simple misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the basic economics. Negative gearing is not some type of tricky tax stunt. It is a simple principle: the costs of your interest are an expense of earning an income and therefore they are deductible when you work out what your pre-tax income is and what you pay the tax upon. Again, it was a concept the Labor Party simply couldn't understand, which would have decimated the investment and housing industry throughout our cities. I hate to think what would have happened.

But truly the real bullet that we dodged as a nation was that we didn't get Labor's 45 per cent economy-wide emissions reduction target. For years we've argued in this place about renewable energy targets, but what we've been talking about is really only renewable electricity targets. The electricity sector only makes up one-third of our emissions, so where Labor just didn't want to take our electricity sector emissions at the 45 per cent; they wanted to do that reduction in every other sector of the economy. Stationary energy: people that use gas in their own home for heating and cooking. How did the Labor Party plan to reduce that by 45 per cent? Trucking across the nation: that sector had to reduce its CO2 emissions, which means reduce the use of petrol and diesel by 45 per cent. How is that going to happen without decimating, mainly, many rural areas and without decimating our trucking industry?

What about our aviation industry? Airlines like Qantas and Virgin? Qantas, for instance, emits more CO2 as a company than does the Liddell coal-fired power station. How is a business like Qantas going to reduce their emissions by 45 per cent under what the opposition took to the election, unless they are simply going to take planes out of the sky? If you take planes out of the sky, what do you do to all the tourist industries and businesses that rely on the tourist sector around the nation? This is the bullet that we dodged.

Then, of course, there's the agricultural industry. The agricultural industry makes up 14 per cent of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions. How is that industry meant to reduce its emissions by 45 per cent other than by a mass cull of our dairy cattle, of our beef cattle, of our sheep and of our pigs? A mass cull would have been required to get to that 45 per cent target. That's the bullet we dodged.

The other concern was how close Labor came to pulling this off, because they went to this election with this huge economy-changing policy and yet they refused to say what were the costs and what were the benefits. They were asked time and time again what the costs were, and they told us, 'Don't worry about it.' What was the cost to electricity? How many jobs could be lost? What would it do to how competitive our nation would be? Just forget about it.

But what it really came to also is what were the benefits? What were Labor going to achieve by their 45 per cent emissions reduction target? Nothing. They were going to achieve exactly nothing. Because we know that—the Chief Scientist of Australia, Professor Alan Finkel, has told us and he's made it very clear—it doesn't matter if the entire Australian nation goes down a giant sinkhole, if we close down every industry in the country and cull every single beast, it will make no difference to the temperature. But then Labor say, 'Hang on, what about all nations working together?' Okay, let's have a look at that. We know under the Paris agreement if every single nation meets their obligations by 2030—a big if—and if we assume the modelling about how adjusting CO2 changes the temperatures is correct, the peer-reviewed research in this says the change in temperature will be one-twentieth of one degree, that is 0.05 of a degree Celsius, by the year 2100. That's if every nation does what they're supposed to do.

There was interesting commentary by Bjorn Lomborg only this week. He looked at what happens if every rich developed nation in the world, including Australia, went to zero CO2 emissions not in 2050 but by tomorrow and they then kept their emissions at zero out to the year 2100, the end of the century. Do you know what the change in temperature would be? Again assuming those models are right, it was 0.39 of a degree Celsius. While countries like India and China continue to lift their people out of poverty and continue to need energy to develop their economies and give the people that live in those countries the opportunity for the type of lifestyle that we enjoy in the West, emissions are going to rise and nothing we do in Australia will have any effect.

The other one we heard during the election campaign was the great 'Stop Adani' march. We had the wonderful Bob Brown—we must actually try and strike some Liberal Party or National Party medal for Bob Brown's efforts!—going up there to North Queensland, lecturing those North Queenslanders about how they should live their lives, what businesses they should have and how he knew better than the Indians that were trying to develop it. What a lot of people don't understand is that India already mines more coal than Australia. India mines around 600 million tonnes of coal per annum; Australia mines only 400 million tonnes. When I say only 400 million tonnes, that is a substantial amount. But what India are planning—and their energy secretary said this only last month—is that they need to lift their production of domestic coal from 600 million tonnes to a billion tonnes. One thousand million tonnes: that is what India are targeting; another 400 million tonnes of production annually. This is equal to Australia's entire production of coal, both thermal coal and metallurgical coal. So we truly, truly did dodge a bullet.

We would have thought that after that, Labor would have learnt their lesson. They would have said, 'Look, we understand that we got this wrong.' And there was a glimpse of hope. For a while there we had the member for Hunter saying: 'We should adopt the coalition's emission targets. Let's drop that 45 per cent emissions target.' There was a glimmer of hope there for a few days. But yesterday we saw that glimmer of hope being diminished. Labor Party joined those climate crazies—those people gluing themselves to the roads; causing protests; dressing up in the most outlandish, ridiculous costumes we have seen; dancing in the streets as though they are drug affected. Labor signed up with those people; Labor joined those climate crazies by declaring a so-called climate emergency.

These Extinction Rebellion people are a menace. They are a menace to society. They are a menace to logic and reason and progress, because the policies that they want, which the Labor Party is now supporting, will bring devastating austerity to the people who can afford it the least in our society. One thing really concerns me about this. We all do what we can to try and win votes for our respective sides, but we've got to do it in a responsible manner. Out there in our society at the moment we have young women and their partners deciding that they are not going to have children because they have swallowed this nonsense that there's a climate emergency. We've even heard stories or reports of women having abortions because of their fear of this climate emergency. What are these couples and these women going to think in 20 to 25 years, when they are in their late 40s or 50s or 60s, and they realise that they cast aside the opportunity to have children because they listened to the lies and the untruths spread by some politicians? There will be a day of reckoning for those who are propagandising this emergency.

Let's have a look at some of the many, many facts that we know are completely false. Firstly, one thing we love to hear from the alarmist camp is that there is a consensus. The claim that there is a 97 per cent consensus is a complete and utter fraud. And it should be offensive to people's reason because it tells us: 'Don't worry about thinking, leave the thinking to others. You just go along with what everyone says.' Only last month, to show what a fraud this is, we had a global network of 500 scientists and professionals write to the UN with a message that said clearly, 'There is no climate emergency.' In their letter they said that the warming is natural as well as having anthropogenic causes. They said the warming is far slower than predicted; that climate policies rely on inadequate models; CO2 is a plant food, the basis of all life; global warming has not increased natural disasters. And they concluded: 'There is no emergency. There is no cause for panic and alarm.' That is 500 of the world's leading scientists and professionals.

Secondly, one of the most important ways of measuring how we are progressing and how we are being affected by the climate is the number of deaths that occur annually from climate related catastrophes, whether they be floods, droughts, storms, fires or extreme temperatures. Data on this is kept by the United Nations international disaster database, which goes back with reasonable quality data to the 1930s and, as time goes on, the data becomes more accurate. What it shows is that in the 1930s there were 450,000 people a year who lost their lives from climate related deaths. By 1950 that had reduced to a quarter of a million—that's still an enormous death rate. By the 1970s it had reduced to 50,000 deaths annually from climate related incidents. Since this century started it has been under 25,000, and that reduction has happened despite the tripling of the world's population.

But last year, 2018, we saw the lowest number of deaths from climate related disasters ever recorded: 6,200. That is not because the extreme weather is getting less extreme, it's because we've learned how to use fossil fuels and learned how free markets protect humanity from this extreme weather. This is something that the other side of the argument do not acknowledge and do not recognise.

Thirdly, there has been in recent years a global greening. There are actually more trees on the planet today than when I was at school. I remember being told at school about how deforestation was terrible and how we were going to run out of trees. Well, the peer reviewed science, in an article titled 'Global land change from 1982 to 2016', published in Nature recently on 18 August 2018 said:

We show that—contrary to the prevailing view that forest area has declined globally—

That's the prevailing view—

tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km2 …

So there are 2.24 million square kilometres, an area the size of New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria combined, of additional trees on the planet than when I was leaving school and university. That is the peer reviewed science.

What about when it comes to extreme weather? We like to hear from members of the opposition, the climate alarmist movement and the lunatics who glue themselves to the road—sometimes that can be all three—that extreme weather is getting worse. Again, let's have a look at what the peer reviewed science says. Printed in Environmental Hazards was a paper entitled 'Normalised insurance losses from Australian natural disasters: 1966 to 2017', published on 24 April this year. It states, and I quote directly from the science:

Despite broad agreement in the scientific literature and assessments by the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that there is little evidence that insurance or economic losses arising from natural disasters are becoming more costly because of anthropogenic climate change … the topic remains highly politicised …

So here we have confirmation of what the IPCC says, that there is little evidence that insurance or economic losses from natural disasters are rising. They looked at the evidence and their conclusion was:

When aggregated by season, there is no trend in normalised losses from weather-related perils; in other words, after we normalise for changes we know to have taken place, no residual signal remains to be explained by changes in the occurrence of extreme weather events, regardless of cause.

That is the peer reviewed science, and yet we have these alarmists continuing to deny the science.

It's also interesting to see what they say about tropical cyclones, because we hear from the Greens and the alarmists that tropical cyclones are made worse because we're burning coal in our coal-fired power stations. Again, the peer reviewed science says:

For tropical cyclone, the clear reduction—

Reduction, that means less—

in losses observed over time … is consistent with declining numbers of landfalling cyclones observed since the late 1800s on the eastern seaboard …

We are getting fewer cyclones, not more. The damage insurance loss from cyclones is less, and not more, and yet we hear the exact opposite time after time.

I could go on, but the last one I'll do is drought. We love to hear people from the Labor Party and from the Greens and from the people who glue themselves to the road say that droughts are caused by climate change. One of Australia's leading climate scientists, Professor Pitman, said recently:

This may not be what you expect to hear but as far as the climate scientists know there is no link between climate change and drought. Now, that may not be what you read in the newspapers and sometimes hear commented but there is no reason a priori why climate change should make the landscape more arid.

He continued:

If you look at the Bureau of Meteorology data over the whole of the last one hundred years there's no trend in data. There is no drying trend.

So the fundamental problem is we don't understand what causes drought and, more interestingly, we don't know what stops a drought. This is the peer reviewed science. I'd encourage members of the Labor Party not to engage with the Extinction Rebellion people but to study and learn the science and not engage in a scare campaign.

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