Craig Kelly (Hughes, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to rise at this hour to speak on the Offshore Electricity Infrastructure Bill 2021 and related bills.

I have sat here and listened to the debate on this bill for many hours and I've heard nothing other than complete nonsense from both sides of politics during this debate. Not once have we talked anything about costs and benefits. This debate has been wide-ranging and many speakers have come to the dispatch box and talked about how this bill relates to this net zero approach by 2050. It may be the old-fashioned way of doing things, but I believe that when we have these proposals and when people come in here then rather than simply talking about virtue signalling we should set out clearly what the costs are and what the benefits are, and then argue them—argue them out. Is this best for our nation? And yet amongst all the speakers and in all the hours on this debate, not once has there been any discussion of the cost benefit of net zero by 2050. I'm going to do something a little unusual here in this parliament today and discuss a proper cost-benefit analysis.

So what is the cost? What's the damage for this net zero by 2050? An article published on 14 October in the Wall Street Journal talked about the cost, and it did an estimate for the USA: 'A new study in Nature finds that a 95 per cent reduction in Americans' carbon emissions by 2050 will cost annually 11.9 per cent of US gross domestic product. To put that in perspective: the total expenditure on social security, Medicare and Medicaid'—that's in the US—'came to 11.6 per cent of GDP. The annual cost will rise to US$4.4 trillion by 2050.' They broke that down in America to US$11,300 per person per year in today's dollars. That's around $15,000 in Australia; for a family of three it costs $45,000 per year and for a family of four it's $60,000 per year in today's dollars. I think that if a true cost-benefit analysis were done in Australia it would likely be higher than what it was in the USA.

So I have the costs at $60,000 per family per year. What are the benefits? Everyone likes to stand up here and say: 'The government should do something to stop the bad weather! The government should take action on climate change!' They always fail to quantify it, but we actually can quantify it. There's a UN climate model called MAGICC.org where we can put the calculations in. That has actually been done by Bjorn Lomborg, who has looked at what the reduction in global temperatures would be, assuming this model is correct—and a lot of evidence shows that it's running too hot, but let's just assume the model is correct. If the entirety of what he calls the rich world—the USA, the European Union, the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, Turkey et cetera—went to net zero not in 2050 but today and stayed there for the rest of the century, what would the effect on temperature be? Surely this should be the very first thing that we should be asking: what are the benefits of that? The UN's own climate models show that if all those rich nations, including the US, the European Union, the UK, Australia, Canada and Japan—the whole lot of us—decided to go to net zero today and held that to 2050 then by 2100, the end of this century, that may reduce the global temperature by 0.5 degrees Celsius, and this benefit—0.5 degrees Celsius—is going to cost each family of four the equivalent of $60,000 per year. To me that sounds like a bad idea. If someone want to argue those figures and put up alternative numbers, let's go ahead and have the debate, but let's not just come into this chamber and debate on virtue-signalling and people trying to feel good

It appears that I am the only member of this House who is going to call out the nonsense of net zero by 2050, but thankfully there are still some sensible commentators in the media who are also calling this out. I'd like to quote from an article in the Australian just a few days ago by one of our most senior economists, Mr Terry McCrann:

IT really is quite extraordinary, the way almost the entire political class has declared economic war on their own country and not just the current 26 million Australians but all future generations as well … They are all united in seeking to attack the Australian economy, plain and simple; to permanently and significantly reduce the standard of living of present and future Australians … the entire political class has signed up to the national suicide note that I wrote about first with Kevin Rudd's carbon tax, by abandoning the use of fossil fuels which have provided the plentiful, cheap and reliable power on which not only all economic progress but indeed our very civilisation has been built.

Hear, hear! It is good to see that we have some journalists actually telling the truth.

The United Australia Party will call this nonsense out. We are not going to sell out our nation's sovereignty to overseas globalist interests just so we can feel good and go around virtue-signalling. We are not going to sell out our nation's competitive advantage to the communist Chinese. How is it possible that we are saying this to China, whose President is not attending these talks in Glasgow, along with India and also Russia? China say, 'We'll get to net zero by 2060, but we expect Australia to do it by 2050.' To agree to that is to give the Communist Party of China an economic, political and military advantage over this nation. That is what everyone in this parliament is doing when they stand up and engage in groupthink and herd mentality and mindlessly chant, 'Net zero by 2050.' They are putting this nation at a competitive disadvantage vis-a-vis the communist Chinese, economically, politically and militarily. I for one am prepared to stand out and say this is a nonsense that damages the interests of the Australian nation.

Some of the other nonsense we've heard during this debate is about the wonderful job creation all this extra investment in renewables will do. We need to ensure the way to create jobs. First, we have to understand that the government does not create job; it is entrepreneurs in the private sector. The secret is that we have to get our electricity costs down and to generate that electricity using the least number of resources possible to give us a lower-cost possibility, so that we can give the entrepreneurs of this nation access to low-cost electricity so they can go out and make things and produce things with new ideas. That's how we create jobs. That's how we encourage wealth creation.

The debates that we've heard in this place remind me of a story that Milton Friedman once told. He was travelling to an Asian country and he visited a worksite where a new canal was being built and he said that he was shocked to see that, instead of modern equipment, such as tractors and earthmovers, he saw thousand of workers with shovels, and he asked the government bureaucrat: 'Why are there so few machines? Why do all these workers have shovels?' The government bureaucrat explained, 'You don't understand; this is a job creation program,' to which Milton Friedman replied: 'I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it's jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.' That is the ideology we see when people come into this chamber and say, 'We're going to create all these wonderful jobs in the electricity generation sector.' For every job we create there we destroy jobs in the real sector that produces real wealth for this nation.

During these debates we've also heard about how wonderful all this offshore wind is in Europe at the moment and how wonderful everything is going in Europe. Do those members actually turn the news on or read the papers to see the current disaster that is occurring in Europe? In Europe they put all their eggs in these offshore wind turbines—and what's happened? The price of energy has gone through the roof there. They are suffering an energy catastrophe this winter in Europe. In Europe this winter, because of the ideology that we've heard in this chamber—which comes from Europe to start with—there will be many elderly and the low-income earners in Europe who will die because they'll be unable to afford to heat their homes. That is where this ideology leads us. The poorest and the oldest in society will not have access to cheap, reliable energy and will not be able to afford to heat their homes, and this winter we will see thousands and thousands of deaths in Europe because of this mad ideology that has taken over.

There are a few amendments that I would like to move in the consideration in detail and third reading stage of this bill. But, if we are going to have these policies, whatever these policies are, we have an obligation to the Australian public to spell out what the costs are and what the benefits are. When you do that with clear, calm and rational thinking, instead of using emotive language and thinking, you understand that these policies are contrary to our nation's interest. They are going to put us at a competitive disadvantage against the Communist Chinese. Money will flow out of this country. We know that China has something like 63 per cent of the market of offshore wind turbines globally. The money will flow out of this country to the Chinese. And then there's that beautiful black coal that runs down our eastern seaboard, Australians will not be able to use that. We will put policies in there that will prohibit Australians from using that, but we will be happy to ship if off to China, where they will use it to create low-cost energy and create goods and services,

Our nation is at a crossroads today. We have to decide whether we are going to put Australia's interests first or we are going to put the interests of the UN globalists—those that we see over in Zurich and Glasgow, who will stand up and want to criticise our nation—first. We have to decide who we put first. For as long as I continue to be a member of this House, I'll continue to fight for the interests of our nation ahead of the interests of UN globalists.

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