Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Hansard source

Whilst I most certainly agree and have always advocated, long before it was a popular thing—I speak with some authority, because I didn't talk about it; I did it. I am on the record as providing the first standalone solar system in Australian history. The head of GE from America came out for the opening ceremony. It was a very important fact. But to achieve that I had to do a hell of a lot of research on silicon. We wanted to provide the world's high-tech silicon. We've got the best silicon deposits in the world. They're already smashed up into fine particles, a very fine sand, which makes them very cheap, and they're 98 per cent pure, so we wanted to develop that.

You must understand that a solar panel is not carbon neutral—anything but. You have spiral separation, which takes up no energy, but then you have to put it under electromagnets, which burns up an enormous amount of energy, putting enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That's not the fun part. The fun part is where you have to crush silicon into flour. Silicon is the second hardest metalloid on earth, second only to diamond, and you've got to crush it. That burns up a hell of a lot of power. So we've got electromagnetic power going up and now we've got the crushing powder going up, but that's not the real fun part. The real fun part is when you've got to smelt it. You can smelt it with wood or you can smelt it with coal. No-one on earth would smelt it with electricity, but, in any event, that worsens your problem. It is not carbon neutral. The proposals put forward by my worthy colleagues in the Greens, by myself and by many other crossbenchers are sensible proposals to lower it dramatically, but there is no way that I am going to stand aside and watch my friends, my relatives and members of my staff have their entire lives destroyed by closing down the Australian coal industry.

I'm sorry to have to give the parliament the bad news, but, thanks to your stupid free-market policies, we only have three sources of income. Thanks to your stupid policies, you gave all the income from gas away, so one of them is gone. The three of them, last time I looked, were worth about $120 billion each. The next thing down may be aluminium, cattle or gold. They're worth about $16 billion. You've only got three sources of income from overseas, and you gave one away. Now you want to do away with another one. I don't know how you're going to buy everything from overseas. This place decided that we're free-market, and, in fairness to the Greens, they've never been for that. They've always been on the right side of the fence as far as I'm concerned on these issues, but the mainstream parties gave it all away. We have to buy everything from overseas. We don't produce cars. We don't produce fuel. We don't produce household appliances. We don't produce about half the stuff you need to build a house; it comes from overseas. If the government proceeds with the current legislation, that will close down the steel and aluminium industries in Australia. Both will be gone.

You can shake your head as much as you like, but if you were running an iron industry in Australia you would know that the cost of producing steel is the cost of energy, and you're going to double the cost of energy—no, don't shake your head, because you've got the graphs. Don't lie to the parliament. You've got the graphs and you have seen how the price of electricity has doubled. You can go down to the library and get the pricing if you like. What tripled it was your free-market policies. That tripled the price of energy. In Queensland, for eight years it was $670; you free-marketed it and it went to $1,500. Now it's gone to $3,000, thanks to your greenie advocates. There are a lot of old people that can't switch the lights on anymore thanks to your environmental policies. But you've got to go to empirical evidence. I have great respect for the Greens these days. They are one party that is not part of the corporate paradigm of power. They are one party that is not in the pockets of the paradigms of power. The big parties most certainly are. But, with all due respect, give us empirical evidence, please. You can have your scientific theory, but you've got to have empirical evidence. At the Gold Coast, the beach is exactly where it was 70 or 80 years ago. (Time expired)

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