Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Evans interjects and wants to know about whether it is a well or a grave. Senator Evans, you can keep digging. Keep digging the hole or the grave or the well or whatever you want to describe it as for your government. You are discredited, and everyone knows it but you. Although there are those on your side who know it—not the leftists, but those with common sense.

This well, this hole, this grave for global warming that is being dug by the IPCC relates to the frauds that have gone on there. The IPCC have misled the public with their climate data, they have manufactured data, they have made outlandish claims that glaciers are going to disappear in 25 years and that the Amazon rainforest is going to disappear and that there are going to be massive droughts in Africa as a result of carbon dioxide being emitted into the air. We have discovered in 2010 and late 2009 that most of these outlandish claims, which were supported and taken to the bank of the taxpayer by the Labor government, were based on flimsy science, false science, dodgy science, student newspapers, WWF funding and claims in Greenpeace’ extremist publications.

It simply beggars belief that the government wants us to accept and adopt this suite of bills without scrutiny of what has come to light. It goes to the desire of Senator Wong and those of her ilk to see world socialism or some sort of evening body across all countries so that we can redistribute wealth to help those who are going to be affected. As I said last year, I do not know how redistributing wealth to corrupt regimes or compensating people for things that they have never had and never will have is going to save the environment. The people who are advocates for this approach are mostly rent seekers who are reliant on the largess of this redistribution of wealth—hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into dodgy environmental programs. The head of the IPCC’s own institute is benefiting. I understand that our government has sent the IPCC $1 million to further these outlandish claims. By the way, that institute, TERI, far from being a bastion of environmental greatness, is, I think, now building golf courses—those things that require lots of water—in India and nine-hole golf courses on public land. That seems a good use of environmental money!

Anyway, I digress. There are a bunch of rent-seekers involved in this, and we need to identify that. We need to make sure the Australian public truly understand that what the government is trying to sell them is not what the environment needs and is not justified by the actual, credible science that has come in. It is justified by the discredited science that the government chooses to use. But, in doing so, we are subject to all sorts of abuse and personal attacks. They say, ‘Al Gore must be right because he won a Nobel Prize.’ If there were a Nobel Prize for fiction, Al Gore would deserve it, he really would—but not for science, not for a peace prize and not for drawing the attention of the Australian people to problems with global warming. This is nonsense. It is rent-seeking. It is further grandiosity by an elite who wants to tell the Australian people and the rest of the world how we should be running our lives—and it has been rejected, again and again. You would think a government that really considered what was in the best interests of the Australian people, what was in the interests of our industry, what was in the interests of our families, would actually say, ‘Hey, we got this wrong; let’s take some direct action on it rather than create a massive bureaucracy’. There are 150-or-so people administering something that does not yet exist. It is quite extraordinary. Do you want to know why they want to pursue that? There are 150 people there who are zealots, advocating for something that is unnecessary and ineffective.

This is a range of inconvenient truths for those who are watermelons: they are green on the outside—we know that—and they are Marxist red on the inside. These are the people who are trying so hard to re-engineer our economy and to put themselves at the very epicentre of it. It is an inconvenient truth. I say to the emperor and the empress of the ETS: what has happened with the IPCC has shown that you have no clothes. And the Australian people know that; they know it—it is not just one small boy, one man or one scientist. The Australian people are waking up to the fact that the emperor and the empress of the ETS have no clothes—and it is not a pretty sight. They continue to come in here and say, ‘We’ve got to take action to save the world.’ Well, the rest of the world is not taking action.

I hear all the time, from Senator Wong and others, that there are 30 or 35 countries that have an ETS. What they do not disclose is that all bar one of those countries is associated with the European Union trading scheme. And what they will not tell you about the European Union trading scheme is that an estimated 80 to 90 per cent of the trades that take place on their carbon exchange are based on frauds. It is pass the parcel: everyone wins a prize and gets a government grant along the way, until some bogus company at the end has all the liability and shuts itself down. This is happening again and again. It has had no impact on carbon dioxide emissions in Europe. It has had no impact on stopping global warming, which they have conveniently ignored now and call ‘climate change’. It has had no impact on stopping cyclones or extreme weather events, or any of these things that they attribute to climate change—which, once again, have been debunked as myths—yet they want to impose it on the Australian people.

If they want to impose this on the Australian people, why will they not allow it to be scrutinised? Why will this government not allow us to examine the data that they have relied on? Or to examine the modelling, and the implications for the Australian economy? What do they have to hide? Clearly, they have a great deal to hide. Their modelling last year—they would not release a lot of it—assumed that all other countries in the Western world, or the major emitters at the very least, were going to introduce an emissions trading scheme of their own. This refers to China, the United States, India—and yet none of them are going to introduce and emissions trading scheme. It is all on the backburner. They have realised the folly of their ways—that this is an imposition on industry, it is an imposition on human progress and it will make no difference to the climate. All have woken up to that falsehood, except the 1950s Stalinist regime that is running this country now, that wants to put the Australian government at the very epicentre of the economy and redistribute the wealth—take from those who produce and give to those they deem worthy. There are laudable aims in government, in making sure that people have opportunities, but you do not give people opportunities by shutting down industry and denying them a job. That is exactly the consequences of this ridiculous legislation that they call the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

I know that Senator Wong has this like an albatross around her neck. We heard about dead cats hanging around people’s necks yesterday. Well, we have a stinking albatross hanging around Senator Wong’s neck on this. I know that she is desperately hoping for a reshuffle so she can ditch this poisoned chalice of a portfolio, and perhaps give it to one of her factional rivals—Senator Arbib would probably be good for this one, because he is in bad-land as well at the moment. What we have is a policy that is entirely friendless. Last year’s friends, from industry groups and other organisations that were supporting this government because they thought these bills were going to get through, have suddenly turned on them and have distanced themselves from them. They have said, ‘No, we really don’t want this legislation.’ Everyone is walking away from it except Senator Wong, the emperor and the Labor Party. This is where the Australian people are being dudded. Last year, if you recall, Mr Acting Deputy President, how to address climate change was the ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’. And yet, for some strange reason they will not allow the ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’ to be examined in a prudent and appropriate manner, so that their bills and their legislation are truly accountable to the Australian people.

Why? We keep coming back to that question—what have they got to hide? We have seen this government’s cover-ups. We have seen that they do not want to be accountable for the mistakes they have made. But one of the hallmarks of great leaders, of good governance, is that when they get it wrong they say, ‘Look, we got it wrong,’ and they shut down ridiculous and silly programs. Let’s take one example, and I will give credit to this government. After wasting some $20 million or $30 million of taxpayers’ money on their GROCERYchoice website, they walked away from it. It is awful that it cost nearly a million dollars a week for the seven months or so of development, but at least they walked away from it rather than continuing to pile many more millions of dollars into it.

But how many jobs are they prepared to sacrifice on their green altar? How many industries are they prepared to send over to China, India or somewhere else in the world? How many people are they prepared to put out of work, to disadvantage? How many businesses are they prepared to close down to pursue an extremist, nonsensical, unaccountable and inefficient climate change agenda? There is something really wrong with this.

Senator Wong maintained yesterday, if I recall correctly, that there have been 15 different inquiries into the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. That may be right, but things have changed. Things have changed since we saw that disaster that was Copenhagen, where every radical green group got together to have a love-in and say, ‘We can change the world.’ They cannot change the world because they were all exposed as not having a legitimate claim or justification for what they wanted to implement. It turned to custard. Yet our Prime Minister, Senator Wong and others wanted us to go there with one of only two emissions trading schemes outside of the European Union.

The other country outside of the European Union that has introduced an emissions trading scheme is New Zealand. The scheme was introduced by a Labor government there and, finally, when a new government was elected, they started to roll back some of the outrageous impositions on their economy. We were going to be the second one. We have a much larger economy than New Zealand. We would be the major country outside of the European Union to implement a trading scheme. It has not done the European Union any favours. It has not done the world any favours. Yet Mr Rudd wanted us to introduce it here and disadvantage ourselves ahead of all our competitors.

It is a bad policy. We know that. We know the science has moved on. We know that the Australian public no longer want it; they want direct action on climate change. We should put this CPRS to bed forever and a day. But the government will not. So we hope that, by referring it to a committee, which Greens, coalition and Labor senators can be on, we can find a general consensus that is in the best interests of the world and of Australia. That committee would examine the implications of what Labor proposes. I believe it would discredit it instantly and, hopefully, Labor would come to their senses and save the Australian people from the nonsense that they want to impose.