Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a senator who is serving the people of Queensland and Australia I rise to congratulate the government on this Farm Household Support Amendment Bill 2017. It does remove the waiting period, which is currently up to 13 weeks, for eligible farmers to receive the farm household allowance. It also changes the categorisation of certain assets, such as water entitlements, which has the effect of broadening eligibility. However, I need to talk about two additional things.

The first is: what about compensation for farmers who had their property rights stolen under the Howard government? Prime Minister John Howard colluded with the Premier of Queensland and the environment minister in New South Wales at the time, Mr Bob Carr. They stole farmers' property rights in order to comply with the Kyoto protocol, despite the fact that the Prime Minister at the time said that he would not ratify the Kyoto protocol. He said he would comply. My understanding is that there are two ways to comply with the Kyoto protocol. The first is to cut back on industry. At the time the Prime Minister did not have the guts to do that, so he took the softer option. He penalised the farmers by preventing them from clearing land. That was a clear stealing of farmers' property rights.

We are told that there is nothing more sacrosanct to the Liberal Party than protecting property rights. Instead, the Prime Minister, in collusion with the then Premier and a minister in the New South Wales government, stole these rights without compensation. If these rights had been stolen or removed by the federal government alone, that would have required compensation. That they were removed by the passing of native vegetation protection legislation by the states meant the farmers were not entitled to compensation. So we had millions, if not billions, of dollars of farmers' land and property rights stolen by the federal government working with the New South Wales and Queensland governments. It was an absolute theft. Yet now we have the Liberals talking about supporting changes to section 18C, which we endorse. The fundamental freedom is property rights, but freedom of speech is also there. Why is it that the Liberals still will not give compensation to farmers for stealing their property rights?

I must add before moving from this topic that four years after he was thrown out of office John Howard in fact admitted in a major policy speech for the Global Warming Policy Foundation that he is agnostic on climate change. His chief of staff while he was Prime Minister was the current Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science, Senator Sinodinos. Surely he would have been advising the Prime Minister. Even though the Prime Minister was agnostic on global warming and that we are affecting climate through our use of hydrocarbons, he must have been advised, presumably by Senator Sinodinos, to push these global-warming claims. That is the reason, in my view, why the farmers lost their property rights and still to this day have not been compensated. Some have committed suicide over the loss of their land, because it has made them unproductive. Others have paid the penalty and walked off. We have seen Queensland regions devastated by this.

The second thing I want to talk about is the global warming claims made by Senator Rice, a Greens senator. There is no empirical evidence anywhere, no hard data or physical observation, that shows there is anything unusual occurring at all in any aspect of climate—not temperatures, not rainfall, not snowfall, not drought severity, not drought frequency and not drought duration. We had longer and higher heatwaves in the 19th century, from the 1880s to the 1890s. We have seen no change in sea level at any of the longstanding—that is, 100-year—tidal gauges around this country and, in fact, in many places around the world. Storm severity, frequency and duration are not changing. In fact, North America and Australia have had a lull in storms in recent years.

Yields of corn, wheat and other crops are actually increasing. In fact, every crop is carbon based. Its core cellular biology is carbon. It is essential for all life on earth. We do not need to have a low-carbon economy. In fact, a low-carbon economy is false and impossible because every cell in that Greens senator's body contains carbon. Every cell in every food she eats contains carbon. It is absolute nonsense to say that the seasons are unnaturally varying in their growing duration. There is no warming going on at all. There is nothing unusual in the temperatures. It is entirely cyclical. That is what the evidence and the hard data show.

What is more, the evidence, the hard data and physical observations confirm not only that we are not affecting the climate through our use of hydrocarbons but also that we cannot affect our climate through the use of hydrocarbons. In fact, the Greens senator raised a question about Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce. Then Senator Joyce told me in a meeting in his office in St George, Queensland, that overwhelmingly the coalition members of parliament and if not all members of his party, the National Party, then certainly almost all members of the National Party in parliament were sceptical of claims that carbon dioxide from human activity affects climate. He thinks it is nonsense. In fact, he went on many, many times to say that the notion that we can affect the global climate from a room in Canberra is absurd. The transition to what the Greens fancifully call 'a low-carbon economy' is essentially a transition to the death of our economy. It is quite ironic that everything naturally green on this planet depends on carbon dioxide. We commend the government for moving this motion and amending this bill, and we support it.