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

It is exceptionally high profiteering. It's, essentially, a tax. It is a tax—nothing else. It's a tax that's destroying jobs, a tax that's destroying people's futures, a tax that's destroying industries and a tax that's destroying exports and making us uncompetitive. Then, as South Australia is on 47 per cent for its renewable energy target, what does the Labor government want to do in Queensland? It wants to bring on a 50 per cent target. Then it has the dishonesty to claim that it won't cost jobs. If we bring in a 50 per cent renewable energy target, that means that that will either displace or be an addition to the coal-fired power stations, which will mean that they will have to shut. They will not have the subsidies that intermittent energies now have. When they shut, that will put coal operators, coal employers and power-station workers out of their jobs. They will watch these imported windmills and imported solar farms working with subsidies passed on by state governments through taxation and higher energy prices.

What we have from the Greens and the Labor Party—can you believe it—is a highly regressive and destructive tax. That's because energy is an essential commodity today. It's no longer a luxury, I say to the Labor Party. Energy is now essential, a significant part of people's expenditure and highly regressive on the poor. Who is subsidising the wealthy to install subsidised solar panels? The poor, because they can't afford solar panels. So we now have a Queensland government that is stealing taxation—they're exorbitant rates, and it's nothing more than a tax—destroying the future of the state with a renewable energy target that is even beyond South Australia's imagination and using subsidies to kill the futures of people on lower incomes.

That's not all. We see the Nicholls opposition in Queensland—the LNP—passing a Labor Party budget that includes a 50 per cent renewable energy target. We also see that they want a target of around 23 per cent. How can anybody trust any of the tired old parties—the Greens and the Nick Xenophon Team? Then we have hydro. Hydro is the only power source that's cheaper than coal-fired power stations, but we can't build dams in this country, despite having massive water flows and water reservoirs up in North Queensland. We cannot build dams because of the Greens.

Let's look at the cause for energy prices being so high and increasing. First of all, we have the Renewable Energy Target, which kicked in in 2007. That Renewable Energy Target coincides exactly with the dramatic increase in prices for electricity. The Renewable Energy Target, with its massive subsidies to solar and wind, has driven up the price of electricity. We've seen subsidies for the intermittent energies and we've seen gold-plated networks that are abnormally high and intolerably high because they're not being managed because the sector is too highly regulated.

We also see something else, and that is what the Howard government brought in. Prime Minister John Howard proudly said that he wouldn't sign the Kyoto Protocol, and that was good. But he also said that we would comply with it, and that we did. To be able to do that, the Howard government had to stop land clearing or stop industry. So what did it choose to do? It chose to stop land clearing. If he'd implemented that then, as a result, the government would have had to pay compensation to farmers in New South Wales, Queensland and the other states, but that's in fact not what happened, because to get around that compensation, Prime Minister Howard colluded with the then Premier, Peter Beattie, and the then environment minister in New South Wales, Bob Carr. They put in place native vegetation protection legislation, which stole farmers' property rights, and Bob Carr is on YouTube gloating and laughing at doing it in a way that would mean farmers would not be entitled to compensation.

We've also seen jobs destroyed by the Renewable Energy Target that the Howard government put in place. A question for everyone: who was the leader of the major political party in this country that first brought in an emissions trading scheme? It wasn't Kevin Rudd; it was John Howard. Howard had the trifecta: the first emissions trading scheme as policy, the Renewable Energy Target and the stealing of farmers' property rights. How can we trust anyone in this debate? Following Kevin Rudd's mad, lunatic and disastrous quest for UN favours in his 2007 campaign, when the Labor Party brought out Al Gore to spread his lies, instead of countering it with facts, John Howard actually endorsed it by timidly falling for the ploy and reinforcing the claims about climate.

Just a couple of months ago John Howard said, by the way, that the two per cent Renewable Energy Target was all it should've been. He is the man who brought in what we see now: around 23 to 28 per cent. In 2011, four years after he left the prime ministership, John Howard was delivering the Global Warming Policy Foundation's annual lecture in Britain in London. After wreaking all of this havoc and doing all of this damage, John Howard admitted that he is agnostic on climate change. He hasn't seen the evidence, and that's why he's agnostic. The reason is that there is no evidence. What we see from the Liberal Party and the National Party is gutlessness, but what we see from the Labor Party and the Greens is dishonesty and deceit. We see that from the former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd.

Then we move onto the mad rantings we heard from the Greens this morning. We heard about hurricanes—the North American equivalent of cyclones—increasing. Let's have a look at that. We saw one cyclone last week, and then we see evidence that another cyclone is building and about to head towards North America. We then look at the records from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in North America, and we see that in the last 10 years North America has had 10 cyclones. If we go back to the 1850s, 1851 to 1860, the first years of the records, we see 19. That's double. If we then look at 1880 to 1889, we see 27, almost three times the number of cyclones we've had in the last decade.

Senator Whish-Wilson this morning was speaking rubbish, absolute nonsense. There are no trends that indicate any changes in rainfall patterns; no trends that indicate any changes in drought severity, frequency or duration; no trends that indicate any changes in snowfall; and no trends that indicate any changes in cyclone severity, intensity or frequency. In fact, cyclones and hurricanes lately are unusually low in the last 10 years. We see no changes in ocean pH. What some people call acidity is actually alkalinity, because the pH is around 8.3. That makes it alkaline, not acidic. How can we trust the mad rantings of the Greens when they distort the facts? Instead of data, what do the Greens they rely on? They rely on pictures of cute, cuddly animals and colourful fish, instead of data. That is not science.

Then we look at the Labor Party—and I see Senator McAllister in the chamber right now. She has mentioned things like a 97 per cent consensus. When people don't have the scientific data, they put in a red herring like 'a 97 per cent consensus'. Well, I am here to say that the 97 per cent consensus has been proven to be a 0.3 per cent fudging, and none of those scientists have any proof—