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

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I want to reaffirm Pauline Hanson's One Nation party's commitment to reducing pollution—real pollution: sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxide, particulates; these are real pollutants. We also want to make sure that we have energy—cheap, abundant, accessible and affordable energy—because energy is the key to human progress.

The fundamental driving force for human progress is our own creativity. That has blossomed in the last 167 years, since 1850, and the start of the industrial revolution, but the key slave that has powered this for humanity has been the relentlessly decreasing cost of energy. That is what has driven human progress: our creativity, implemented through cheaper energy, ever reducing in price, until 10 years ago. And now we see the Greens, aided and abetted by the deceitful Labor policies under Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard and by the weakness under the Liberal Party, destroying that by reversing the trend in energy prices. We have now seen energy prices increasing for 10 years under the policies of both the Liberal Party and Labor Party. We see that as a retrograde step for human progress—a return to the Dark Ages. We see it as a retrograde step for the standard of living as things become more expensive.

The cost of energy is reflected in the cost of almost every single service, every single product across our community, across our nation. We see the Chinese using our coal and many other countries in Asia using our coal to produce cheap electricity, cheaper than we can sell it for here. We also see that as manifesting then in a reduction in standard of living and an increase in cost of living. These are the things that trouble not only young people but people in their retirement and people on low incomes. Energy has become an essential good. It is not a luxury any more. That means that people on lower incomes find this to be a highly regressive tax.

The Greens, fundamentally, want to reverse human progress. That is anti-human. Senator Rice has mentioned electric vehicles. Electric vehicles have their place, but in small quantities. If we went to widespread use of electric vehicles, it would lead to dramatic increases in the price of electricity because the demand for electricity would rise. Yet, the Greens give us no solution. They prevent hydroelectricity, they prevent the use of coal-fired power stations, they prevent the use of nuclear power generation. Those three are the only base-load providers of energy in this country and anywhere in the world—hydro, coal, nuclear. And the Greens are opposed to all of them. They want us to go on windmills, a product of the 19th century. Old technology indeed. How do we produce hydrogen? We produce hydrogen through electrolysis. That's how we produce hydrogen—more electricity. Senator Rice is advocating for yet more electricity while curtailing the supply of electricity. That's the first point I want to mention.

My second point about the Greens' charade is that they have never, ever produced any empirical evidence that we need to cut the use of hydrocarbon fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas. No-one in the world has proven any human causation of global warming or global climate change due to the human use of hydrocarbon fuels. It is an ideology that contradicts science. Let's have a look at some of the empirical evidence. Temperatures have not risen for 22 years. There is no warming. Secondly, the longest temperature trend for the last 160 years was 40 years of cooling from the 1930s to 1976. At that time, the human production of carbon dioxide increased dramatically in the Second World War and in the post-war economic boom. Thirdly, temperatures in the 1880s and 1890s were warmer in Australia than they are today—warmer 120 years ago than they are today. In the United States, which has the best temperature records in the world for the last century, we see that the 1930s were warmer than today. Any changes in temperature are found not to be driven by changes in carbon dioxide. The reverse applies. What we see are changes in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere driven by the changes in temperature, which are entirely natural. That is due to the enormous capacity of the oceans to absorb 50 times more carbon dioxide. They currently contain 50 times more carbon dioxide than is in the entire atmosphere. Slight changes in temperature lead to slight changes in carbon dioxide levels. In the last 20 years, we have seen massive production of carbon dioxide from human activity, yet no increase in temperature. The whole thing is a scam.

The third point: even if we were causing warming, is it detrimental? No. Warming is highly beneficial. In fact, all of earth's past far-warmer periods are known by scientists as climate optimums. Why? Because they're beneficial for humans, civilisation, the planet, animal species and plant species. What we see here is the Greens wanting to control our future and wanting to put us back into poverty, stuck with failed technology. Without subsidies, the Greens' policies are dead, and that is the same for human activity.

We want to commend the government for bringing forward this bill, because the government has fallen down in this area. Previous governments have fallen down as well. We are very pleased to see this minor change, but we argue that we need a comprehensive approach to energy, a freeing-up of markets—getting rid of the energy market that is now governing electricity use and restoring free markets, not controlled markets. The problem with markets today is that they're not markets in energy. The electricity market is not a market; it's an energy racket controlled by subsidies, vested interests and politicised ideologies. What we need to see is a restoration of a free market so that people can make their choice. We are very pleased to see this minor change, and that's why we will be supporting this bill.