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 bring in a call for a return to sanity—a return to sanity, because I can see young people in the visitors gallery who will pay for the follies that we are embarking on and that we have embarked on for the last 10 years. Their parents are already paying for this suicide of manufacturing and this suicide of industry. We need a return to sanity.

This Competition and Consumer Amendment (Abolition of Limited Merits Review) Bill 2017, which the government is promoting, abolishes the ability of the Australian Competition Tribunal to review certain Australian Energy Regulator decisions. The review power was first established in 2008 under Prime Minister Rudd, who brought it in and made things unaffordable because of a fundamental belief that he pushed. It was a lie. We now have a regulator regulating the regulator. So we've got costs on costs on costs.

As I said, this review power was first established in 2008. It has been reviewed since then. In 2012 it was found to have caused a bureaucratic nightmare. In 2013 amendments were made to try and improve the operation of the regime. In 2016 there was another review, and we found that it was still a bureaucratic nightmare. We have a situation now in which a regulator, with less knowledge than the organisation it's regulating, is regulating that organisation. It's a competition tribunal, not an energy regulator. Let me read from the explanatory memorandum:

The regime was reviewed again in 2016 by the COAG Energy Council's Senior Committee of Officials, following applications for review of 12 of 20 of the AER's post-2013 electricity and gas decisions (in which affected businesses sought a total of around $7.3 billion in additional revenue) and two of the ERA's gas decisions. The review again identified a number of significant regulatory failures, including that LMR reviews of economic regulatory decisions remain a routine part of the regulatory process—

in other words, everything is getting challenged, everything; it's just another cost—

involve significant costs to all participants, continue to present barriers to meaningful consumer participation, lead to significant regulatory and price uncertainty, and are failing to demonstrate outcomes that serve the long term interests of consumers.

We've seen that because in the last 10 years power prices have doubled. That is largely due, in addition to the burden of intermittent energy supplies, to overregulation. So the view is that the regime is failing to achieve its intent of ensuring that better energy regulation decisions are made, and the delays, costs and uncertainty associated with the regime are increasing pressure on electricity prices. In other words, regulation is costing the consumers, costing families, and therefore the government has made the decision to get rid of it entirely. I want to add, Acting Deputy President Leyonhjelm—and I know you personally can see this—that government regulation decreases quality of service and product and increases costs. This is a mess that needs to be sorted out.

Let's get back to basics. We all share common traits, and one of those human traits is care. We must celebrate that because humans are wonderful; human spirit leads to the creativity that enables everything we see in this room. Two hundred years ago poverty prevailed right around the world. We had short life spans, even in the industrialised world. We had kings, then, who did not live as well as people on welfare today. That is a celebration of humanity. We have improved life spans, costs of living and the health, security and safety of people right around the world. In some places, fortunately—and we are a part of that western civilisation—it has been far more successful than in other places in the world. 'We' is the important word, because, while creativity is important and ideas are sexy, it is the sharing of ideas that is even sexier. Freedom is essential to human progress—that creativity, that spirit, that relentless drive to improve things, to improve humanity because we care. It's alive across Australia, but it's being choked.

There are eight steps to human progress. The first is freedom to let that creativity flourish, to let that creativity blossom on top of other people's creativity. It becomes exponential. The second thing is that we need a rule of law. The third is stable constitutional governance to provide for succession. The fourth is secure property rights. That is fundamental to responsibility. The fifth is honest money. The sixth is fair, efficient, low, tax systems. The seventh is strong families. There are two basic systems or structures in human society today. The first is the nation state and the second is the family—perhaps I should say the first is the family and the second is the nation state, both of which are being destroyed. The eighth key to human progress is cheap, efficient, affordable, reliable, secure energy. All of those eight steps are under threat.

It is fundamental to understand these things because when I first joined the Senate I promised that I would seek to increase accountability and to work on reducing cost of living and improving security, both materially and economically and also with regard to personal safety and terrorism. The government has three responsibilities: to protect life, to protect property and to protect freedom. And freedom must be protected for continuing human progress.

Let's look at that. As to food: farmers' property rights have been stolen—stolen in this country by a Liberal Prime Minister. Who would have thought that a Liberal Prime Minister would steal something that is fundamental to Liberal philosophy? It was government that did that. It was Prime Minister John Howard, trying to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, who stole farmers' property rights by colluding with then Premier Peter Beattie and Bob Carr in New South Wales. I'm currently Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Lending to Primary Production Customers, and it is quite clear that government action, government policy, quite often takes farmers to the brink, and then the receivers are called in. We have the world's largest island. We have the world's largest commercial fishing zone—or we had. We have the largest continental-shelf fishing zone in the world, and yet our tiny population of 24 million imports almost three-quarters of the seafood we eat.

Housing is a real problem for all young people right across this country. A study in New South Wales by the housing industry some years ago showed that 50 per cent of the cost of a house is tax.

As to taxation: the Australian Bureau of Statistics' figures in the late 1990s and early 2000s said that a person earning the average income pays 68 per cent of that income to government for rates, levies, fees, charges, special charges, special fees and special taxes. Government is sucking the lifeblood out of people.

On energy: we have the world's cleanest coal; we have the ability to use cheap coal. We have the resource of cheap hydro, which is even cheaper than coal. And yet, because of the policies that have been pushed in this country, based on a lie, we now have foreign powers producing electricity using our coal, and selling it more cheaply than can our manufacturers, our businessmen and our farmers. We have regulation throughout this country.

So what has gone wrong? Let's define the problem. John Howard said that he would comply with the Kyoto Protocol but would not sign it. In fact, to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, he introduced three actions. The first was, as I said, to steal farmers' property rights, raise the cost of food and destroy the farmers' property values. The second was to put in place a renewable energy target. He was the man who brought into place the renewable energy target. Sure, Tony Abbott increased it, but it was John Howard who brought it in. And, third, John Howard was the first leader of a major party in this country to propose an emissions trading scheme—not Kevin Rudd, not Bob Brown; John Howard.

Let us look then beyond John Howard. I have to admire—I do admire—compliment and appreciate Senator Ian Macdonald for raising the truth last December, on the last sitting Monday before Christmas, when he admitted, sadly, that this parliament has never had a debate on the science of climate, and yet we are now pushing policies that are costing families, individuals and companies billions of dollars a year and are destroying jobs.

Now we'll go to a government agency, CSIRO. I have been constantly calling on the CSIRO to provide me with evidence that human production of carbon dioxide is affecting global climate. The CSIRO has failed to provide any evidence of cause by human production of carbon dioxide. What's more, the CSIRO has failed to even identify anything unusual in the climate or anything, to be more specific, that is unprecedented. There is nothing unusual happening. Empirical evidence implies not only measured data and observed data but a logical process that proves cause and effect. We have seen some people put forward data on temperature and data on the amount of carbon dioxide we produce but nothing that shows cause and effect. Indeed, we had the Chief Scientist in May respond to Senator Macdonald's admirable question as to what the impact on global climate of shutting down all of Australia's carbon dioxide production—stopping all of our transport, stopping all of our industry, killing all our beef and sheep animals—would be. The Chief Scientist, after beating around the bush, was asked by Senator Macdonald to get to the point, and the Chief Scientist said it would be 'virtually nothing' from shutting down all production of carbon dioxide, let alone five per cent.

I hear talk about 'the scientists say'. Well, in fact, the scientists don't tell us that carbon dioxide from human activity is increasing temperature. The study produced by Cook at the University of Queensland, my old university—