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

In summary, these bills are a massive opportunity for free enterprise to fix an unprecedented by-product of human progress. I urge the CSIRO to work with industry to produce biodegradable and compostable plastics that allow Australians to simply switch from environmentally damaging materials to environmentally friendly materials.

The Recycling and Waste Reduction Bill 2020 and associated bills are a win for the environment, a win for Australia and a win for the countries we have been dumping our rubbish into. The extent of this win depends on the response from the CSIRO and from industry. I'd like to take this opportunity to address the fact that the environment can be an opportunity—a huge opportunity—for high productivity and for a competitive advantage. Let's consider the evolution, for example, of management attitudes in business and society's attitudes to safety, quality and the environment. One has followed the other. Safety, initially, was seen as a cost, a burden. But, incidents, whether they injure people or are just simply near misses, are waste. Removing that waste, removing incidents and near misses, improves productivity and profit. This has driven me in my career in management. Improving safety reduces costs, improves productivity and improves profit. That's now accepted, although still not widely followed.

Secondly, there's quality. Quality was seen, initially, as a cost. High quality came with extra cost. Yet the Japanese miracle in manufacturing in the seventies and eighties turned that around, because the Japanese understood that defects are waste. Removing those defects improved quality, reduced costs, improved productivity and improved profit. This has driven my work in improving processes at work—in workplaces and in leadership processes. Quality is now understood to lead to lower costs, and that is why the lowest-cost producers in the world in manufactured goods have the highest quality.

The same cannot yet be said for the environment. Environmental issues, sadly, are still seen quite often as a cost. Yet looking after the environment removes waste and improves productivity and profit. Real environmental problems, such as real pollution of air, water and soil, add to cost. Take the example of the removal of car exhaust pollution. Car exhaust pollution in California is now one-thousandth what it was in the seventies. That has led to increased efficiency in the use of fuel, lower pollution, lower costs for motorists, lower costs for producers and lower costs for the cities of California.

Yet today there are still too many fabricated environmental problems, nonproblems cloaked as environmental issues. Making up environmental problems is physically and morally reprehensible. It hurts people. It adds needless cost, which the poor pay disproportionately. For example, labelling carbon dioxide as a pollutant is dishonest and contradicts science and nature. Car pollution consists of nitrous oxides, sulphur oxides and particulates. These were cleaned up in California and cleaned up in our country. Now we have carbon dioxide fabricated as a pollutant, and that is dishonest and contradicts science and nature. Carbon dioxide is nature's trace atmospheric gas, essential to all life on this planet. It cannot be a pollutant. We cannot affect the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; the empirical evidence shows that. It is not a pollutant.

I call on the government to do its work on hydrocarbon fuels and to understand natural climate variability and how it has been fabricated dishonestly by the Greens and others into climate change due to human activity, when that is false. This distracts from real and serious environmental problems. So, while I compliment the government for its work on plastics and removing plastics from the pollution stream, we need to buck up when it comes to carbon dioxide. Claiming that carbon dioxide is a pollutant leads to needlessly higher electricity prices. The noted and reputable economist Alan Moran calculates, using the government's own data, that it adds $13 billion a year to the cost of electricity in additional costs, that it adds $1,300 to the cost of electricity to the typical household and that 2.3 jobs are lost for every so-called green job that is created by these subsidies. This is hurting the poor. As a result of this climate change nonsense, we have the theft of property rights from farmers. That increases food costs, which hurts the poor. This climate scam is hurting the poor; it is antihuman; it increases costs needlessly, and disproportionately for the poor and those who cannot afford it; it increases waste right through our society; it decreases productivity; and it decreases wealth.

When ideology is wrapped as an environmental issue, as it is with the climate scam, then everyone suffers, particularly when the real aim of this climate scam is simply to control people. Everyone hurts. We need to get back to real and serious environmental issues. This climate scam is distracting us, our money, our time, our attention, our interest, our energy and our effort from real and serious environmental issues.