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 note that it's certainly true that the Australian economy was not as strong as it should have been in December 2019 just before the government's restrictions on COVID hit. GDP in the December quarter recorded a very poor 0.4 per cent and inventory growth was negative 0.1 per cent, reflecting the low confidence in the manufacturing and retail sectors. Median wages were not growing in real terms, and unemployment had stalled at 5.1 per cent. The only thing holding up the Australian economy was surging mineral exports. It's here that One Nation parts company with Labor. One Nation believes that the weak economy was a result of policies that Labor introduced or supported. At the heart of an economy is electricity. Labor and the Greens cheerlead unreliable energy. If only steal smelters could run on rainbows, Australia would be an economic powerhouse!

According to economist Dr Alan Moran, Australia's excessively high electricity prices are undermining our economic resilience and competitiveness and cutting our standard of living. Since 2002 successive Liberal, National, Labor and Greens governments, in a misguided quest to reduce carbon dioxide, have introduced climate policies at the expense of cheap coal and gas power. As we try vainly and stupidly to cut carbon dioxide, nature's trace atmospheric gas, essential for life on the planet, our electricity prices, once the lowest in the world, have become one of the most expensive. With carbon dioxide at just 0.04 per cent—four one-hundredths of one per cent of our air—this is futility and stupidity. The data shows we cannot even affect the level of carbon dioxide in air.

Dr Moran goes on to state that the financial impact of climate policies and their renewable subsidies are as follows. Higher electricity costs through the supply chain are forcing up retail prices and costing households at least $13 billion annually extra, or around $1,300 per household per annum. Climate policies account for 39 per cent of household electricity bills, not the 6½ per cent the government typically quotes, and it causes a net loss of jobs in the economy. For every green job subsidised, 2.2 jobs are lost in the real economy. State and federal governments' own data reveal the cost of these climate policies to household electricity bills is an extra $536 per annum, significantly more than the government's touted $90 per household per annum. In effect, the government imposed climate policies and renewable subsidies account for 39 per cent of household electricity costs. Labor cannot blame the government for an economy that policies Labor themselves advocate have decimated. To get the economy going and to create breadwinner jobs, baseload coal power is needed desperately.

On Tuesday I moved that the Senate support a new HELE coal fired power station in the Hunter, and Labor voted against this. Last year One Nation supported the government's call for a new HELE coal plant in Collinsville, and Labor voted against that. In a previous sitting One Nation proposed a hydro power station be constructed behind Townsville in northern Queensland. The Bradfield Scheme's first stage would create 2,000 megawatts of clean, green baseload power and thousands of high-quality jobs. Labor voted against it. Labor just doesn't understand energy and its vital core important, nor does Labor give a moment's thought to the energy workers who will be thrown out of work as a result of Labor's policy of closing coal fired power stations. Beleaguered Labor member for the Hunter, Joel Fitzgibbon, is stranded in a party that doesn't give a damn about coal or the three in every five households that coal provides in the Hunter. Mr Fitzgibbon admits that labour—the real labour—is no longer part of Labor, and the Labor Party is no longer the party of labour. One Nation is the party of labour.

I need to mention the National Party, who this week walked from their support for coal despite only just releasing their glossy manufacturing 2035 policy a few weeks ago. After One Nation moved a motion calling on the Nationals to vote in favour of their own policy, a motion that took the words of Senator Canavan and applied them directly, the Nationals backflipped and chucked out a policy they'd only just released. Two days ago, our motion, as I said, copied and pasted the public shoutings of Senator Canavan, the Nationals' deputy leader in the Senate, and that same day they slapped him down. What a joke! The Nationals have a credibility problem, a hypocrisy problem, a duplicity problem.

To be fair to this motion, the Morrison government voted as a whole to oppose HELE coal. That's the Morrison government. And what a sight there was on the opposition benches with the Liberals, the Nationals, Labor, the Greens and the crossbench all crowded together, united in their desire to take jobs and a future away from the Hunter—not so much TheBrady Bunch but F Troop. Of course, the troubles in the Australian economy are to do with more than just power. The last 40 years have seen the largest transfer of wealth in the history of this country, from working Australians into the pockets of the elites. Behind this transfer of wealth is globalism. Australia has exported more than one million manufacturing jobs over the last 30 years, mostly to China.