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

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I note this government's turn to the dark side. Pushing a zero carbon dioxide economy is gaining steam. 'The dark side' means sitting in the dark, because unreliable technologies like wind and solar will cause us all to be sitting in the dark, as is proven repeatedly overseas. These green boondoggles exist only to farm taxpayers' money, not energy. It's the ultimate irony that, when the Greens talk about a farm, they don't mean one that grows food and fibre; their wind and solar farms are made from communist China's industrial processes creating steel, fibreglass and concrete, the very things you can't make with green power. The Greens vision for Australia has no integrity because they claim so-called science has no integrity. It does not exist.

It is 772days since I first challenged the former Greens Leader, Senator Di Natale, and the current Greens Leader in the Senate, Senator Waters, to provide the empirical scientific evidence justifying cutting carbon dioxide from human activity—nature's pure, clean trace gas essential for all life on our beautiful planet. I challenged them to debate me on the science and on the corruption of science. Senator Waters has been running from my challenge for 11 years—since I first challenged her as a joint panellist at a Brisbane climate forum.

The Liberal Party should know that there's no compromising with the Greens, who responded to the Prime Minister's gutless, unfounded major shift in the way that any extortionist does: the Greens upped the ante. Rewarded, the Greens now call for 2035 carbon dioxide output to be 75 per cent of 2005 levels. Today, the media is reporting that a deal has been done between the Nationals and Prime Minister Morrison so he can jet to Glasgow with net zero and get his pat on the head from the elites, from his globalist masters. Mark my words, net zero will become 'Nat zero'. Minister Hunt won't even be able to claim the resulting death of the National Party as a COVID death; it's very assuredly suicide.

As a result of the government's capitulation to green lunacy, many things will happen. Prime agricultural land will be put over to farming carbon rather than food, increasing feral animals and noxious weeds on productive land. Abandoned. The Howard-Anderson Liberal-National government's theft of property rights to implement the UN's Kyoto protocol will now be buried, so it cannot be restored, and there will be hundreds of billions of dollars in compensation. Buried. Farmers will experience more green tape and more blue UN tape, stealing more of their rights to use the land they bought and own. Family farms will disappear, a process well underway already. No new base-load power plants will be constructed. Mining industries will shut down and regional cities will be gutted.

Already, the cost of renewables to Australian taxpayers is $19 billion a year—$1,300 a year for each household. To implement this agenda, this burden will more than double. It will savage the poor as a capricious, regressive tax. Every job created in the green economy costs three jobs in the productive economy—jobs lost to communist China. I expect we'll hear more about so-called clean smelting using hydrogen, an exhibit in the sideshow alley of green dishonesty. It will never be feasible without taxpayer subsidies or extreme inflation in the cost of building materials and housing. Adding the reduction in government revenue from a devastated regional economy, new energy subsidies and new subsidies for industries producing green boondoggles, the net zero policy's mountain of taxpayer debt will be visible from space. Net zero will require as much taxpayer money as we are now spending on health or education. What will that do to the health and education budget? Or is the Prime Minister planning to 'borrow, tax and spend' in the worst traditions of the Labor Party?

Unreliable, expensive, parasitic malinvestment in so-called renewables—monstrosities that only last 15 years before they become toxic heavy metal industrial waste that cannot be safely disposed of. Every solar facility and every wind turbine in existence will need to be replaced before 2040. What a windfall that will be for the corporations that own this parliament—tens of billions of dollars in construction and operational subsidies to rebuild the national generating capacity from scratch, for no impact on earth's temperature! It is a great reset not just of electricity generation but of our entire economy. We're not transitioning from dirty industry to clean industry; we're transitioning from a somewhat free economy to a controlled economy. The winners will be large corporations; the losers will be every Australian trying to get ahead to survive. It is madness, it is inhuman, it is insanity. We will continue to oppose this nonsense.