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

Not a stitch of evidence did we hear from the senator who spoke earlier, Janet Rice, just wild, fearful, false claims contradicting hard evidence. I listen to the scientists. I cross-examine scientists. I debate the science and, in my life, I have used the science to protect hundreds of lives in my role of knowing about atmospheric gases. Earlier this evening I discussed my cross-examination of CSIRO and I will continue that another day.

Now I want to discuss the political class abdicating their responsibilities to the people. Let's start with the Howard-Anderson government. When John Howard got booted from office in 2007, I wrote him a letter saying 'Thank you very much for what you have done for the country', because he had had 30 years of service. Six years later, I rescinded that letter and I will explain why. The Howard-Anderson government introduced the Renewable Energy Target in response to the UN's Kyoto protocol. The Howard-Anderson government said it would not sign the Kyoto protocol but it would comply with the UN's Kyoto protocol, so they introduced the Renewable Energy Target that is now guarding our country's electricity sector, driving businesses overseas and causing unemployment not only in manufacturing in particular but also in farming.

His government, the Howard-Anderson government, became the first federal entity to have a policy calling for an emissions trading scheme, a carbon dioxide tax. The first were these people here on the Liberal-National side of politics. Then he did something that is so unbelievable and unimaginable to the Liberal Party, which was supposedly based on the sanctity of life and the security of property rights. The Howard-Anderson government stole farmers' property rights in a dirty deal done with Queensland and New South Wales Labor governments. What they did was they enabled the clearing of vegetation. They stopped the farmers clearing vegetation on their own land. First of all, the deal was done in Brisbane with Rob Borbidge's National Party government, so we had the Howard-Anderson Liberal-National government doing a dirty deal to get around Constitution section 51, clause 31, requiring the payment of just terms of compensation for the stealing of property rights or the taking of property rights. That then led to an agreement with Peter Beattie, who replaced Rob Borbidge, and the Beattie Labor government brought in measures under the guise of a UN protocol saying that we would stop the clearing of land to protect native vegetation. And yet it is on record in Hansard in the Queensland parliament that the Beattie-Howard deal, with exchanges of letters from both, was due to John Howard's government needing to comply with the Kyoto protocol.

Farmers missed out on hundreds of billions of dollars of compensation in what amounts to a naked theft of property rights, the rights to use property, and the Howard-Anderson government went around the Constitution to bypass so it could get Queensland to do the dirty work to stop the clearing, because the state government does not have to pay compensation.

Six years later, after John Howard was booted from office, in 2013 he addressed the annual lecture at the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a sceptical think tank, and he confessed that, after bringing in the renewable target that last year he said was decimating our electricity sector—and he regretted that it had gone so high—after bringing in place a carbon dioxide tax as policy, the first to do so, and after stealing farmers' property rights, he said that he was 'agnostic' on climate science. In other words, he didn't have the science. There was not a single stitch of science to back up John Howard and John Anderson's policy, not a single stitch, yet farmers around the country have lost their rights to use their land with no compensation—no science, just theft with no compensation. That is what we're looking at in this country—the abandonment of science.

The parliament needs to come clean and restore integrity, to use data and true science, proving cause and effect and to do cost-benefit analysis. They have never done that. The onus to provide the logical scientific points and the empirical scientific evidence is on those claiming a climate emergency and climate action. Until we see that, no policies. Rescind all policies on climate and energy that are based on climate. (Time expired)

Senate adjourned at 19:44