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

I want to clarify something. Senator David Pocock made a comment, saying the Great Barrier Reef is in disaster. We have schoolchildren here as well, and I really want to say that UNESCO's World Heritage Committee have not listed it as an endangered zone. It's not endangered. Actually, it is in pristine condition and it's in good health. There's nothing wrong with the Great Barrier Reef at all. I'm sick of it being used as a sign of climate change when there's nothing wrong with it.

I'll go back to the Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) Bill 2023 the government has put up. The sea dumping bill is not what it seems. The government wants us to believe it is about regulating carbon capture and storage in geological formations under the sea. But the hidden purpose of the bill is to support the carbon trading market, which only adds to the cost of living for Australians. When companies cannot meet carbon emission reduction targets through the failed technology of carbon capture and storage underground, they will be forced to buy carbon reduction credits. These carbon credits are either created by the government out of thin air or created through land use change, where farmers are being encouraged to stop producing food and to turn the land back to bush. The argument put forward by the government is that turning agricultural land back to bushland will suck carbon out of the air and store it. In fact, the bush becomes a fire hazard, and, when it burns, the carbon is released back into the air. But that carbon emission does not count under the carbon credit accounting rules. Carbon trading is a scam in which money is ripped out of the family budget and put into the hands of government and carbon traders.

Let me make it quite clear: I am not against gas exploration or fossil fuels at all. I think that we need mining, and it's what has propped up the budget in this country. The billions of dollars it brings in is important to the economy, the security of this nation and the wellbeing of many Australians, and we do need the taxes.

Senator Pocock asked a question about the PRRT that we get from the North West Shelf. I can tell him. We export about $78 billion in gas each year from the North West Shelf, and over the years we've accumulated about $300 million in taxes. There was no PRRT. The companies Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell accumulated about $400 billion in tax credits through the PRRT. That was actually brought in by the Labor government and supported by the coalition government, which I've been talking about since I came back to this place in 2016. Why were we not getting money out of it? Due to that, they've now reduced the 100 per cent down to 90 per cent. The Labor Party did that. The PRRT was one of the first things I spoke to the current Prime Minister about. They actually have changed it. In the last budget they were expecting about $2.4 billion in tax from a $78 billion export. As I said, I'm not against coal and gas mining, but I am against the carbon credits.

Minister, are these all carbon credits through capture and storage? As we've heard—Senator Pocock has spoken about this and so has Senator Whish-Wilson—Barrow Island is run by Chevron, and that is not working. They've put about $3 billion into it for carbon capture and storage, and it has failed. If you're saying they can do the sea dumping, capture and storage, what is your plan if that fails like it has done with Barrow Island? What's your plan?