Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Before I get to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Climate Trigger) Bill 2022 [No. 2], I might just briefly respond to the Minister for Finance's claims there. She said that the government has ended the climate wars. Aren't all Australians happy that the climate wars are over! Ever since the climate wars have finished, interest rates have gone through the roof, grocery bills are skyrocketing and energy prices are through the roof. Isn't it a wonderful utopia that Australia has become since the climate wars have ended! This government has presided over the largest drop in living standards in Australia ever. There has never been a bigger drop in living standards than since we all signed up to net zero and ended the climate wars. What a wonderful environment we live in! In fact, last week new data on real wages came out, and the average wage level now is back to the level it was in 2011. We have gone backwards under this government, by 12 years, thanks to the policies of this government in terms of your living standards.

That's why people are angry right now. They don't care about climate wars, about all these ridiculous arguments we have in this place. They want a government that is focused on their lives. They want to be able to pay their bills and stay in their own homes and not have to stay awake at night worrying about how they are going to pay for groceries tomorrow. That is the environment this government has delivered, by focusing on issues like climate change, which we in this country can do nothing about, but not focusing on what we are put here to do, which is to help our country become more prosperous and stronger in the difficult geopolitical environment we live in. That should be our focus in here.

This bill, of course, would do nothing. It's another discussion we're having on issues that we can't control. It's another discussion we're having which will make zero difference. Even under the objectives of this bill, this bill will make zero difference. I listened to Senator Waters go through the description of her bill. She is very proud of the fact that her bill would put a stop to any project in this country that has scope 1 emissions, emissions of more than 100,000 tonnes. Okay, great. What is that going to do? What is it going to actually achieve for people? That's what we're here for, right? What is it going to achieve for Australians, for our country? That's the most important thing, but, even for the world, what's it going to achieve? In 2022, the last year that data is available for, the world as a whole emitted 37.15 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide. That is a record, despite all the rhetoric we hear from leaders and all the wonderful international agreements that they sign after flying to the meetings in their private jets—the constant climate change conferences we have to put up with, the hypocrisy. As we watch our paper straws dissolve in our soft drinks, they fly off in their private jets to these conferences, sign a new agreement and pat themselves on the back, saying that they've saved the world. We're up to 28 of these international conferences now. They've had 28 of these meetings. Through all of those conferences, carbon emissions around the world have absolutely skyrocketed, to a record in 2022 of 37.15 billion tonnes.

This bill would come in and say, 'Let's put a stop to all projects in Australia that emit more than 100,000 tonnes.' What does that mean? One hundred thousand tonnes, out of 37.15 billion tonnes, means that this bill would stop projects that would, terribly, increase global emissions by 0.000269 of a per cent. That's what this would achieve—a 0.000269 per cent change in global emissions. Well done, Australian Greens! How much will that change the temperature? They don't tell us. Tell us in simple terms what this bill will actually do. Will it stop bushfires? Will it stop cyclones? Will it reduce our global temperature? What is it going to achieve? It will achieve absolutely nothing. The lower limit on this bill—any project over 25,000 tonnes—would have to go through this climate trigger process. That would mean that threshold is 0.0000673 per cent—add another zero there behind the decimal point. It's absolutely ridiculous. It does nothing. What a waste of time we've got here. People listening to these must be pulling their hair out. They've got real problems in their lives and we are focusing on projects that would add three decimal places—three zeros and then some after it—of a per cent, to the world's emissions. What an absolute joke and an indictment of the state of our politics right now that we're focusing on this and not the real problems that face Australian people.

Of course, this will do nothing for the environment. It'll simply make things harder to do in this country, in our nation, because nothing in this bill says that 'Look, if other countries aren't acting on climate change, if they're not doing their bit, nothing then absolves Australians to get on with life.' Why should we stop building coal mines and gas facilities in our country when other countries just continue to do it? They're even other countries that you think might actually be taking climate change seriously—other countries that are as loud and uselessly provocative in their rhetoric about this stuff. Look at the United States—there's an administration in the government of the United States that seems to take climate change seriously. They have a special envoy, John Kerry, who has left his job—he flies to these conferences, and they make a big deal of climate change in the United States. Last year the United States achieved a record level of oil and gas production. There's all the rhetoric and all talk but what's actually happening is they've got record amounts of rigs going around the Permian Basin in Texas drilling like there's no tomorrow. Yet we're going to sit here and try to stop what we're doing in this little part of the world and save the planet, apparently. It's absolutely absurd.

The United States is now on track to double their LNG capacity in the next five years. LNG is liquefied natural gas—it's the process that needs to occur to export gas over our oceans if there are no pipeline is involved. Under our government in the last 10 years Australia became the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas in the world. It has brought enormous wealth to our country. The exports of LNG have topped over $80 billion of wealth coming into this nation, massive amounts of tax revenues for the Commonwealth government, and huge levels of royalties for the state governments from these LNG projects. We were leading the world, but last year we lost our place as the top LNG exporter under this government to the United States. Why are we letting this happen?

We are absolute fools. This is a total and utter scam, this whole net zero stuff, and we're the only fools who are seemingly taking it seriously and not attracting investment in oil and gas or in coal—it's all going elsewhere. Meanwhile, there have been three separate European countries in the last few months that have signed 30-year gas deals with Qatar. Qatar is also massively expanding its gas production facilities. It will also overtake Australia. It's just behind Australia at the moment and it'll overtake Australia in the years to come. We will be third place in the LNG rankings. Europe is also continuing to burn large amounts of oil. It doesn't get it from Russia anymore, thanks to Ukraine—well, it doesn't get it directly from Russia. But India has—quite astoundingly—the world's largest oil refiner at the moment, despite not having any major oil deposits of its own on the subcontinent. Why is India the largest oil refiner now? Because all that Russian oil is going to India, getting refined and put through a factory, and then Europe is buying it from India. It's buying Russian oil from India. It is a total and utter scam. This climate stuff is a scam that is only impoverishing those countries like ourselves that are foolish enough to try to actually do this while the rest of the world does absolutely nothing.

There could have been an alternative universe over the last couple of years where the very high oil and gas and coal prices we have seen could have brought a new wave of investment into our country that would have created jobs, grown our economy and set us up for the future. The last time we had a massive commodity price boom, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, we attracted a huge amount of investment. We peaked at $100 billion of investment a year into the resources sector in Australia. That's a massive amount of capital expenditure. It helped keep our country going through the global financial crisis, which really didn't even touch our country thanks to that massive mining boom. This latest commodity price boom that we've been through, which did start before the Ukraine war but was supercharged by that, actually saw our terms of trade, the prices we receive for goods, at record levels. It was higher than the previous mining boom, in the early 2010s. But we did not attract the same level of investment. Mining investment—resources investment—has only been running at about $40 billion over those years. So we have missed out. We really should have been at that level, or thereabouts, of $100 billion a year. We've missed out on $60 billion a year of investment in the last few years because we've had a government that has been putting on carbon taxes—their so-called 'safeguard mechanism'—and has been actively discouraging investment in our country.

Fortunately, for now we've been living off the legacy of the last mining boom. Those LNG exports, those coal exports and those record amounts of money we've been receiving in the last few years that have propped up the nation's budget have been the result of the legacy of the investments we got back in the 2010s. But, because we're not getting the investment today, we are going to be poorer tomorrow. Those coalmines and those LNG facilities that were built 10 years ago will, over the next decade or so, start to finish. Those mines will finish. The LNG facilities will be without feedstock and those exports will shrivel up. What are we going to do then? We've been promised critical minerals. The critical minerals industry has been the saviour this government is focused on. How's that going? The nickel industry is about to go kaput, unfortunately. It's absolutely tragic. We've had this wonderful nickel industry in Western Australia for 60 years. It was built by an Australian hero, a gentleman called Sir Arvi Parbo—an Estonian migrant who achieved a superhuman feat in the 1960s of building a nickel industry in the space of 18 months. He literally built a mine, a refinery and a rail line and exported to Japan in the 1960s within 18 months. We couldn't do that today. Sir Arvi Parbo said later in life that it wouldn't have happened today. But we built that, and we had that legacy. More than 10,000 people in Western Australia owe their jobs to that wonderful nickel industry. It's going down the gurgler right now because we've signed up to net zero. The government's saying that we're going to be able to produce green nickel and that the world will somehow pay a premium for our nickel because it's clean and they love the fact that we've got a green label on it. It's not working out too well.

While we were focused on net zero goals, Indonesia—who also signed up to net zero emissions—decided to build coal-fired power stations financed by China and massively expand their nickel industry. They're undercutting us now and destroying our industry. Indonesia is stealing our nickel industry and stealing those jobs, because of our inane, futile, simple-minded net zero emissions goals. It's an absolute tragedy. Tens of thousands of Australian workers are going to be put out of a job because we're obsessed with these things while other countries just do their own thing. In 2022 Indonesia expanded their use of coal by an astounding 32 per cent, in one year. They're already a large user of coal—one of the largest users of coal in the world—and they expanded their use of coal by 32 per cent in one year. As the International Energy Agency said a couple of years ago, almost all of that increased coal use went into the production of nickel. Their nickel geology is actually worse than ours. They've got laterite geologies. That's much harder to mine and much more energy intensive. We should be beating them. There's no reason why we can't beat Indonesia on cost. Even with our high labour costs and even with our higher environmental standards, we always have beaten them until now—until we decided to go down this green-obsessive route and ignore the realities of the world. So possibly 10,000 workers are going to be put out of a job. There are already 1,000 who have lost their jobs, and the rest are not looking great.

When is the government going to focus on that? When are we as a nation going to get back to focusing on being the best we can be—getting our costs of production down, being sharp in business and making sure our country goes forward? While we remain obsessed with these futile efforts to try and stop economically productive investments in our nation, we will simply become poorer. Nothing will change for the environment. There will be no change to the global temperature. The sea levels won't start declining because of this bill. It will simply cost Australian jobs, like those in the nickel industry, which is occurring right now. I wish I had more time, but it is not looking great. The new Indonesian Prime Minister ran on an election platform of doubling down on their nickel strategy. He also said that he wants to repeat that in copper and bauxite. So our copper industry and our aluminium industry are now in the sights of the same gun unless we start to wake up to ourselves, unless we start to drop these kinds of futile efforts and focus on our own nation, our own jobs and our own wealth and prosperity. We should reject this bill because it will do nothing for the environment but will cost Australian jobs and lower Australian living standards even more.