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

Once again those who worship the sky god of global boiling are using their religion to scare the public into holding the line on the great climate boiling scam. Is it still global boiling or have we now moved to global scalding? This fearmongering, this scaring, as I've been explaining for many years, involves taking money from hardworking Australians and giving it to parasitic billionaires to fix the climate.

Senator Whish-Wilson's latest motion reheats an old, debunked scare: the Great Barrier Reef is dying. In 2016 the Washington Post ran an article titled '"And then we wept": Scientists say 93 percent of the Great Barrier Reef now bleached'. In 2022 the Washington Post ran an article titled, in part, 'Great Barrier Reef has the most coral in decades'. In 2024 they ran an article titled 'Fatal heatwave strikes unspoiled swath of Great Barrier Reef'. It went on to say:

Water temperature data suggests the toll of this event could approach that of 2016, when some 30% of the reef's corals died after suffering through what were then unprecedented levels of heat stress.

Can't they see it's cyclical?

Hang on. Wasn't that 93 per cent? No. That's just the mainstream media scare figure used at the time to appease their owners, the same predatory billionaires that profit from the global boiling scam. It was never an accurate figure, never credible, yet the Greens repeatedly peddled it.

In summary, the reef had a serious bleaching event in 2016, and within a few years the coral extent was back to normal. By the way, the first scientifically recorded bleaching was in 1926. Scientific records show that bleaching has been a natural part of the Great Barrier Reef cycles and other reef cycles for millennia. That is fact. This is not some esoteric discussion. These Chicken Little claims from the Greens have consequences. Scare stories about the reef dying cause tourists, including international tourists, to cancel their holidays on the Great Barrier Reef, destroying livelihoods in Great Barrier Reef communities on the Queensland east coast. People instead go to a country where the politicians are not scaring off the tourists. Jobs are lost every time the Greens use the Great Barrier Reef as a political football. There's not even any science behind their claims.

At times the reef can be a naturally fragile ecosystem. We know that. Certain naturally occurring events can impact it. The greatest danger for the barrier reef is flooding. Tropical cyclones dump fresh water into a river catchment system that carries rainwater hundreds of kilometres onto the Great Barrier Reef. Freshwater plumes kill saltwater coral polyps, and the event is declared a bleaching event—all natural, all cyclical, quite common.

What did we have three months ago in Queensland? A severe flood event—entirely natural. What do we have now? Coral bleaching—entirely natural. Don't take my word for it. Please read James Cook University's article titled 'Back-to-back cyclones and flood plume impacts on the Great Barrier Reef', which confirmed freshwater coral bleaching was recorded along the reef.

Now the climate boiling scammers are trying to blame this on natural climate variability, so let me give you the inconvenient truth about that. I want you to reference the study titled 'Great Barrier Reef study shows how reef copes with rapid sea level-rise' from the University of Sydney website. I'll publish the link. To quote from the study:

Using unprecedented analysis of 12 new drilled reef cores with data going back more than 8,000 years, the study shows that there have been three distinct phases of reef growth since the end of the Pleistocene era about 11,000 years ago.

It goes on to say:

'We wanted to understand past reef resilience to multiple environmental stresses during the formation of the modern reef,' said the lead author Kelsey Sanborn, a PhD student at the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney.

It continues:

The study was an international collaboration published in Sedimentary Geology, which revealed a period around 8,000 and 7,000 years ago when the reef growth slowed as it was exposed to multiple stressors, including likely increases in sediment and nutrient flux on the reef.

I wonder what could cause the sediment and nutrient flux that damaged the reef 8,000 years ago. Well, it can't be coal fired power stations, it can't be internal combustion engines or people living in freestanding homes on quarter-acre blocks, and it certainly couldn't have been air travel. What could it be? Of course! I have it: eating meat! That's it! If the local Aboriginal population had just stopped eating red meat and instead grew soybeans, those tropical storms would not have dumped nutrient-rich floodwaters onto the reef.

Study co-author Associate Professor Jody Webster said:

We need to understand the past in order to predict the future. This paper and Kelsey's broader research examine how sea level, surface temperature, sediment in the water, nutrient influx and energy inputs into the reef system affect its vulnerability to environmental change.

It goes on:

The reef system survives because of a delicate balance these environmental factors.

All natural.

Whenever the balance of the reef is disturbed, a bleaching event occurs. It's entirely natural. It's in a symbiotic relationship with other organisms. There's no doubt that when an unusually hot day corresponds to an unusually low tide, the reef will bleach, and it will bleach from a cyclone event and many other disturbances. That reminds me, I went scuba diving with some media off Keppel Island. We said, 'See the corals recovering from a cyclone.' The journalist said, 'But you haven't seen the real bleaching a thousand kilometres north.' There was a thousand kilometres of reef between where we were, with the healthy reef, and their claimed bleaching event. They just ignore the healthy reef.

For the Greens to use mother nature to promote their climate change scam is wrong—it's utterly wrong. For reef researchers to pretend reef damage is due to climate boiling and then ask for more money to research climate change is wrong. It's dishonest and it's scientific fraud. The truth is that the ocean is warmed primarily from the sun, with a secondary contribution from geothermal activity—fact. The atmosphere—the thing being blamed for heating up and bleaching the reef—only warms the top millimetre or so of the ocean surface. That's not enough to cause any harm—and, by the way, we can see that in the seasonal impact.

The climate boiling scammers can blame their sky god of warming all they like. They can demand large homes, big cars, aeroplanes, cattle, sheep, clothing, cheap power and so much more be sacrificed on the altar of their climate boiling beliefs. Saying a lie does not make the claimed science real. Repeating a lie doesn't make the claimed science real. Our weather patterns are normal—entirely natural—and so are the patterns on the reef.

If the Greens want to be useful, they should campaign against wind turbines—the installation of which requires whole tops of mountains being blown off mountains across northern Queensland right now, disturbing sediment and arsenic that flow through underground aquifers and winds up on the Great Barrier Reef, making these natural flood events even worse.

One Nation care about the natural environment because we value the natural environment. That's just one of the many reasons why we oppose wind turbines in pristine bushland and, for that matter, near human beings. We oppose industrial solar on farmland and on bushland. We oppose national parks being carved up for power lines, especially the Snowy 2.0 abomination. And we oppose land clearing of old-growth forests for any purpose, including grazing. One Nation is now the party of true environmentalism. And the Greens? Well, they're the party of promoting the political agendas and the pockets of parasitic billionaires over the best interests of the natural environment. The Greens peddle the United Nations World Economic Forum's antihuman agenda, which is in turn based on a lie—a false assumption. That lie, that false assumption, is that human civilisation and the environment are mutually exclusive. That is the opposite of reality.

The reality is that, for human civilisation to have a future, we must have a healthy natural environment. History over the last 170 years shows that the health of the environment depends on human civilisation because industrial civilisation minimises human impact on the natural environment. What has human civilisation produced that is so beneficial for the environment? High-energy, low-cost, ultrareliable hydrocarbon fuels: coal, oil and natural gas. Before these hydrocarbon fuels, humans needed whale oil for lighting, killing whales. Before these hydrocarbon fuels, heating and cooking needed timber from chopped down trees. The area of land in the developed continents covered by forest over the last 100 years has increased by 30 per cent because we're no longer chopping down trees for cooking and heating. The best friend of whales and the best friend of forests is hydrocarbon fuels: coal, oil and natural gas.

As a servant to the fine people of Queensland and Australia, I cherish human progress. I cherish human flourishing. I cherish hydrocarbon fuels: coal, oil and natural gas. I admire human progress and human initiative. I appreciate human progress.