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

Last year the European Union regulation on deforestation-free products entered into force. It ceased to control deforestation worldwide using a devious trick: requiring proof that products imported into the EU did not originate from recently deforested land or contribute to forest degradation—products like Australian cattle and wood, as well as derived products like leather, chocolate and furniture.

It does seem inconsistent to One Nation that the two parties, Liberal-National and Labor, who just voted through a bill to prevent illegally logged timber coming into Australia, now oppose a measure to stop the same material being exported from Australia to the EU. One Nation, on the other hand, opposes both measures. Trying to control deforestation through holding food and building materials hostage is the long way around the block. It introduces compliance costs, and it's impossible to confidently determine the status of products. It's easier to use satellite imaging to identify and take direct action against illegal logging.

Using the European Union approach allows for politics to enter into the equation. It allows greenmail, it allows tit-for-tat sanctions on spurious environmental grounds and it gives life to bureaucracies that should not exist. For instance, define 'recently cleared land'. In Australia, farmers will let fields go fallow for several years, after which there is some vegetation growth, which is cleared to return the field to use. It's bad enough that farmers have to put up with idiot greenies crying over junk vegetation being mulched to enrich the soil. Now we must put up with the European Union bureaucrats joining them.

Seriously, our farmers won't be able to feed and clothe the world with the layers of stupid regulation being heaped on them. They're the best farmers in the world. They know what they're doing. I don't know how we can influence the European Union on this matter, yet One Nation is happy to support the motion. At some point, hunger might inspire an awakening of commonsense across Europe and across the Liberals, Nationals and Labor to stop pushing climate fraud and its allies and to stop pushing net zero.