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

I move:

That the following matter be referred to the Environment and Communications References Committee for inquiry and report by 25 November 2024:

The effectiveness, transparency and cost of the Australian Government's carbon credit and offset schemes, including the Safeguard Mechanism (Crediting) Amendment Act 2023 and the Climate Active carbon-neutral labelling program, with particular reference to:

(a) concerns raised by major companies like Fortescue, Telstra and BHP about the quality of offsets and lack of transparency;

(b) the effect of Labor's carbon credit scheme, including the Safeguard Mechanism and the Climate Active program, on Australian businesses, particularly how these programs increase costs without delivering clear environmental benefits;

(c) the use of international carbon credits by Australian companies, with specific attention to whether these credits are trustworthy;

(d) how the Safeguard Mechanism and the Climate Active program have negatively impacted jobs, driven up electricity prices, and contributed to the current household recession;

(e) the role of the Safeguard Mechanism and the Climate Active program in driving up resource and electricity costs, contributing to rising inflation;

(f) the role of the Safeguard Mechanism in increasing demand for Australian carbon credit units and its consequences for businesses, particularly rising prices and reliance on offsets;

(g) the potential for misleading claims (greenwashing) within the Safeguard Mechanism and the Climate Active program; and

(h) any related matters.

Scans within scams within scams—scams costing taxpayers untold billions of dollars every year, as wind turbines and solar panels spread across regional Australia like a malignant cancer; scams driving poverty across the nation, as Australian households struggle with record electricity bills; scams driving Australian small businesses into the ground, as they struggle with reduced revenue from the cost-of-living crisis and their own record energy costs; scams involving guaranteed taxpayer returns to union controlled industry superannuation funds for investing in uneconomic technologies, ending up in Labor and Greens election coffers; and scams that leave energy-rich Australia facing serious energy shortages when economic productivity is still in sharp decline. There is the scam built on the fantasy that Australia can stop global warming all by itself, while major carbon dioxide emitters like China rapidly increase their emissions. And, of course, there's the ultimate scam—that the world is doomed unless human beings stop emitting carbon dioxide altogether.

These scams are a direct threat to Australia's future. These scams are a direct threat to jobs, farmers, miners, industry, manufacturing and innovation, and regional communities. What is truly perverse is the threat that these scams pose to Australia's natural environment and wildlife. Climate change extremists like the Greens, Labor and the teals would have us destroy the environment in order to save it. They would have us clear huge areas of native vegetation and rainforest to plant vast forests of ugly, toxic wind turbines that would end up in landfill less than 20 years later—and, I will add, they use more energy to make and erect than they will ever produce. They would have us rape the earth with child labour to get the vital ingredients for their fire-prone car batteries. They would have us cover prime agricultural land with toxic solar panels that contaminate the soil, wind turbines that harm wildlife and thousands of miles of transmission lines.

They don't care, because they don't have to see it from their cosy inner-city sanctums. That price is paid by regional and rural communities and by our farmers. Perhaps if we planted a few of those 300-metre wind turbines around Sydney Harbour or on the banks of the Yarra or Brisbane rivers they might understand. But I doubt it, because they're all hooked on the money generated by the scam. They have net zero empathy for the Australian people, as they burn down our nation's future prosperity and growth.

One of the many scams in this place is the concept we call carbon offsets. This is the idea that carbon dioxide emissions can be offset by buying carbon credits, generated by carbon dioxide sinks mostly located overseas. In other words, it absolves emitters of the reduction effort by handballing it to someone else. It's absolutely critical to the net zero emissions fantasy, because there is no human being and no human civilisation that can exist without omitting some amount of carbon dioxide. It's absolutely critical to Labor's promises to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 43 per cent by 2030.

Twenty years ago carbon credits were all the rage among the big Australian corporations keen to put their environmental and progressive credentials on display. Today, however, it's a very different story. There are very serious concerns about whether carbon credits do anything to reduce real emissions. Big corporations like Fortescue, Telstra, Woolworths and BHP, which used to be big fans—big fans!—of carbon credits, have now abandoned them. In its latest annual report, Fortescue said the company would:

… no longer buy voluntary carbon offsets unless required by law, as offsets have been shown to be troubled by extensive concerns about quality, lack of additionality and an inability to deliver real reductions in emissions.

In June this year, Telstra announced it would also stop using offsets. Until then, the company was the single biggest participant in the Labor government's Climate Active carbon neutral labelling program. Even the extremist Greens think they're bogus, enabling the companies to claim they're carbon neutral when these claims are built on dodgy offsets. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, but the evidence backs them up.

Last year, a joint media investigation found that 90 per cent of rainforest carbon offsets approved by Verra, the world's leading certifier of voluntary offsets, did not represent genuine carbon reductions. Also in 2023, a systemic review of more than 2,000 offset projects found that 88 per cent of the total credit volume across renewables, cookstoves, forestry and chemical processes did not constitute real emissions reductions. Again in 2023, the Australian National University conducted an analysis which found more than 24 million Australian carbon credit units worth more than $760 million had led to minimal, if any, carbon sequestration. There are dozens more such revelations, but you get the idea.

Despite all this evidence, Labor continues to push a flawed scheme based on these bogus carbon offsets. These have to be bought by the corporations and the energy companies, with the costs always passed onto Australian consumers. Energy bills have never been higher in Australia than they are today and are a major component of Labor's cost-of-living crisis. We are paying through the nose so that Labor can pretend it's taking climate change action. We are in fact in a per capita recession. Labor is all talk and definitely no substance. They're all power with no responsibility. It's desperate Labor virtue-signalling in a vain attempt to stop votes leaking to the Greens.

As our energy costs soar, Australians are wondering: what happened to Labor's promise to lower their power bills? The real tragedy is that all of this pain inflicted on the Australian people is completely and utterly futile. Even if we reduced our emissions to absolutely zero overnight, the reductions would be quickly overtaken by increased emissions in other countries such as China, India and Russia.

This inquiry isn't just about scrutinising Labor's policies; it's about standing up for Australian families, workers, farmers and businesses carrying the burden of this scam. It's about holding this worthless, lying government accountable over expensive illusions of taking action on climate change. It's also about trying to hold them accountable for the high immigration levels that we have coming into this country, because the emissions of every person we bring into this country are about 32,000 tonnes a year. If you are really interested in reducing the emissions in this country, why have you brought in 1½ million people, adding to our carbon emissions? Clearly, you're not terribly worried about this country and its high emissions rate. You couldn't possibly be and bring in that number of people. It just doesn't make sense to me, or to a lot of other Australians. It has been a scam. The whole thing is a scam. All this money is pouring into this Australian made program, even from Australians. It all sounds good, but all it is doing is keeping your carbon emissions and climate change scam going. That's BS.

Another fact was brought to me this afternoon. Polls were done a couple of years ago showing about 11 per cent of Australians and, prior to that, 16 per cent of Australians agreed with climate change. After all the cost-of-living crises that have been going on at the moment, people can't afford their mortgages. They're losing their houses and they can't pay their power bills. In this polling that they did, they had 11 per cent who agreed. Now it has gone down to four per cent. That tells you that you're losing the Australian people. They're starting to wake up to the scams that are going on and they don't like it. They don't believe this rubbish that the world is coming to an end and that, if we don't address our carbon emissions, then the whole world is going to come to an absolute grinding halt.

Your actions speak the loudest, and what are you doing to our nation? You're destroying prosperity, you're destroying our standard of living and you're adding cost to it so that future generations are going to have a huge debt to pay off. And, at the end of the day, for what? You are so hypocritical when you talk about carbon emissions. These big companies are having to offset their carbon emissions, which is destroying industries and manufacturing, yet you actually do business with China, whose emissions are over 30 per cent. You continue to buy their solar panels and their wind turbines and everything else they're manufacturing; therefore, you're not questioning it. What a bunch of hypocrites you are!

If you were true to a sense of duty that you were really deadset about and you thought the world was coming to an end and you had to clean up the planet, then you wouldn't allow the trade that goes on between you and China. But you won't do anything. You kowtow to China because you have no interest in standing up to them. What's happened is we've become so reliant on China and on what we buy from them that we can't do anything. So you buy into Australia instead of going to the heart of it and setting up real industries here in Australia that will create jobs and will enable us to provide to ourselves what we need and want. You're do absolutely nothing.

As I say all the time, and I'll keep saying it, you are the worst government in the 28 years I have been around this place. Since I was first elected to parliament 28 years ago, this is the worst government I have ever seen, based on your performance in this place, on the policies you've brought in and on the destruction to this country that is going to go beyond your time and into the future. The sooner you lot are gone, the better for all of us.