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

The Future Made in Australia (Production Tax Credits and Other Measures) Bill 2024 is a perfect example of the garbage legislation a One Nation government would abolish. For 30 years, Australia has been held hostage to the green climate scam/climate fraud. With this legislation, the boondoggles continue—this time with a hint of desperation.

The bill has three schedules. The first introduces a hydrogen production tax credit of $2 a kilogram of hydrogen. This is supposedly to encourage the production of hydrogen for use in processes that contribute to the meeting of net zero targets. There it is again, raising its ugly head: net zero targets. There is a reason that green hydrogen is going up in flames faster than the Hindenburg. If hydrogen was commercially viable there would be a queue of companies producing and using hydrogen, but there aren't. There would be a queue of bankers lending for new hydrogen production. That isn't happening either. In fact, the reverse is true: companies and banks are pulling out. One Nation has a different strategy to encourage production. It's called the profit motive.

Eighteen months ago Canadian gas giant ATCO scrapped plans for one of the first commercial-scale green hydrogen projects in Australia, despite strong funding support from the government. Why? Because the numbers did not add up. In a sign of the times, Shell withdrew from a project to convert the Port Kembla steelworks into a hydrogen powered green steel project in 2022. Only last week BlueScope announced a $1.15 billion upgrade to the same Port Kembla plant to produce steel for another 20 years, using coal. The Hydrogen Park project in Gladstone, in my home state, was suspended after the Queensland government and the private partner withdrew. Despite the hype, this project would have only produced enough hydrogen to power 19 cars, while employing a handful of people. On the other hand, the Port of Gladstone's container-handling development, a real project, which One Nation has championed for years and which will be starting construction shortly, will bring thousands of jobs to Gladstone, with $8 billion of private sector investment—real breadwinner jobs, real future productive capacity.

Now, there have been some promising developments in hydrogen powered cars, mostly from Japanese makers. With zero tailpipe emissions, a longer range and faster refuelling, they contrast with the high cost and impracticality of EVs, electric vehicles, to achieve the same outcome. But the Japanese are trialling these on the basis that they may be legislated. The Japanese are covering their options. It should be noted that this research is being conducted in the private sector, acting out of a profit motive. Nothing our government has done will develop this technology. Consider Honda, for example. It is a disciplined, respected car maker—one of the leaders in the world—with an amazing culture. It is a leader in hydrogen. It's marking time. It has hydrogen powered vehicles on the road, but it's using it's shareholder money to support them, prudently, just in case they're legislated.

There's nothing in the hydrogen schedule of this bill that will provide Australian taxpayers with value for money—nothing—and it's a bloody lot of money: $6.7 billion over 10 years. I can just see Chris Bowen and Mr Anthony Albanese tossing out another few billion, $6.7 billion, to add to their trillions that will be invested eventually in this net zero madness. One Nation opposes schedule 1 of the bill, and if the bill is passed it will be repealed when One Nation repeals all of the green climate-scam legislation.

Let's move to schedule 2. Schedule 2 of the bill creates production tax incentives for transforming critical materials into a purer or more refined form. The materials in question are those that are used in wind, solar and batteries, used to firm unreliable, unaffordable, weather-dependent power—more money being thrown down the sewer. This section of the bill is directed at an industry that already receives government support through other schemes, including the Critical Minerals Facility, which offers loans, bonds, equity guarantees and insurance; the National Reconstruction Fund, which offers concessional loans, equity and guarantees; the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility, which offers concessional loans, equity and letters of guarantee; and the Critical Minerals Research and Development Hub, which offers in-kind support via free research and development—not free to the taxpayers funding it, but free to the company—which is separate to the normal research and development tax incentives from the Australian Taxation Office. We're tossing money at these people, and it's wasted. How much assistance does one industry need? How much, government? After all this assistance, who gets to keep the profits generated from all this taxpayer largesse? The processors do. The critical minerals proposal in schedule 2 will cost $7 billion over 11 years—another $7 billion. 'What's a billion here or there?' says the government.

The Albanese government is socialising the costs and privatising the profits. We pay for their development and the costs, and the companies take the profits. Worse, there's no requirement that the recipients are Australian owned. What are you doing with people's money? What would actually help critical minerals in Australia is One Nation's proposal for a northern railway crossing from Port Hedland in the west to Moranbah in Queensland to open up the whole Top End and provide stranded assets like critical minerals with access to manufacturing and export hubs.

Let's move on to the third schedule, the final schedule. It's even worse. The bill changes the rules in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Act to allow Aboriginal communities wider borrowing powers. The new rules are not specified. Those will come later from the minister. Not only is this a failure of transparency, it creates a second round of debate when the rules are released. It creates more uncertainty. Rules written under proposed legislation should be included with the legislation so the Senate knows exactly what it is voting on and how the powers will be used. But we don't, and yet you're going to vote on this. Without those rules, One Nation cannot support this schedule either.

In One Nation, we support the people. The Liberal-Labor-Greens, though, have decades of serving masters outside the party—globalist, elitist, parasitic billionaires, foreign corporations, non-government organisations, the United Nations and the World Economic Forum alliance. The Senate is open to conclude, given the location of this provision within a bill about injecting money into the net zero scam, that net zero is the destination for this extra borrowing—financing Aboriginal corporations to create their own government subsidised businesses and doing things private enterprise won't touch.

Minister for Climate Change and Energy, otherwise known as 'Minister for Blackouts', Chris Bowen, member of parliament, is behaving like an addicted, compulsive gambler who has done all of his own money and is now dragging his friends into his black hole. If this bill is passed, the Aboriginal community will be shackled with debt for pointless financial boondoggles that have no chance of commercial success—none. If this is not the intention, then the minister must table the rules. Let's see what the government does intend.

The net zero transition is destroying Australia and doing nothing for the natural environment. It is hurting the natural environment. The public are turning against the whole scam now that they realise the cost benefit is not there. It's costing them money and needless suffering. Business is turning against net zero because its carrying the full cost of soaring power prices and extra green tape. It's now coming out in the papers—the mouthpiece media. Minister, give it up, turn on the coal- and gas-fired power stations and save Australia from more suffering.

I'm now going to raise some additional points, related points, explaining what underpins the hydrogen scam and climate fraud. The Senate seems to be populated, mostly, with feeble-minded, gutless senators. Never has any empirical scientific data been presented as evidence, within logical scientific points, proving that carbon dioxide from human activity does what the United Nations and World Economic Forum and elitist, fraudulent billionaires claim—never, anywhere on earth. Or do such uninformed, gullible proponents in parliament have conflicts of interest? For example, the teals and possibly the Greens, it seems, receive funds from Climate 200, which spreads money from billionaire Simon Holmes a Court, who rakes in subsidies for solar and wind. Are the teals, including Senator Pocock, and the Greens gullible, or are they knowingly conflicted and pushing this scam? Only One Nation opposes the climate fraud and the net zero scam. One Nation will pull Australia out of the United Nations World Economic Forum's net zero target. One Nation has a plan to put more money into Australian pockets, giving you choice on how you spend your money rather than letting these people here waste it for you with the needlessly high cost of living.

Why do electricity bills keep skyrocketing when we switch to LED lights and star appliances, and when we get power from huge solar and wind generators? The people have been conned by the energy relief fund, which has suppressed what they see in their electricity bills. When that fund comes off soon, you're going to be in for a nightmare, a shock. Only One Nation has the policies to put more money into people's pockets now. For some insight from overseas, President Trump says it so well in his 20 January executive order:

The United States must grow its economy and maintain jobs for its citizens while playing a leadership role in global efforts to protect the environment. Over decades, with the help of sensible policies that do not encumber private-sector activity, the United States has simultaneously grown its economy, raised worker wages, increased energy production, reduced air and water pollution …

That's exactly what we've been saying for years, for decades in fact, in One Nation. And that's exactly the opposite of what the Greens, the teals, the Labor Party, the Liberal Party and the Nationals are pushing with net zero.

I have one final point. I remember Scott Morrison as prime minister at the time, a few years ago, introducing some green hydrogen scheme incentive, with more subsidies from taxpayers to foreign, predatory billionaires. He said at the time that a price of $2 per kilogram for hydrogen would be fine. We worked out that the price of electricity at that price for hydrogen is $200 per megawatt hour, which is exorbitant. It's almost 10 times what the fuel costs are for coal. What he didn't tell you at the time, and what Labor has blindly followed, was that the actual price of hydrogen was $6 per kilo. Pipedreams are now becoming nightmares for people across Australia.

Only One Nation opposes the climate fraud and the net zero scam. Only One Nation will pull Australia out of the United Nations World Economic Forum's net zero target. We are importing ideology from the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, and we are importing poverty and deprivation. One Nation, though, has a plan to put more money into Australians' pockets, to give you choice on how you spend your money.