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

On this Remembrance Day, and as a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I want to pay tribute to those who, through their labour, helped build this amazing country. I speak of our farmers in communities right around our country. Farm work is more than just dawn-to-dusk physical work; it is more than the stress of banks; it is more than the stress of bureaucrats and environmentalism. Here, on the driest inhabited continent on earth, our farmers must contend with natural drought. Sadly, they must also contend with unnatural bureaucracy and unnatural levels of ignorance. Driven by the United Nations Environmental Assembly, farmers are being blamed for climate variability through vegetation reduction and even their farting cows—maybe even their burping cows—yet, Mr President, have you seen what happens to a property in a drought once it is deprived of water? It turns into a wasteland with a corresponding loss of habitat for native Australian animals. It stops sequestering carbon.

I mention the word 'carbon' because it's a favourite play toy of the Greens, the Labor Party, the Liberal Party and the Nationals. Let's explore the word 'carbon' for minute, because this is dogging farmers. Carbon is a solid. It is diamonds; it is graphite in the lead of pencils. Carbon dioxide is a gas. A solid is not a gas. Carbon, the solid, is in every cell of every living organism. It's in every cell of ourselves. As I said, carbon dioxide is not carbon. We inhale air with a carbon dioxide content of 0.04—trivial. We exhale it at 100 times that level: four per cent. So we are making carbon dioxide, and the plants love us for it because carbon dioxide is the driver of everything that is green. Everything that is green relies on carbon dioxide. Farmers know this. Farmers know that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, and yet they are being blamed for causing climate change when it's really just natural climate variability. By their own nonsensical climate change argument, the Greens, the Labor Party and the Liberal Party show that dewatering a property makes the environment worse off, not better. When you stop water, you stop plant growth. When you stop plant growth, you stop the sequestering of carbon dioxide.

On my recent visit to Cobram, in Victoria, farmers shared stories of the wildlife on their farms. One dairy farmer had a wildlife expert who counted 35 native Australian species on his small dairy farm. This included fish, frogs and turtles in their dam, and mammals and native Australian birds on the land. On another farm, with 100 acres of native bush down the back that benefited from run-off from their farming, he found 200 species in that little area. Our farmers are doing much more than just saving Australians from starvation and the weather; they are saving our wildlife as well, and yet all we hear is that farmers are causing climate change, which in turn has caused the terrible fires. That is false. Farmers are now being blamed for fires, yet they're the ones who want to have fire breaks, fire trails, vegetation thinning and back-burning. They know how to prevent fires and how to manage and minimise the fuel load. Farmers don't cause fires; farmers prevent fires. I say to the people promoting the nonsense that farmers control fires: how dare you, because it is false.

Farmers must contend with activists invading their homes as well. Farmers are blamed for footage of animals suffering in the live export trade, only to find out, after their livelihoods were destroyed, that the footage was faked. Activists suborned fake footage to promote their antihuman hate campaign against farmers. Anybody who hates farmers hates humans. The ABC ran the story. How can those city journalists of an organisation with such a long history, with so many ties to the country, through ABC rural services, hate our country so much? How can these journalists hate farmers so much? Farmers along the Queensland coast are being blamed for the chemical contamination of the reef, which is non-existent, because farm chemicals are not detectable in the reef water. Why do they demonise, for no reason, farmers who are growing products Australians use every day? This is madness. Despite this, the farmers continue their work.

Water has ceased to be an input to production and has now become an input to politics. Water is being used to send small, medium and family farms to the wall. This is corporatism masquerading as environmentalism. The 'useful idiots', the Greens, are being used by corporate agriculture and the United Nations to wipe out the competition, steal property rights and control every business input. We could name farmer after farmer who has been devastated by rampant regulations driven by political environmentalism. Political environmentalism is not making the world a better place; it is making the world cold, hungry and miserable.

In Cobram the other day I met an earthmover and a teacher. Terry was the earthmover, and the teacher needed to be anonymous to protect her career—such is what happens these days when one speaks up against the Left. Terry, though, depends on farmers. He works in construction. When farmers need work done, whether it is a dam or some clearing, he gets it done, but now farmers are not ordering jobs, because they have lost confidence. They haven't lost confidence because of the drought—they know that droughts come and go, droughts start and end, and they know this one will end, because droughts are cyclical—farmers have lost confidence because of government. They cannot see the end to political and bureaucratic insanity. They don't know what is down the road tomorrow, next week, next month or next year, coming out of this place and out of their state capital in Melbourne.

Still the farmers' spirit shines. They will rally in Yass on Tuesday 2 December and drive in convoy to Canberra, where they will let us know what they think of the people in this building. One Nation applauds and thanks our farmers for their efforts and looks forward to the day when our society casts off this pseudo-environmental lunacy that is just socialism masquerading as environmentalism and once again appreciates farmers for the amazing work that they do in growing food and fibre for the world, for us all.