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

I've said it before in this chamber and I'll say it again: hypocrisy is just the latest virtue of Green-Left activists and politicians to signal, and there's nothing more hypocritical than the destructive climate change ideology. The price of this hypocrisy is being paid right now by the Australian people, not by the Green-Left politicians themselves. This self-appointed elite is doing just fine, thank you very much. They don't give a damn that their actions are destroying this country and hurting the people who live in it. The rising cost of living in Australia is literally forcing families into homelessness and greater debt, and into making greater sacrifices to keep their children fed and in school.

The biggest component in the rapid inflation we're experiencing in Australia is soaring energy costs. Labor lied directly to the Australian people. No government in Australian history has more rapidly broken a promise than Labor's pledge at the election last year to reduce household energy bills. Labor knew it couldn't deliver the promise and they never had any intention to try, because it was totally incompatible with their obsession with reducing human-caused carbon dioxide emissions in Australia.

This is nothing new. Energy bills have risen around 300 per cent since the large-scale penetration of renewable energy began some 20 years ago. It is no coincidence that, as more wind forms blighted the landscape and more solar panels were installed in wealthy homes, all with hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer support, the energy bills paid by less fortunate Australians went up and up and up. And it's only getting worse.

It's these same people now looking at a 56 per cent rise in electricity costs and a 40 per cent rise in gas costs over the next two years thanks entirely to the green left obsession with human CO2 emissions. This obsession, pushed on by the corrupt UN and the IPCC, is also forcing the reliable power generated from coal and gas out of the system, and our energy-rich country now faces serious shortages that will cripple farming and industry while leaving households in the cold this coming winter.

What do the Australian people get in return for the enormous price they are forced to pay? Surely all this tremendous sacrifice and pain in Australia is achieving what the green left hypocrites say is their intention: to save the world from temperature increases, sea level rise, droughts, floods and cyclones. The short answer is that it's achieving nothing at all. Ninety-seven per cent of the world's CO2 comes from nature: from the soil, from the sea, from volcanoes. Only three per cent is caused by humans, and Australia's contribution is barely one per cent of that three per cent. Tell me how the hell shutting down our coal, gas and fossil fuel use is going to compete with more than a million volcanoes above and below the ocean's surface?

To state some facts for you: the IPCC use the unique chemical fingerprint of carbon dioxide in the air to determine the amount of human emissions from burning fossil fuels, gas, stubble, timber, forests and peat. However, there is just one slight problem: the carbon chemical fingerprint of carbon dioxide dissolved in the oceans from past volcanic activity and later released to the air by ocean degassing is the same as that released from the burning of fossil fuels and vegetation.

Now they're attacking our cattle. I'd be more worried about solar cycles and the occasional impact event than farting cows! No amount of money or sacrifice can change this. None of this matters to the green left hypocrites looking down on us from their energy-intensive mansions, their fuel-guzzling four-wheel-drives that never see a dirt road and their high-polluting private jets. They just continue with the lie that, unless Australians act as they dictate, the entire planet is doomed. They lie while reaping the dividends from taxpayer money invested in this global green scam based on faulty computer models, doing their best to scare Australians into giving them their misinformed votes.

Why don't Labor and the Greens condemn China, which emits more CO2 in two weeks than Australia does in a whole year and is planning to build 1,000 new coal power plants? Can you imagine the idiot activists who are vandalising works of art and gluing themselves to roads in Australia going to China to do the same? Neither can I. That's because they're not only hypocrites but pathetic, gutless cowards too. For them, China deserves leeway as a developing nation. Never mind it has the world's second-largest economy, nuclear weapons and an active space program.

This green Left hypocrisy is on display in so many ways. Thousands of hectares of natural vegetation are cleared to build wind farms. Massive environmental damage is caused by producing the materials used for wind turbines, solar panels and rechargeable batteries. They refuse to even consider permitting the use of one of the low-emission technologies that will deliver reliable energy—nuclear power, which is safely used in 30 countries around the world.

Despite the fact that global CO2 emissions continue to rise, this hasn't even remotely led to the disasters we were promised by the green Left prophets of doom. Remember when Tim Flannery promised that our dams would run dry and our coasts would be permanently flooded by the sea? Our dams are full and our coasts remain exactly as they were. In a radio interview in March 2011 Flannery also implied that so call climate action was futile. He said:

If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as a thousand years …

These green Left prophets of doom were big on wild scaremongering. We were promised that huge storms of unprecedented intensity would destroy our homes and infrastructure. That hasn't happened. Storms are no worse than they ever were and, in fact, have become less intense in the past 50 years.

These are the hypocrites for which the Australian people are being forced to pay and sacrifice so much. Yet it's not enough for the green Left political elite who can't even tell us what net zero actually means. It's never enough for the gutless activists. They will not be satisfied until Australia is a Third World country in which only they are secure and comfortably well off.

They're already destroying what's left of Australian manufacturing, crippling it with energy shortages and high energy costs and allowing it to be held hostage by union thugs. They're already killing off mining industries, which have been a mainstay of our economy for centuries and employ hundreds of thousands of Australians. They're already attacking our world-leading agricultural industries, taking away their water and forcing higher production input costs on farmers—that is when they're not selling off our land to foreign interests.

I despair for the future of this country held captive by the green Left while they work their hardest to make everyone poorer and more dependent on government handouts under the guise of saving the planet. It's the Australian people who need saving from this hypocrisy and patronising arrogance.

Energy policy must prioritise affordability, reliability and resilience, not reducing the human pool of CO2. Energy policy must prioritise the use of a range of technologies, from renewables through to nuclear, to make sure that we don't put all our eggs in one basket. Energy policy must leverage the advantages provided by our abundance of natural resources—coal, natural gas and uranium. Energy policy must put Australia and Australians first, not loyalty to the cult of climate change. Like all cults, the cult of climate change is ultimately about utilitarian control.

Climate change is used as an excuse to control energy production, control manufacturing, control travel and freight, control trade, control food production and control water supply. When this is achieved they will have total control of the people. They will control where we live, the work we do and even the food we eat. Today's report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change spells it out. The UN Secretary-General's statement was full of the language of doom. He demanded that countries like Australia place more controls and restrictions on energy production. Are we listening to them? No, we're not and shouldn't. We should stand up for ourselves and—

Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Hanson. Senator Roberts?