Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Roberts has submitted the following proposal under standing order 75 today:

Pursuant to standing order 75, I give notice that today I propose to move "That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

"Fear-based net zero 'climate' policies are harming everyday Australians and have no environmental justification"

Is the proposal supported?

More than the number of senators required by t he standing orders having risen in their places—

With the concurrence of the Senate, the clerks will set the clock in line with the informal arrangements made by the whips.

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

I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

Fear-based net zero 'climate' policies are harming everyday Australians and have no environmental justification.

As a servant to the many different people who make up our wonderful Queensland community, I say that fear-based net zero climate policies are harming everyday Australians and have no environmental or scientific justification. Yesterday this chamber saw a display from the Greens that is best described as fear based. I could feel their terror. They were terrified. It was not fear of some impending human barbecue; it was fear of impending political irrelevance. The public are starting to wake up to the fact that climate change is the greatest display of mass formation psychosis since the Salem witch hunts.

Last weekend, Tory Prime Minister Sunak in Britain won a surprise victory in the Uxbridge by-election, campaigning against Lord Mayor Sadiq Khan's net zero policies. A Conservative politician took a stand against net zero and won. The British media have sensed the changing mood and their reporting tone has changed. Here's a sample of their headlines from the last few weeks. 'Change the ludicrous net zero timetable,' read the Telegraph. 'Rishi Sunak must be bold and delay our net zero deadlines or the cost will be ruinous.' That was the Sun, saying what I have been saying for last 15 years, except I've been saying 'cancel', not just 'delay'. 'Sunak will have to water down net zero,' read the Spectator. The Washington Post weighed in with: 'Backlash to climate policies is growing.'

The UK going off-reservation and winding back net zero will provide economic competition to countries like Australia which continue to commit economic suicide with a net zero agenda. The money flowing into the pockets of the predatory billionaires who are behind this scam is already under threat. Swedish state energy company Vattenfall has announced one of the world's biggest offshore wind developments, the 1,400-megawatt Norfolk Boreas project in the UK, has been suspended due to spiralling costs. Increasing prices for wind turbine materials, including copper, zinc, chromium, nickel, rare earths, cement and the oil for the fibreglass blades, gearbox and lubricants, have caused a 40 per cent cost overrun. This pushed their projected cost per megawatt hour from $85 to over $100 a megawatt hour.

Offshore wind is not cheap electricity and it never will be. Wind energy is expensive and, due to the laws of physics, always will be prohibitively expensive.

This insane ideology is causing everyday Australians to feel deep pain and hurt. Building a home is getting dearer because all of the materials used in net zero are used in homes. Rising construction costs mean home ownership is harder and rents are increasing. Retooling our entire energy grid, both generation and transmission, is transferring hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of everyday Australians into the pockets of the climate carpetbaggers running this scam, using rising electricity prices and higher taxes. We are the world's most energy-rich country, yet we have some of the world's highest prices for electricity. We export coal and uranium so foreign countries can have cheap, reliable power; yet the energy policies of the Greens, Liberals, Labor and the Nationals mean we cannot use it here—all in the name of this new religion of green self-flagellation.

In two weeks, I will be visiting the site of the latest green environmental vandalism in Chalumbin, Queensland. Thousands of hectares of native forest are to be chopped down for an industrial wind turbine complex—killing the environment to save it, apparently. Oil companies are experiencing record margins and profits thanks to the Albanese government allowing this profiteering, despite having the power to bring prices down. The higher the price of petrol, the less people use their cars, allowing the Albanese-Bowen government to claim progress towards net zero.

All of this is based on faulty science and selective misuse of natural events—fraud. We were told this was the hottest July on record, when in fact it was the hottest July since last year. We were told the ice extent is shrinking. However, the Arctic is within long-term fluctuations and the Antarctic is not melting, except for the section where there's significant volcanic eruption under the ice. You fearmongers didn't bother to mention that, did you?

In my adjournment speech tonight I'll speak on the warmers' scientific fraud. Even the fearmonger in chief, Jim Skea, the new head of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has had to ask for an end to the hyperbole. Speaking on the weekend, Skea said, 'We should not despair and fall into a state of shock,' if global temperatures were to increase by 1.5 degrees. He said, 'The world won't end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees.' Rebranding climate change as climate boiling is designed to drive fear.

Senator McKim said yesterday that billions of people will die. That's what he said—no facts, just fear—because the Greens are terrified of the rapidly changing public mood. People are waking up that the public are being bullied into continued support for policies that achieve nothing except to hurt human beings and harm our natural environment. Now, in this debate, the Greens are silent. (Time expired)

Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

OL BROWN (—) (): It's always good to follow Senator Roberts's contribution to what is a very important issue. We are, despite the previous contribution, living in a climate emergency. This is our reality. It's an emergency which is showing us that our summers will be marred by extremes of bushfires and floods. In the Black Summer bushfires in 2019-20, 24 million hectares of land were destroyed, millions of native animals were killed, 33 people directly lost their lives and a further 450 people are estimated to have died due to smoke inhalation. In 2022, eastern Australia was devastated by repeated floods. At least 22 people lost their lives, and thousands lost their homes or businesses, with an estimated $5 billion hit to the economy. Last year in Australia, seven out of 10 people lived in an area declared as a natural disaster zone at some point in their life, often more than once.

Since coming into office, this government hasn't wasted a moment in getting on with the job. We've lifted our 2030 emissions reduction target by half, from 26 per cent to 43 per cent. Just two weeks ago we announced we would be developing decarbonisation plans for each major sector of the Australian economy, underpinned by sector-wide economic modelling, to set us on a path to reaching our ambitious but achievable goal of net zero by 2050. One of those industries is one I work closely with in my responsibility as Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Transport.

The transport industry contributes 19 per cent of all greenhouse gases in Australia, vastly more than any other industry. Since 2005 greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 11 per cent and are currently projected to be the largest source of CO2 emissions in Australia by 2030. This government knows that reducing emissions in the transport sector through using more renewable energy sources will require concerted action across government and industry to secure long-lasting benefits by managing and minimising the impacts of the transition. That's why this government is acting through the development of a transport and infrastructure net zero road map and action plan. A draft road map will be developed this year, and the action plan will be drafted in early 2024.

This action plan will present an integrated decarbonisation road map to ensure that we take up the opportunities by carefully managing the transition to new energy sources. Further, the government is already decarbonising the transport sector through increasing the uptake of electric vehicles and developing a fuel efficiency standard through the National Electric Vehicle Strategy. Fuel efficiency standards are common elsewhere around the world. In fact, through the inaction of the former government, Australia is playing catch-up in introducing these standards. That's just a fact. We are playing catch-up because of the inaction of the previous government. Fuel efficiency standards help by reducing transport emissions, improving air quality in and around our cities, making it easier for Australians to breathe and, importantly, ensuring for people around the country that they will save money at the petrol pump.

Moving away from how we are tackling emissions in transport, the government has also reformed the safeguard mechanism. This mechanism is an important reform and one which we took to the Australian people in the last election and received a strong mandate for. No amount of denial by those opposite, who seek to undermine the climate emergency— (Time expired)

Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What a delight it is to follow Senator Brown in that rousing contribution about the government's position on the motion before us. I like Utopia, and I'm sure that the Albanese Labor government have picked most of their policy nomenclature from the script of Utopia. We've got a sector-wide strategy. We've got a road map. We've got an action plan, and all of it is going to lead nowhere, frankly, apart from disaster and destruction for the Australian economy—the offshoring of jobs, the increasing pressures on household budgets—and all of it on the basis of what Senator Brown and her colleagues describe as a 'climate emergency'.

Someone must have missed the memo, because earlier today, during question time, the government actually did refer to something that is impacting on Australians, and that is the cost-of-living crisis that we're facing. Thank the good Lord, of course, the Reserve Bank today put a hold on interest rates, but someone has missed the memo in that contribution just given from and on behalf of the Australian government about what really matters to Australians. I have to apologise to Senator Roberts, because while his motion is fantastic in many respects, it is not going to change a blasted thing when it comes to the direction the Australian government is taking with the bedfellows down the end here, the Australian Greens. Disastrous and destructive policies based on anything other than science—emotion, headline grabs, Utopia scripts, as we already heard today—if we look at these things, I think the construction of his motion points to some very important points, because balance and proportionality are important when it comes to government responses. I don't know that there's anyone in this chamber that wants to destroy the environment, contrary to the assertions that are often made about people being 'planet haters' and 'climate deniers'. I actually want this place to be a wonderful place for my three sons and their children, should they choose to have them. I'd like them to enjoy the beautiful wilderness in Tasmania.

But shutting down entire industries without any regard for the economic impact is, I think, irresponsible and it won't fix the climate emergency. It will in fact make this cost-of-living crisis worse.

Take, for example, this climate emergency that Senator Brown referred to in her contribution in talking about the bushfires on the east coast of Australia in recent times. It's Labor across the country that are shutting down the native forest industry. They want to lock up swathes of forest and throw away the key, with no management whatsoever. We have seen it happen in Victoria. We have seen it happen in Western Australia. Do you know what? When you remove management of our productive forests, you increase bushfire risks.

Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Oh, rubbish!

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator McKim!

Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You see bunkum reports out there suggesting forestry contributes to bushfires. I tell you what: not managing forests is actually bad for our environment.

Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is an absolute load of rubbish, and you know it.

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator McKim, I've called you to order. I expect you to stop interjecting.

Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you for your protection, President; I appreciate it very much. As I continue to make my fact based, science based points, I want to demonstrate the lack of logic in the government's thinking. When you have groups like the Labor Environment Action Network, which is probably going to take over the Australian Labor Party at the next federal convention—I'm reading a few things that are sending out concerning messages about the direction of this government and their policies and there is real concern—you see policies like this, with the shutting down of the native forest industry. It's not based on science. That is not factored in anywhere in any of these policy decisions by the two state Labor governments that have pursued this. Goodness knows what this government will do when it comes to its turn to make a decision about the future of that industry.

We are supposed to be problem solvers and we are supposed to be dealing with the issues that affect Australians most. The contribution that was made earlier about what crisis people are facing when they can't pay their power bills, can't keep the lights on, can't heat their home in winter, can't put fuel in the car and can't put food on the table was ridiculous. The government have climate policies like the safeguard mechanism, which we proudly opposed because all that will do is send jobs offshore along with the emissions that will inevitably be increased when those businesses, those heavy emitters, go to jurisdictions where they don't give a damn about the environment and they don't care about emissions. It will be a net negative for our environment and it will certainly be a net negative for our economy and for households that are struggling already.

So I have to say that I am concerned about where they are headed. But, unfortunately, Senator Roberts, no number of motions in this place will ever get them to see sense. Only at the ballot box will they be proven wrong about their ridiculous policies— (Time expired)

Ralph Babet (Victoria, United Australia Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wholeheartedly support Senator Roberts's urgency motion. The Australian people are victims of our government's blind pursuit of net zero. Labor and the Greens are, quite frankly, climate catastrophe cookers. That's what they are. Their rhetoric has reached boiling point. At least, I think it's boiling. Or is it 'warming'? Or is it 'changing'? Just make up your minds, guys. Stop staring the kids.

Those of us in this place who put Australians first were yesterday referred to as 'sociopathic agents'. I would suggest—

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Babet, may I remind you that that remark was withdrawn. It is not appropriate to repeat it.

Ralph Babet (Victoria, United Australia Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would suggest that the real sociopath—

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Babet, I've asked you not to revisit something that was withdrawn. It's not a request; it's an order.

Ralph Babet (Victoria, United Australia Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Those who would weaponise climate fear—let's put it that way—in order to appease their globalist and corporate interests are no friends of Australia. I'll tell you why. They are championing the shutdown of our cheap, reliable coal-fired and gas-fired power while China is fast-tracking hundreds of coal-fired power plants. China already has six times more coal-fired power plants than the rest of the world combined—but it wants even more. Last year, China approved 106 gigawatts of new coal-fired power projects. That is five times more than all the coal-fired power stations in Australia's national electricity market. We know why they are doing this: coal power is cheap and coal power is reliable.

China is flourishing, but the cost of everything in Australia is going through the roof, and our standard of living is decreasing. Australian pensioners and battlers can't afford to heat or cool their homes. Australian families can't afford to pay grocery bills. And China's energy cost advantages are killing Australia's manufacturing sector. The insanity of the climate cult will eventually bankrupt Australia.

Fear is not grounded in fact. I'll take this opportunity to remind the Australian people of some historical far-left fearmongering. Our friends at the Guardian back in 2004 warned former US President Bush that Britain would have a Siberian climate by 2020. In 2007 Professor Flannery claimed, 'Even the rain that falls isn't going to fill our dams and our river systems.' In 2007, 2008 and 2009 Al Gore claimed that there was a scientific consensus that the North Pole would be 'ice free by 2013'. I think Santa's home is pretty safe for now. In 2018, Greta Thunberg tweeted:

A top climate change scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.

Well, it's 2023. I guess we'd better pray that we're not all wiped out in the next four months. Thanks, Greta!

As you can tell from this sample of quotes, apparently the science is well and truly settled. I'll tell you what: these people are as cooked as their predictions. Our government is so obsessed with net zero that it is sacrificing our economy for policies that make net zero sense. And the only people who benefit from this, the only ones, are the globalists and, of course, the CCP. That's who benefits.

Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's great to speak this afternoon to this MPI. I have to say I agree with it. There is no doubt that the policies being adopted by the Labor government are harming Australians. It is pushing up their obsession with renewable energy. I use that word 'renewable' flippantly because this energy isn't renewable; it can't actually even be recycled, at least not for less than three times the cost of making it. That's a quote from the very mouth of the former head of the CSIRO. For some reason, the CSIRO doesn't want to include the cost of recycling renewables in their gen cost report, and that's something I'll touch on in a minute, but I really want to focus on the cost of living today.

Australians are struggling under the cost of living. As my colleague Senator Duniam pointed out, they're struggling under high interest rates brought about by Labor's mismanagement. Labor are also driving up the cost of energy, because renewables are very expensive. It's not just the point of delivery that matters; it's the cost of transmission, it's the cost of storage, it's the cost of security, the cost of frequency control—everything like that. All of that costs money. These are the hidden costs that aren't actually put into the energy budget models. It is misleading the Australian people and, unfortunately, it is hurting them in their hip pockets. If we want to solve this problem, we need to be very honest about the cost of renewable energy, because that is how it is harming the Australian people.

But it's not just the Australian people that are being harmed. I myself have been up to the proposed Chalumbin wind farm site. It's in the Great Barrier Reef basin. It beggars belief that farmers are required to prepare a basin management plan, at a great cost of up to $10,000, and they face $200,000 fines if some guy from the Department of Resources decides that they're not doing whatever they're doing properly. Hopefully, that is only ever going to be used in extreme cases where there is justification for it, but I fear that won't necessarily be the case. No, it's not just the economy that suffers as a result of this obsession with net zero; it's actually our environment itself.

We've got a lot of sites in Queensland. We've got the Chalumbin wind farm; we've got Eungella, upstream of the Pioneer river in Mackay, where the Queensland state government is proposing to take on an enormous pumped hydro project. This project is slated to provide five gigawatts of energy. You lose 20 per cent straight away when you do pumped hydro projects because you waste energy pushing it up the hill, so it's going to be at least six gigawatts of energy that have to be provided by wind farms.

On average, Queensland uses about nine gigawatts of energy a day, so we are talking about building enough windfarms to provide two-thirds of Queensland's energy in pristine native forest upstream of Mackay. That energy is then going to have to be transported a thousand kilometres south, back to Brisbane, if not further, so there will be further energy losses in the transmission lines as the energy is transported downstream. This is going to be very expensive. The Eungella region, upstream of Mackay, is also one of the world's more precious sites when it comes to platypus habitat. This is another example of how renewables, which are supposed to be saving the environment, are actually a threat to the environment and our biodiversity.

The Rewiring the Nation fund, which is going to fund this, is another Orwellian term. It's not rewiring Australia; it's adding more transmission lines, which are already there, in order to connect these isolated renewables projects to the grid. Thirty years ago we had about 30 power stations on the east coast of Australia; they provided all the grid's energy. They mightn't have been pretty; I'm not saying they were, but they were contained within a small footprint. These renewables projects are going to be spread across the environment and across the country, with another 10,000 kilometres of transmission lines. Enormous mines are going to have to be involved in getting the rare earth metals out of the ground. As I've said on numerous occasions, these so-called rare earths might be rare in the sense that the percentage of metal in their ore body is very small. It is going to be very damaging.

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

I rise to commend Senator Roberts for getting to the heart of this debate. There is no logical justification for the major parties' terrible climate-change policies. Let's look at the facts. Climate policy is aimed at reducing global emissions of carbon dioxide. Global carbon dioxide emissions are increasing because carbon dioxide follows temperature by approximately 700 years or more; therefore climate policy is not working. It's not working, because the world's human population is the source of only three per cent of the world's carbon dioxide. The rest comes from natural sources, like volcanoes, animals, soil and oceans. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It's a natural gas essential to virtually all life on earth. The major parties' climate policies do not address the 97 per cent of carbon dioxide from natural sources, because they can't—it's beyond anyone's control. Instead of having their intended effect, the major parties' climate policies have only ever had one real impact: electricity costing more. Electricity today costs three times as much as it did 20 years ago. Australia has some of the biggest natural energy resources in the world but pays some of the highest energy prices in the world, due in part to a profound shortage of energy. This does not make any sense.

Yesterday we were treated to a childish display of temper from Greens Senator McKim across the chamber at Senator Canavan over Australia's one per cent of human carbon dioxide emissions. Why aren't these Greens yelling at China, responsible for 30 per cent of human carbon dioxide? That country produces 12 billion tonnes of it, and this will rise by another two billion tonnes by 2030. This would wipe out any reductions by Australia, which produces less than 500 million tonnes. You could reduce Australia's carbon dioxide to zero overnight and, within a year, this reduction would be overtaken by China's increased carbon dioxide. China also mines almost 4.5 billion tonnes of coal per year. Australia mines about 560 million tonnes. Senator McKim and his fellow Greens hypocrites love to run down and insult Australia but never say a word about the country which produces 25 times as much carbon dioxide as Australia and nine times as much coal. The Greens are the very definition of hypocrisy, with absolutely no empathy for Australian families struggling with some of the highest energy bills in the world. Senator McKim would do well to understand that a lack of empathy is the very definition of a psychopath.

David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Roberts's motion talks about fear and climate change. It seems to me the people harbouring the greatest fears are climate scientists—those actually doing the research, looking at what's happening and some of the projections for the future. I thought I'd read out a few of their thoughts from an article from last week. I'll start with Dr Joelle Gergis, senior lecturer at the ANU's Fenner School:

I am stunned by the ferocity of the impacts we are currently experiencing. I am really dreading the devastation I know this El Nino will bring. As the situation deteriorates, it makes me wonder how I can be most helpful at a time like this. Do I keep trying to pursue my research career or devote even more of my time to warning the public? The pressure and anxiety of working through an escalating crisis is taking its toll on many of us.

Bill Hare, physicist, climate scientist and chief executive at Climate Analytics:

… as today's monstrous, deadly heatwaves overtake large parts of Asia, Europe and North America with temperatures the likes of which we have never experienced, we find even 1.2C of global warming isn't safe.

Professor Matthew England, from the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science:

While we've been saying for decades now that this is what to expect, it's still very confronting to see these climate extremes play out with such ferocity and with such global reach. It's going to be Australia's turn this summer, no doubt about it.

It makes me feel deeply frustrated to watch the slow pace of policy action—it's bewildering to see new fossil fuel extraction projects still getting the go-ahead here in Australia. And with this comes deep resentment for those who have lobbied for ongoing fossil fuel use despite the clear climate physics that have been known about for almost half a century.

Professor Katrin Meissner, director of the Climate Change Research Centre in New South Wales:

Was I surprised by this heatwave? Of course I was not. If anything I felt a mild scientific curiosity to see materialise what we have been forecasting for years. I also felt sad. We know that what we are living through now is just the beginning of much worse conditions to come.

If you don't find that convincing, check out the 80-page IPCC Synthesis report, which is arguably the most reviewed document in human history. It's terrifying. The climate science is there, the projections are there. We need a government that not only accepts the science but acts according to advice from scientists.

Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that Senator Roberts's motion be agreed to.