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

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

Carbon dioxide credits are a scam and an absolute fraud, and the Greens agree with One Nation on this. Yes, you heard that correctly. It's difficult to believe. Australians may wonder what we agree on Granted, the Greens and One Nation have come to the same conclusion for very different reasons. Nonetheless, we share the conclusion that carbon dioxide credits are a scam. They are rife with opportunities for fraud.

The Clean Energy Regulator has issued 140 million carbon dioxide credits. At the current spot price of $35 each, this represents a racket potentially worth $4.9 billion. That's expected to grow by 20 million credits, or $700 million, this year alone, making it $5.6 million.

The Greens and One Nation aren't the only ones to criticise Australian carbon credit units, or ACCUs. In 2022 Professor Andrew Macintosh, environmental law expert at the Australian National University, and his colleagues published a series of papers absolutely tearing apart the ACCU system. Keep in mind that this is a $5.5 billion market that's being fabricated, in part to give the UN income, ultimately. As usual, they enlist parasites who benefit while pushing UN policy for them. For example, the major banks. Rothschild Australia, the Bank of America and Merrill Lynch had on their advisory boards in this country at the time the CSIRO chief executive, Dr Megan Clark—a conflict of interest?

Back to the study of ACCU carbon dioxide credits. The study was done under Professor Andrew Macintosh, who said:

The available data suggests 70 to 80 per cent of the ACCUs issued to … projects are devoid of integrity …

So 20 to 30 per cent may have some integrity. Remember, this is a $5.5 billion market. Here's another quote:

What is occurring is a fraud on the environment …

'A fraud on the environment', I say to the Greens. This is what Dr Macintosh said:

What is occurring is a fraud on the environment, a fraud on taxpayers—

Australian taxpayers—

and a fraud on unwitting private buyers of ACCUs …

In response to these revelations, the government commissioned what they call the Chubb review. The government should just have been honest and called it what it really was: a whitewash, a distortion and misinformation. Actually, the Chubb review is disinformation. In the past, when Professor Chubb has been requested to provide empirical scientific data within a logical scientific point backing up claims of climate change due to human carbon dioxide, he has repeatedly failed to produce it. He has never produced it, yet he's often advocated for it. He's part of the climate fraud industry and has received a lot of money to push climate fraud. He has been heavily rewarded by both Liberal-National and Labor Party governments. The Chubb review, in this case, addressed nothing of substance and provided no evidence for its claims that problems have been fixed, yet the government held the report up as proof that everything's fine. As Professor Macintosh and his colleagues outlined in their response to the Chubb review, it spent less than six pages discussing the ACCU rules, which relate to a $5.5 billion market. They say:

The--

Chubb—

report does not contain references to the evidence relied upon to reach its conclusions …

I'll say that again:

The--

Chubb—

report does not contain references to the evidence relied upon to reach its conclusions, and includes very little analysis to support its findings. And importantly, the panel does not address key questions around the integrity of the scheme's rules.

What use was that? This is 'a fraud on the environment, a fraud on taxpayers and a fraud on unwitting private buyers of ACCUs'. Here is another quote:

Bewilderingly—

I don't find it bewildering; it's straightforward, as I've been watching this scam unfold for years--

in its assessment of the methods, the panel does not refer to the findings of a review it commissioned from the Australian Academy of Science … The academy … found numerous flaws in the methods and the associated governance processes.

There were 'numerous flaws in the methods and the associated governance processes'. This is so typical of this government. It is so typical of the Liberals, the Nationals and Labor, pushing the climate fraud. Here is another quote:

The—

Chubb—

review … acknowledged the scientific evidence criticising the carbon credit scheme, but says "it was also provided with evidence to the contrary". Yet it did not disclose what that evidence was or what it relates to. The public is simply expected to trust that the evidence exists.

Maybe the dog ate the evidence for breakfast. This is what the government says is assurance and integrity for taxpayer money.

While the Greens, Professor Macintosh and I may agree on the integrity issues with carbon dioxide credits, here's where I leave them behind: there is no reason to reduce our output of carbon dioxide or trade credits for it. Carbon dioxide credits can never have integrity because they are a scam designed to transfer wealth from the pockets of everyday Australians and their families and small businesses to the bank accounts of billionaire net zero scam artists and parasitic multinationals sucking on the financial payout from climate fraud and associated financial scams.

I note some of these points. I won't go into them in detail. The government that introduced the renewable energy target, a scam, and the national electricity market that is really a national electricity racket—it's not a market; it's a bureaucratic controlled entity—stole farmers' property rights across the country so that they could comply with the UN's Kyoto protocol. They put in place the first policy—not legislation—advocating for a carbon dioxide tax. It wasn't Julia Gillard. It was the Howard government that did all these things. The Howard government laid the foundation for all of this. It went around the Constitution to steal farmers' property rights around the country. Then, six years after being booted from office and after the Liberals and Nationals in the Howard government told us that it was all based on science, John Howard, in a major lecture to sceptic think tank in Londan said that on the topic of climate science, he was agnostic. He didn't have the science, and now our electricity sector has been crippled because of the renewable energy target, the national electricity market and an alphabet soup of bureaucratic agencies.

There has never been—there never is—any empirical scientific data and logical scientific points that human carbon dioxide is warming the planet. There is not any from the CSIRO—I've done freedom of information requests and held them accountable in the Senate—nor from their publications ever. There is not any from the Bureau of Meteorology. It's the same deal. There is not any from the United Nations. It's the same deal. There is also no policy basis. There is no documented effect per unit of human carbon dioxide on climate factors such as air temperature, rainfall, heat waves, drought severity and frequency or storm severity, frequency and duration—none at all. There is no basis for the policy on which the carbon dioxide credits are based. There's been no cost benefit analysis. There's been no business case. Ross Garnaut, who produced a report for the Rudd-Gillard government, said in his report on the science that there basically was no science and he was going on the consensus. Yet he is parasitically sucking on solar and wind subsidies, driving up electricity prices and putting Australians into poverty. Remember, the money that goes to the extra costs of electricity in this country is a highly regressive tax on the poor in our country.

In 2009 and 2020 we had two global experiments showing that human carbon dioxide has no effect on carbon dioxide levels in the air. We had a major downturn with the global financial crisis in 2008. We then had a recession in 2009. COVID hit us. It arrived on our shores—it didn't really hit us; the government hit us—in 2020, and then 2020 was almost a depression because of the restrictions and lockdowns. In both years, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continued rising unabated. Yet we've been told for decades now that by cutting back on human production of carbon dioxide we would see the levels in the atmosphere start decreasing and go down. We had a major reduction in industrial activity and a severe recession in 2009 and 2020. The production of carbon dioxide from human use of hydrocarbons, coal, oil and natural gas decreased dramatically, yet nothing happened. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere kept increasing.

I asked the CSIRO why. They said that there is an inflection. I asked them for the details of that inflection, to characterise it statistically. They failed to do it. I asked the Bureau of Meteorology, and they said, 'Senator Roberts, it would take years for that to come through.' Here is the CSIRO saying that we've already seen it and the Bureau of Meteorology saying that we will see it eventually, but it will take a long while to come. You can't make this stuff up! What the experiments in 2009 and 2020 showed is that the production of carbon dioxide from human activity will not affect the level of carbon dioxide in the air. Once you understand Henry's law—the quantities of carbon dioxide dissolved in the ocean are 50 to 70 times more than the entire atmospheric carbon dioxide—then you start to understand why that's the case. But not content with climate science fraud, the CSIRO is perpetrating gen cost, which is energy fraud based on bogus assumptions that have been completely debunked. Aidan Morrison has done a marvellous job; others have done a marvellous job.

There's no basis for this scam, this fraud, but let's return to the fraud. A report in the 2010s said Europol found 95 per cent of carbon dioxide trading credits were suspicious. That's easy to believe because there's no physical basis to the measurement of reductions to carbon dioxide produced. They're all projections. They're all based on guesses. They're formulae based on estimations. They were never quantified and are still not quantified. China is producing record quantities of carbon dioxide, and so are Russia, Brazil, the United States and the European Union—Australia are a small player—yet temperatures are flat and have been flat since 1995. That's almost 30 years of flat temperatures. I urge senators to establish this inquiry so that we can get to the bottom of how taxpayer money is being fraudulently abused.

Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The government will not be supporting this motion. This motion is a political stunt by a party that rejects the science of climate change and seeks to undermine action by businesses getting on with acting to cut pollution and store carbon in our landscape. The reforms to the safeguard mechanism, passed with the support of the Australian Greens and most of the Senate crossbench, have been welcomed by the business community, including the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Industry Group. These reforms provide the policy certainty for companies to invest to decarbonise their facilities.

When our reforms passed on 30 March, the Business Council of Australia stated:

… this is critical progress towards securing a transition that delivers new jobs and new opportunities.

…   …   …

After more than a decade of uncertainty and equivocation employers now have certainty about our emissions targets and how we're going to get there.

The Australian Industry Group also made clear on 30 March:

… the legislation delivers a measure of much-needed certainty that Australia is serious about both its emissions goals and the centrality of competitive industry to achieving them.

On 31 January 2023 the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry urged those opposite to do the right thing for Australia's future and pass the bill, saying:

The business community has been very clear in its support for reforms to the Safeguard Mechanism. This is the best way to secure the planning, investment and innovation that will underpin the decarbonisation of our economy without sacrificing reliability or affordability.

Past failure to deal with this reality has crimped certainty for industry and investors, and left our energy sector in disarray. Australian businesses and households are now paying the price.

On 3 April 2023 Orica made clear:

Orica strongly supports the Government's reforms and strengthening of the Safeguard Mechanism, and we commend the Government's consultative approach and commitment to making this scheme work.

Eighty-two per cent of safeguard facilities, representing around 90 per cent of covered emissions, are already covered by corporate net zero commitments because business knows that reducing emissions is essential to their long-term competitiveness in a global net zero economy.

I might just add: only today I met with senior representatives of Rio Tinto, one of Queensland's major employers. I'm not sure whether Senator Hanson or Senator Roberts have ever bothered to go to Boyne Smelters in Gladstone. Rio Tinto, in partnership with the Queensland government, are investing heavily in renewable and other sources of power for their plant, which employs over 1,000 blue-collar workers in Gladstone, because Rio Tinto understand that their ongoing competitiveness, the ongoing future of those jobs in Gladstone and the thousands of jobs in manufacturing outfits that supply Boyne Smelters, along with other heavy industry in Gladstone, relies on making this transition towards cheaper, cleaner power. Rio Tinto are doing this because they understand that, if they want to be able to sell their product in the future across the world, they have to move towards renewable, cheaper and cleaner power. We know that One Nation and, unfortunately, elements of the LNP in Queensland want to put their heads in the sand and pretend that this is not happening. This is what companies need to do now to make sure that we have those jobs in heavy industry into the future.

The reforms that the Labor government have introduced will progressively lower baseline on a trajectory consistent with the legislated targets, delivering more than 200 million tonnes of abatement to 2030. The use of Australian carbon credit units has always been central to the safeguard mechanism since it was legislated by the previous government in 2014. Let's not forget that, on 25 November 2015, the previous government's environment minister, Greg Hunt, boasted that the safeguard mechanism would generate approximately 200 million tonnes of emissions reduction by 2030—and that was towards the weak 2030 targets that the former government had at the time, a target that has now been abandoned by the Leader of the Opposition.

The ACCU scheme has already been subject to multiple reviews and has been found to be sound. In 2022, the independent Chubb review found the ACCU scheme settings were sound and set out some sensible improvements that should be made. We are getting on with it and have already acted to implement the review recommendations. The Climate Change Authority's review of the scheme, which reported last December, has also found that the scheme is 'well designed', with 'robust governance, compliance and enforcement structures'.

On 30 April, the Australian National Audit Office released their performance report of the ACCU scheme. They found the scheme's administration and development of methods was effective and was being effectively enforced by the Clean Energy Regulator. The Clean Energy Regulator has increased the transparency of HIR projects and established extra review and audit processes to implement recommendation 8. In May 2023, implementing the ministerial direction, the Clean Energy Regulator expanded its compliance audit program to include independent audits for regeneration and forest cover attainment checks, known as gateway checks, of all HIR projects. In June 2023, the Clean Energy Regulator published HIR project carbon estimation areas.

In the second half of 2023, the Clean Energy Regulator engaged Associate Professor Cris Brack, a forestry services expert from the Australian National University, to independently review HIR projects passing their first five-yearly regeneration check. Associate Professor Brack's first report, published on 15 December 2023, found:

… HIR projects are demonstrating regeneration and proponents are implementing the project activities.

He also found:

… the independent audit reports and the Clean Energy Regulator (CER) reviews of HIR projects provide strong assurance that projects meet the requirements of the method …

A second report was published on 30 September. Associate Professor Brack found that the independent audit reports and the Clean Energy Regulator's assessments 'continue to provide strong assurance that projects are being managed properly'.

The Albanese government has also been consulting on the Climate Active program and looking at ways to drive more effective voluntary climate action and provide consumers with greater confidence about businesses' climate credentials. The program is not related to our safeguard reforms and is not one of the key levers used by the government to meet its legislated emissions reduction targets. The Albanese government has put in place a comprehensive suite of climate and energy programs to encourage businesses and organisations to act on climate change and prioritise emissions reductions. Of course, we are doing that partly because of the environmental need to act on climate change, but we're also, as I say, doing this because we understand that so many thousands of jobs across Australia, particularly in the resources sector, heavy industry and other blue-collar occupations, rely on us making this energy transition as quickly and efficiently as possible.

We know there are some in the Australian parliament—including One Nation and, sadly, many in the LNP—who continue to believe that we can ignore climate change. In some cases, they just don't believe that climate change is even happening. There are many in this chamber—fortunately, not in the Labor Party, but in other parties—who think that we can ignore the reality of climate change and that the rest of the world can move ahead in making this adjustment and we don't need to worry about it. The only thing that will happen as a result of that is that thousands of blue-collar workers in places like Gladstone will lose their jobs. It's not environmental activists who are making this point; it's companies like Rio Tinto.

Senator Hanson interjecting—

Senator Hanson can keep yelling at me if she wants to. I'd bet she's never set foot in Boyne Smelter. I'd bet she's never set foot in any of the alumina refineries. Well, people like me have. We've talked to the workers. We've talked to the companies. They understand that we need to make this change, because the workers want to have a job not just next year but in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years and 50 years. The way to do that is by making sure that we accept the reality of climate change, making the investments that are necessary to keep those jobs and ensuring that they are supplied by cheaper, cleaner power. We are not going to be distracted by the climate deniers who sit in parties like One Nation and the LNP. We're about protecting those jobs and protecting the environment.

James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question before the chair is that the motion moved by Senators Hanson and Roberts be agreed to. A division is required, but, because it is past 6.30 pm, it will be deferred until tomorrow.