Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Home Ownership) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Roberts has submitted a proposal under standing order 75:

Pursuant to standing order 75, I propose that the following matter of public importance be submitted to the Senate for discussion:

"Australia's agricultural sector must not be sacrificed on the altar of climate change".

Is the proposal supported?

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

With the concurrence of the Senate, the clerks will now 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

The UK has just concluded a trial of a personal carbon dioxide allowance which, as the name implies, calculates how much carbon dioxide is produced annually in the UK, then divides that per person per day and then works out by how much that figure needs to fall in order to meet net zero goals. We have the white paper in my office that informed the trial. The whole concept of a daily carbon dioxide allowance is now out there for all to see—conspiracy theory no more; I bloody told you so!

To anyone who is advised by data and empirical evidence, not mass formation psychosis, carbon dioxide is the gas of life, necessary for all life on earth. It's plant food. The more CO2 produced, the more food, plants and trees the earth is blessed with. The climate change scam is not founded on science; it's founded on feelings. It has become a religion for those who consider themselves above religion, and increasingly amongst those who could do with having some religion in their lives.

Australia's agricultural sector and rural communities, and $100 billion of agricultural production and hundreds of thousands of jobs, are about to be sacrificed on the altar of climate fraud. It is driven by globalist politicians and directed by parasitic billionaires who will benefit from this criminal enterprise—including Coca-Cola, who sponsored the trial. Coca-Cola is the world's largest producer of plastic, with 120 billion single-use plastic bottles each year holding their toxic sludge and producing 15 million tonnes of carbon dioxide—so their support for this white paper and trial is nothing short of greenwashing. Coca-Cola's leading shareholders are Warren Buffett, of Berkshire Hathaway, as well as BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. These wealth funds invest on behalf of the world's predatory billionaires who will profit from a carbon dioxide allowance. This is in the open following the admission last week by British Prime Minister Starmer that farmland being stolen from British farmers via taxation extortion will be purchased by corporate partners, including BlackRock. I wonder if this is what Prime Minister Albanese spoke about in his recent meeting with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.

What is the future for Australian food producers under this crony capitalist dystopian agenda headed our way? Red meat is top of the hit list. The methane cycle means cows do not produce methane in a way that remains in the atmosphere; I'll return to that point in a minute. Nonetheless, this trial used the figure for red meat carbon dioxide production of 100 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent, which equals 100 grams of carbon dioxide for every one gram of meat. Quick maths means your daily food allowance of 2,600 grams of carbon dioxide will be enough to buy 26 grams of red meat—one mouthful—and then you eat nothing else that day.

I raised this years ago in this chamber when the World Economic Forum first called for a limit on red meat of 30 grams a day—another conspiracy theory that's come true! A cooked breakfast will have to be half the size to squeeze into your daily allowance—again, with nothing left over for food for the rest of the day. Your daily allowance will cover two plant based meals a day because predatory billionaires like BlackRock and Bill Gates are buying up farmland to grow the cereals and soy needed for plant based meals. Not surprisingly, the whole thing is rigged towards the products they can exploit for their own financial gain—including plant based fake meat, which contains 20 chemical ingredients; most are shared with pet food. The nutrition profile is not even close to the nutrition profile of natural foods like red meat and dairy. Speaking of dairy: don't wash your yummy plant burger down with a glass of milk, because you can't. One glass of milk is your entire food budget for the day, with just enough left over for the coffee to go in it.

The hypocrisy here was on display to everyone at last week's COP 29 meeting for the UN, in Baku, where the area dedicated to meat based foods was packed and the one dedicated to plant based foods was empty. The World Economic Forum at Davos has hosted speakers calling for this system to include carbon dioxide credit trading so rich people can live their lives exactly as they do right now and poor people can skimp on food, clothing, travel, electricity and entertainment and sell their excess credits to rich people. The rules never apply to the people who make them.

The war on livestock is a war on good nutrition and is based on a lie which is designed to enrich billionaires. Over 150 nations signed the Global Methane Pledge without even bothering to check if the methane was man made. Methane from fossil fuels has a higher carbon-13 isotope ratio, and, even though hydrocarbon fuel use is rising, the carbon-13 levels of atmospheric methane are falling. Between 2020 and 2022, microbes in the environment drove methane emissions more than hydrocarbon fuels did. That's a pretty big deal.

Methane has supposedly caused 30 per cent of our current temperature rise—say the broken climate models. Yet 90 per cent of that recent rise was nature's microbes, not cattle. The Big Brother in every aspect of our lives is based on fake science of carbon dioxide and methane.

Raff Ciccone (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak briefly on the matter of importance moved by Senator Roberts. The Albanese government is committed to improving our agricultural industry, which is one of the best in the world—the economic data shows this in no uncertain terms. Having contracted during the pandemic, agricultural employment is recovering very strongly. As of August this year, 285,000 people were employed in the ag sector. That's a 12 per cent increase in agricultural employment over the last 12 months.

Despite poor seasonal conditions affecting production in the last financial year, the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry forecast the gross value of agricultural production to rise by four per cent, to $86 billion, this financial year. This is very important, because back in 2018 the National Farmers Federation laid out its road map to grow Australian agriculture into a $100 billion industry by 2030. Back then, the industry was worth around $59 billion. The sector has added nearly $25 billion in value since 2018, and it's set to continue this strong growth. The numbers simply don't lie. Given these very encouraging figures, I don't understand how we can be accused of sacrificing Australian agriculture on any altar, not least climate change.

To suggest that climate action is intended to hurt Australian agriculture is to misunderstand both climate change and agriculture. Farmers are more dependent on and connected to the environment than people in any other profession are. Across the world, agriculture will be hit first and hardest by climate change. It's why I've been so encouraged over the past few years to see representatives from our fine ag sector, including organisations like the National Farmers Federation, come together on this issue. From putting forward innovative solutions on the world stage in forums like COP to taking the initiative in their local communities, Australian producers don't want climate action stopped; they want their government to help them do the right thing. Taking action on climate change and strengthening our agricultural industry aren't mutually exclusive ambitions. We can and, in fact, need to embrace both.

Modelling also suggests that, due to inaction on climate change, Australian farmers lost, on average, $29,000 per farm from 2001 and 2020. And, as climate change worsens, that bill will only get higher if we delay. That's why the government are taking decisive action. We're spending $28 million over 10 years to help farmers better understand their emissions, using digital technology to ensure it's easy to keep up with climate standards. To help farmers get access to market insights and make good financial decisions, we're investing nearly $40 million to expand the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences, ABARES. We're also spending $30 million over the next four years to supercharge reductions in agricultural and land-practice emissions, building on existing outreach programs.

For years I have been very passionate about our ag sector and about reframing our approach. I also believe that agriculture is as critical and crucial to our national security as it is to our economy. Since taking office, federal Labor has focused on growing and securing ag in the face of recent supply change disruptions to the global economy. We must face the reality that, while supply chain disruptions began in earnest during the COVID pandemic, they almost certainly will not end with it.

As climate change continues to exacerbate natural disasters and cause disruptions, as we see constantly throughout the supply chain, a secure ag industry with sufficient capacity to feed Australia and broaden our region may become our most valuable national asset. By working to prevent climate change and to secure our ag industry against these effects, we do the opposite of sacrificing it. We ensure its survival, its prosperity and its potential to provide for our country and for our people for many years to come.

Perin Davey (NSW, National Party, Shadow Minister for Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to thank Senator Roberts for bringing this very important and very pertinent issue to the chamber. Senator Ciccone spoke about models. I often ask about models in the portfolio areas that I'm interested in. When I asked Dr Colman of the CSIRO about the models they're using, particularly with respect to an update of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, he said, 'While models are an important line of evidence, they aren't the truth,' which is true. Millions are being invested in producing models to inform our policies and decision-making, but we must always remember: they are models; they are not the truth. When our primary industries are at stake, when billions of taxpayer dollars are at stake, that distinction becomes very important.

While I believe the climate is changing, I also firmly believe that primary industries have a vital role to play in being part of the solution—unlike Labor, who think things like agriculture and forestry are part of the problem. Take, for example, their countless anti-agriculture policies. I'll start in my portfolio area of water. Despite the government already holding on to more than 2,100 gigalitres of water in Commonwealth environmental portfolios and despite the states holding hundreds of gigalitres of water in their environmental portfolios, the government says we need a new basin plan to address climate change, while pursuing more water buybacks across the basin, despite the unanimous concerns of communities. Goondiwindi, Dirranbandi, Moree, Dubbo, Griffith, Deniliquin, Shepparton, Mildura, Renmark and Loxton—every single one of those communities says water buybacks are not the solution, but, no, Labor knows best, apparently.

Labor wants the new Basin Plan to account for climate change. That's ignoring the fact that irrigation is one of the best tools we have in our armoury to be able to continue to feed the world in a changing climate. That's ignoring the fact that our farmers are already taking steps to address soil carbon sequestration, through farm forestry, through new broadacre agricultural practices, through using techniques like a fungi inoculent that increases the carbon uptake of soils, and through new water efficiencies. Our farmers are doing this despite the government tying their hands behind their back and despite looking down the barrel of new carbon emissions reporting structures that will cost them time and money and achieve no real substantial change.

Then let's talk about Labor's sole solution to the changing climate when it comes to energy: acres and acres of solar panels; hundreds of thousands of wind turbines, on and off shore; and tens of thousands of transmission lines. And where do all of these things go? They're not in Mosman. They're not in Toorak. They're not in Brisbane's South Bank. No. They go right across regional Australia, across prime agricultural land and forestry land. Forestry is a carbon sink.

It's okay to rip up hectares of forests to put in transmission lines and build roads to get the wind turbines to the top of the ridge, but it's not okay for a farmer to put in a development application for an intensive dairy?

I commend Senator Roberts's motion to this place, and I say we need to start recognising that agriculture is part of the solution. We, on this side of the chamber, the Liberals and the Nationals, stand behind our farmers and support our farmers and will do so into the future.

Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's good to hear Senator Davey say she accepts climate change is real and supports solutions and that she believes agriculture should be part of the solution, because I totally agree. But I think we need to be realistic here. It's no reflection on you, Senator Davey, but you're part of a political party that, since I've been in this place for 13 years, has done nothing but undermine climate action—consistently undermine climate action. One of your colleagues here in the Senate, Senator Canavan, has been on the record—he covered his face with coal dust and put it on his social media—saying that he stands with coalminers. He's very proud of the stance he has taken on supporting dirty fossil fuel energy, which of course is one of the big parts of the problem that we have to solve—how we transition away from dirty fossil fuels. So you can't stand with farmers if you are part of a political party and a movement that is, in its DNA, totally opposed to climate action. I don't need to go through, for senators, all the actions we've seen in this place in the last decade to undermine climate action and transition of our economy, but it has been really sad to watch. We are seeing the weather and the climate change around us now.

This is just a small technical point for Senator Roberts: yes, CO2 is plant food; however, as you may know or as any student of botany from high school or university will tell you, the stomata, which take on the CO2 in the plants, will close to conserve water when it gets hot. This is just basic science. I know you don't accept science or facts and you never have, but I'm just telling you how plants actually work, Senator Roberts. On a hot day, they will shut. They won't take on CO2. That's just a little fact I thought you might want to be aware of.

Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Home Ownership) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Roberts, on a point of order?

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

That is a negative imputation on me—false.

Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Home Ownership) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'll just have to take some advice on that. On this occasion, it may just have been a debating point, Senator Roberts. So I ask you to proceed, Senator Whish-Wilson.

Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It was a debating point. If I'd called you the village idiot, you'd have a good reason to stand up and take a point of order. But I didn't. I was making a perfectly valid point about how plants work. They have these things called stomata, Senator Roberts, which are tiny little apertures—

Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Home Ownership) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'll ask you to address your remarks through the chair. Senator Roberts, on a point of order?

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

Senator Whish-Wilson said that I don't believe in the science. That is false.

Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Home Ownership) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Again, I think that's a debating point; I don't think it's a personal reflection or imputation. So I invite you to—

Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

These plants have things called stomata. They are millions of little apertures where they take in CO2. So you're correct; they do actually use CO2. But when it gets hot they close. Anyone who understands the basics of how plants work would be able to tell you that. And, of course, in the future of climate change, it is going to get hotter. We are seeing extreme weather events—

Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Home Ownership) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Whish-Wilson, please resume your seat. Senator O'Sullivan?

Matt O'Sullivan (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am not contributing to the debate on this, but I think you have asked Senator Whish-Wilson to direct his comments through the chair, and he keeps referring directly to senators.

Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Home Ownership) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator O'Sullivan. Senator Whish-Wilson, thank you in advance for directing your comments through the chair.

Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thought I was directing them through the chair. My, my, how sensitive we are in the chamber today, talking about climate change and the LNP's and One Nation's decades of opposing it! Farmers, as Senator Ciccone said, are on the front line of climate change.

We've got a movement of Farmers for Climate Action around the country who are coming together—there are over 10,000 of them now—and who are talking to each other about how they can take climate action. Senator Roberts might be interested to know that a new report just commissioned by Farmers for Climate Action—which they're talking about on their social media today—surveyed 1,000 farmers, and 70 per cent support clean energy projects on farmland in their community. In fact, this reporting shows, as CEO Natalie Collard stated today:

… the quiet majority of rural Australia is clearly in favour of clean energy projects locally, although many don't realise they're part of the quiet majority …

And that is because we have a noisy minority in this place who call themselves the Liberal and National parties and who continue to say that they're advocating for farmers and that they speak for farmers when they clearly don't. They clearly don't speak for farmers. Farmers are on the land. They are the ones subjected to droughts, to pestilence—we're seeing significant new biosecurity threats arising because of climate change—to floods, to bushfires, to extreme weather events, to disruptions to their supply chains, to disruptions to port infrastructure, to export markets, and I could go on. They're the risks of modern-day farming, and they're made worse by climate change. But, ultimately, they're made worse by people in here like Senator Roberts who actually don't even want to understand the science. They waste the Senate's time and the taxpayers' time by coming up with motions like this, which are so cooked up with all the different elements to them that they just don't make sense.

But I have no doubt that Senator Roberts will find a few seconds of clips to cut out and put on his social media to show that he's got some kind of international conspiracy agenda around climate change and is taking action to support farmers. I look forward to hearing the rest of the contributions. It's been fascinating.

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

There's perhaps no more important role in our nation than that of our farmers. We eat and we are clothed every day because of these hardworking men and women. Our farmers take huge risks every year with no guaranteed financial return, yet our government—both sides of this chamber, in my opinion—deliberately punish them with their crazy climate agenda. That's what it is.

Teal voters on Sydney's North Shore would be outraged if you suggested that a solar panel might take up a corner of their beloved dog park, but those same voters, urged on by the climate fanatics that they send to Canberra, don't think twice about tens of thousands of kilometres of transmission lines being installed across prime agricultural land, massive wind turbines, huge solar farms, increasing restrictions on vehicles, forced water buy-backs, banned live exports and emission reduction targets aimed at livestock. If you're a farmer, the attacks from your own government just never end. The irony, of course, is that it is our farmers who we rely on to feed our nation. It is our farmers whom the government insists must bear the greatest burden of so-called climate action. It is worse than unfair. It's stupid. It's mean. It's self-destructive.

On a sidenote, why do we call these things 'renewable energy'? What is renewable about Chinese made solar panels which need to be installed and then replaced regularly or wind turbines which also need to be rebuilt every couple of decades? Where do these things go at the end of their useful life? Into landfill. There's nothing renewable about renewable energy—far from it. I'll tell you what is renewable, though: the cost. That's what's renewable. The government keep telling us that renewable energy is the cheapest form of energy. I don't know about that. Have you checked your power bill? Have you checked it? They keep going up.

Our farmers already carry this nation on their back. They should not have to shoulder net zero as well, which I will add is nothing but a wealth transfer. It has nothing at all to do with the environment. If you care about the environment, how about you stop plastic going into the ocean? How about you stop pesticides and chemicals running off into the ocean? How about you do that? How about you stop cutting down old-growth forests? Those are real environmental things. Net zero has nothing to do with this—nothing at all.

It's difficult enough being a farmer in this country with ridiculous cultural heritage laws piled upon the red tape that's piled upon the green tape that restricts everything that they do, and don't get me started on the taxes.

If inner-city elites really want to walk to work, cancel their overseas flights, sit at home in the dark or suck on soggy paper straws laced with forever chemicals to 'save the planet'—good luck to them! But the same people should remember that the soybeans and lentils they love to consume so much are grown by the blood and the sweat and the tears of hardworking farmers.

What our primary producers need from this government—both sides, Left and Right—is to just get the heck out of the way. Let them do their darn jobs. Let our farmers farm. At the end of the day, this is the problem—too much government, not enough freedom. You can apply that line to absolutely everything. Government is always, always the problem.

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

I rise to support this motion today that we should not sacrifice our farmers on the altar of climate change. I have to say, through you, Mr Acting Deputy President Bragg, I'm disappointed that Senator Whish-Wilson didn't refer to me before as well, because I would enjoy the debate about the science very much. You see, the problem with climate change is it's a motherhood statement; it lacks specific equations that show and measure cause and effect. If I were to lodge my tax return and say my income had changed, the tax office would, quite rightly, come back to me and say, 'You need to be more specific.' Yet, we have the government spending taxpayer dollars on this notion of climate change, but they don't really want to define what 'climate change' means.

I've asked the CSIRO in estimates if they could give me the method by which they're going to calculate net zero, and the reply was, 'Well, which method do you want—there are 40 different models.' I think that goes to show that if the experts can't even agree on how to calculate net zero, they clearly aren't very specific about the impacts of CO2 on the environment. The other question I've asked them, while talking about plants, is we forget that the biggest absorber of CO2 in the planet is phytoplankton in the ocean, which absorbs about 40 per cent of the world's CO2. We know, after the bushfires in 2019-2020 there was a phytoplankton bloom in the Southern Ocean because they absorbed all that extra CO2, so the fishes and the whales—our fisheries in Australia are actually quite low compared to other countries, so we need all the CO2 blowing off the land over our coastline to get as much fish and marine life as we can.

It is important to note that CO2 boosts plant productivity—that's well known—but what I want to focus on here today is not the notion of climate change, which is undefinable and indistinguishable—it's just a motherhood statement that has no real cause and effect associated with it—is the greenhouse gas effect. That was the original lie that started this whole climate change discussion in the first place. By the way, I accept the climate changes—it changes every day. And the world has been heating for about 12,000 years—it's called the Holocene period. There are lots of reasons the climate changes. I also believe that CO2 does increase the temperature. We know that, because of the ideal gas law. Now, CO2 is a gas, and if you're going to do proper science, you have to ask yourself, 'Is there an equation out there that demonstrates the cause and effect between gas and temperature? There is: it's the ideal gas law. I've spoken about it before, it's PV equals nRT. Pressure is force over volume, so there's your volumes gone. Force is mass times acceleration. If you take mass and you take your temperature, which is just a measure of mean molecular momentum, you have your mass energy equivalents from Einstein's 1905 paper. That's what it comes down to, that mass is energy. If we looked at it through those eyes, we would then realise that an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is a function of mass and not radiation.

I should note that CO2 absorbs incoming radiation at 2.8 microns, which, as we know per Planck's law, is five times more powerful than the outgoing radiation it absorbs at 15 microns. But ultimately, as per the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy of the system will always increase, and this is where the greenhouse gas effect falls over. In the greenhouse, you have a solid object that stops hot air from rising, in the atmosphere, it's actually gravity that stops hot air from rising as it pulls the molecules closer to earth, which is the reason Mount Everest, which is closer to the sun, is cooler than the surface of the planet.

Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Farmers in this country do it tough enough as it is. They struggle to stay on the land, especially through the vagaries of different weather and commodity fluctuations. We have a situation right now where our government is making their lives harder through its obsessive pursuit of completely ineffective climate change policies. The government has decided to pursue a climate reporting mechanism which even its own figures say would cost Australian businesses over $2 billion a year, and some of those businesses will be farm enterprises. Under this absurd approach, a bank or insurance company will have to assess not only the carbon emissions of its own operations but those of its customers. Let's say one of those customers happens to be a cattle grazier in Central Queensland, where I'm from—Rockhampton, the beef capital of Australia. That grazier, banking with, let's say, ANZ, will have to assess, write down and tabulate all of the methane emissions from their cattle; from the fuel use on their property and the associated carbon emissions; and from any construction they do, with the embodied emissions in things like concrete, steel, et cetera. It is a bureaucratic nightmare being imposed on them by this government, a red-tape tsunami imposed on our hardworking farmers along with many other businesses across the country.

What is it going to do? It's going to do absolutely nothing. Obviously, the incoming Trump administration is pulling out of all this stuff. As to anything we do, what our farmers collect: what's going to be done with the information? It will be collected, it will be sent down here, there will be people employed to tabulate and report on it, and then nothing will change except that a whole lot of people will have had their lives made a whole lot more frustrating.

Claire Chandler (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time for the discussion has expired.