Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

I'll start by saying that net zero is going to have absolutely no effect on the climate whatsoever. Why is that the case? Because the vast majority of the globe, in both population and GDP, are not participating in it. China is not participating in it in a real form—neither is India, neither is Indonesia, neither is the United States of America, and neither is most of South-East Asia nor Africa nor the Middle East. So why are we doing this to ourselves? What is the purpose of this?

What I do say is that it has changed the standard of living for so many Australians. Our GDP per person is going down. People are becoming poorer. If you go into shops, they talk about 30 to 40 per cent of their costs being energy. Whether it's pie shops or hairdressers, it doesn't matter. It's hurting Australians. In a more pronounced way, it's hurting the poorest, because it's the poorest who need the power to keep themselves warm at a time of the year like this in areas such as mine. It is putting people—and it genuinely is—out of their house, because it's not only the price of power but also the price of groceries. It filters through.

Why are we doing this? Why are we doing this to these people? When you look at it, you have to say, 'What else is it doing?' It's dividing our communities—not down the middle—into the 90 per cent who are either furious or just angry and the 10 per cent who feel intimidated. It is driving out, from our nation, manufacturing. We are losing manufacturing—our plastics, our fertiliser and our glass—and other industries such as aluminium are just holding on by their fingernails, only with government subsidies.

In a time when we have 35,000 troops in Talisman Sabre from 19 countries, this is actually making us weaker. It is shelling out our capacity to defend ourselves in what is acknowledged by both sides of the chamber as the most precarious time since the Second World War. We have a duty to absolutely make sure we get our priorities right: the defence of our nation and the protection of the poor. When we say, 'Oh, well, it's going to bring the price of power down,' you know it hasn't. Here is your review: the power bill. It has been going through the roof, and we are told we are now at 42 per cent intermittence. They're not renewable; they're future landfill. They're the desecration of the landscape. The more intermittence, the higher the power bill, without a shadow of a doubt. No-one can argue against that correlation.

If there was virtue in this—I'll give one example—the government would underwrite the decommissioning and rehabilitation of the land at the time of obsolescence of wind towers and solar panels. They don't. Senator Murray Watt was very honest in his Senate committee when they said, 'Who's going to pay for this decommissioning?' and he said, 'That is an agreement that the farmer has to enter into with the proponent.' Andrew Dyer, who was the ombudsman appointed by Labor two years ago, said the cost of decommissioning one tower, if it's structurally sound, would be $600,000. If it's not structurally sound, it would be over $1½ million dollars. The farmers won't have that money. They'll be sitting there.

Do you know that now, under LPA guideline 2.8, I am not allowed to graze stock around them. I have to show my management plan to keep stock away from wind towers. I imagine it's because of microplastics and bisphenol A. You're not allowed to have them around solar panels due to cadmium and lead. This is nothing environmental. You pose this question, as you have to: qui bono—who benefits? If it's not our nation, if it's not manufacturing, if it's not the cost of living, if it's not the pensioners, if it's not rural Australia and if it doesn't change the weather, who benefits? Billionaires, both domestic and international, benefit. The thought that they would have a scheme underwritten by you, the taxpayer, with borrowed money from overseas, in secret agreements called capacity investment schemes so that you, as the Australian people, can't see the details—Who devised this? Who dreamt this up?—is amazing!

I tell the fourth estate: look under the bonnet on this! It's not an issue of whether you believe in climate change or not. It's about net zero. It's about how we're getting done over, and we have got to stop! There has got to be an epiphany, and it cannot wait. Every time—and I'm thinking of the person—you say to the lady who's been kicked out of that very poor house into her pretty poor car, 'You have to wait.' Wait for what? Us! We're on between $200,000 and $500,000 a year. Why has she got to wait for us? It's got to happen now!

I put this to the chamber. Of course, I can say it now because I'm not bound by cabinet solidarity; I acknowledge that. Maybe it was cowardly of me in the past; I acknowledge that. But I've got to do it now, and others are going to do it as well. I commend this bill to the House, and now I'll let the seconder speak.

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