Llew O'Brien (Wide Bay, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of Repeal Net Zero Bill 2025, brought forward by the member for New England, and I commend him for doing so. At the start, I'll say the obvious: climate change is real. With a global population of over eight billion people, obviously the industries that support them have an effect on climate change, and this is something that we need to manage as a government. But it's how we do that that counts, and I believe that we haven't got those settings right—not even close at the moment.

When we signed up to net zero, in 2021, we did so on the premise that the whole world was decarbonising and that the major emitters were going to take it seriously, and, four years on, it's obvious that that's not the case. China, the biggest emitter in the world, last year alone constructed 94 gigawatts of coal-fired power. It is mining coal at an unprecedented rate; it is not giving it up. India is also investing heavily in coal, and its targets under this agreement are so far out into the future that they're almost worthless. Russia is at war with Ukraine; its emissions are going up. It's building infrastructure to pipe gas into China. The US has started a formal process to get out of the agreement. Why? Because it's putting its people and its economy first, and that's what we need to do in Australia. But what are we doing in Australia? We have a government in Australia that is engaging in one of the greatest acts of economic self-sabotage in the history of the nation, pursuing 82 per cent wind and solar targets that are destroying rural and regional Australia. They're tearing our communities apart. They're pitting community member against community member. Sadly, in some cases, they're pitting family member against family member, and that is tragic. And for what? For the most expensive electricity in the world. A lot of our prime agricultural land is being carpeted with these Chinese solar panels. In the greatest act of hypocrisy our pristine, prime, beautiful forests are being mowed down in the name of environmentalism to construct wind turbines.

How did we get into this crazy space? We got into it because we had a prime minister who promised us cheap electricity. He promised us prosperity and jobs, and that has all been a total and utter mistruth. He promised us some sort of renewable energy superpower and that we'd have so much of an abundance of this electricity that we could break through the normal barriers of physics and economics and create an industry of green hydrogen. He promised we'd export this to the world, and it would be so fantastic! But what has happened? It has been a spectacular failure—in Gladstone, in the Hunter and in South Australia, and it's cost the taxpayer an absolute fortune.

The Prime Minister stood here in this very chamber when he was giving his second reading speech for the climate change bill and talked about this wonderful SunCable project from the Northern Territory that was going to have such vast amounts of renewable energy that we'd be exporting it to Asia. Well, within 18 months of saying that, what happened? It went into voluntary receivership; it's been downscaled, and now it has so many question marks over it that it's a joke. It's an absolute joke! I'll tell you what is real. What is real is the lives of business people who are trying to survive in this country, who are going insolvent at an incredible rate—33,000 of them since this transition to net zero began. It is crippling our productivity. It is seeing our manufacturing go offshore because we're not competitive. We have lost industries like our urea industry that is absolutely fundamental to agriculture. Our plastics industry and our nickel industry have gone offshore. Our heavy metal smeltering is on life support because it is captured in the safeguard mechanism. This is a nightmare that needs to stop.

Voting to stop this blind obsession with net zero doesn't mean you don't believe in climate change. It doesn't mean you're a good citizen. It just means that you are reassessing and looking at the world around us, our global environment, that is saying that this is not working. It's saying that you want to make Australia resilient as we go into an uncertain future; that's what it is saying. I commend this bill to the House.

See this speech in context