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

Obviously, we are on the premise of regulation. There is never a place that needs more regulation and more staff than the absolute swindle which is intermittent power. Every time, it never ceases to amaze me. As we speak, we have the Chinese company BYD, or 'build your dreams'. They get carbon credits when they bring cars into Australia, and even though they've only sold 38,000 they've brought 51,000 in. I wonder why! It's obviously virtue. It's virtue. They say it's because of the expanding market. Well, it's not really expanding. What's expanding is the money they're putting in their bank from the Australian taxpayer. That is what is expanding, and this continues expanding into so many sections. The previous speaker clearly said that they had to increase the staff for all this regulation. I'm not surprised. You need a lot of work when you have a decreasing supply of electricity and increasing demand.

We have been absolutely done over with this swindle, which is premised on faux virtue. The idea in this chamber that we're going to change the climate—that we're going to do it here in Australia by ourselves—is remarkable. Actually, it's insane. When you look at it, what is this virtue actually doing? The reality is, in an attempt to keep a carbon dioxide reduction policy, we are relying on increasing the amount of intermittent power and maintaining the regulatory caveats on the vegetation on farmers' private land. This is putting up the price of electricity, hurting the farmers, hurting the poorest, taking away private property rights, pushing many small businesses to the wall, de-industrialising Australia, devastating our landscape in regional Australia and weakening our capacity to defend ourselves. That is an incredible policy you've got yourself there. That's a piece of genius that you've devised for our nation.

In an alternative universe, the minister comes in here and tells us that power prices are going down. I don't know. I just can't get it, because they're not going down. Is there a person who believes their power bill is getting cheaper? It's gone through the roof. Whether it's a pie shop, a hairdresser or the Tomago smelter, it's all the same. They're under the pump, with record insolvencies and companies leaving. Rio Tinto is a pretty smart organisation. If they honestly believed that, due to our electricity policy, our carbon dioxide policy, our power policy, there was this nirvana coming and power prices would be so cheap, do you think they'd be going? Do you think they're dumb? They've done the research. They've said, 'We've done the research on this. This country has gone completely off its head with its power policy, and we're leaving,' just as Alcoa in Kwinana is leaving, the plastic industry and the urea industry have gone and we're down to two oil refineries.

Don't you think that, if all these people thought that Australia had got it all together, they'd be coming here? Wouldn't they be lined up? They'd be buying industrial real estate across Australia to build their new factories, but, of course, they're not. They're leaving. They're just saying the nice words on the way out the door. For the people who are the poorest, the people who can't afford their power bill—some of them have been getting booted out of their houses. The cost of living has gone through the roof. Have you changed the weather? Is there a difference? Can someone point me to something—'This has changed: we're down to two cyclones a year,' or, 'That's changed: we've reduced the number of heatwaves,' or, 'It's rained a bit more, or a bit less'?

It's an all-encompassing thing. What you do is say 'climate change' and then, apparently, you're allowed to get away with anything. I went badly at the Melbourne Cup—climate change. I had an argument with my wife—climate change. I've lost my pet—climate change. You just throw it out there, and as you soon as it's said you're not allowed to argue against it; you've just got to accept it. It's a religion. If you don't believe the religion, you're a denier. You're not a believer. You've got to be a believer: 'I'm a believer!' I don't know what you do then—speak in tongues and dance with serpents? I don't know what happens next, but it's a remarkable type of cult we've got ourselves into here.

It would all be funny if it weren't for what's actually happened, if we go to the facts. Let's go to statistics 101. There's been a direct correlation between the increase in intermittent power—don't call them renewables. There's nothing renewable about them at all. They end up as landfill. You have to build new ones after 15 years. What do you think? Do you think they're made out of fairy dust? They're made of steel, composite plastics, copper and oil. They've got the whole box and dice of unrenewable things in them, so they're not renewable. Have you noticed that, as you increase the amount of intermittent power, there's a direct correlation with the increase in the price of electricity? Fascinating. Maybe it's just coincidental—it just happens to have happened—or maybe it's cause and effect. I'll go with the latter.

We're not allowed to say 'coal fired power'. It's a religion. The believers say you're not allowed to say 'coal fired power'. It's evil; don't mention it. But when we had coal fired power we had, comparatively, some of the cheapest power on the planet, and we had heavy industry here. Now that we've got rid of coal fired power, we've got some of the dearest electricity on the planet, comparatively, and industry is leaving. Is there a penny dropping here? Yet we are told that everything is going to get better. All those companies leaving Australia—they're just stupid. The fact that China is building one coal fired power station every four days—they're just stupid; they're wasting their money. They're stupid, those Chinese. They don't know what they're up to. They're just a superpower. The fact that the United States of America is out and now its industry is growing again—that's just coincidence, just crazy facts. The fact that India is turning things around—the world is stupid, except for Australia. We are the shining light, and we're on this singular crusade. If you step outside this building you will see the benevolence of our work in the great ark of heaven, which will change because we managed to send poor Australians into destitution. That is what we are doing.

The only beneficiaries of this lunacy are billionaires. Who actually makes the money? Where does the money go? Follow the money. You'll find very rich Australian billionaires and you'll find multinational companies. I'll tell you who some of those 'really concerned environmentalists' are that have been benefitting from providing us with intermittent power. It's BP, British Petroleum. As we all know, they're terribly concerned about the environment. It's PETROS, the Malaysian oil refineries, among the biggest polluters in the world—they're are building them. It's Chinese real estate companies and Nigerian billionaires. It's all of these people. They're just so worried about the climate in Australia. That's why they've got to do this.

We have also seen, unfortunately, a lack of capacity to defend our nation. To defend a nation, you need to have an industrial base. You need intelligence, you need an air force, an army and a navy, and you need industry. If a part of your plane flies off, you've got to replace it. You can't replace it if you don't have industry, because you have to rely on imported parts. We have to rely on imported everything because we don't make anything here anymore. Because we don't make anything here anymore, we're very vulnerable.

As people might have noticed recently, in the last couple of decades, we have a totalitarian superpower called communist China, which is becoming more and more powerful, exerting its influence and projecting power. These are the circumstances we now find ourselves in. Communist China's People's Liberation Army is vastly more powerful than Germany was in 1939, and our military is vastly less powerful than it was in 1939, yet we sit back and our No. 1 priority is coming up with a climate policy. We're going to show President Xi. You watch us, President Xi: we're changing the weather; you just watch us. You watch us, President Trump: we're going to change the weather. You watch us down here in Australia. We've got this under control. It's lunacy.

In the end what we'll have, because of these swindles, with money going into capacity investment schemes and secret agreements—they don't tell you what's in the Capacity Investment Scheme, even in the budget papers. It's commercial-in-confidence. They're not for publication; you can't see them. In the end, billionaires are collecting the dough, and you can't tell where your money is being spent. Isn't there something wrong with that? Are there other things you want to keep secret? You don't want to know who's getting how much money and how it was negotiated? Please, there wasn't a mate who might have said, 'I know the fellow'? They're not standard agreements; they all get varying amounts. Some people get a big kicker; some people get a little one.

In the end there's going to be a royal commission into this—absolutely, 100 per cent. If we've had royal commissions into ceiling insulation, spit hoods and robodebt, by gosh, we're going to have a royal commission into this one. And then people will go running left, right and centre, because they'll be asking: 'Who knew what, when? What was your relationship? How did that come about?' Then the energy regulator will be the least of your worries. That time is going to come because there is no way a future parliament is going to tolerate what inevitably leaks out and becomes apparent.

The problem we've also got is, of course, we're still complying with the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement, obviously, believes that you have to have net zero in the second half of the century. That's a bit of a problem because, first of all, it's impossible. That's a small part of it: it is not possible. The only reason we're getting to where we need to be is that, basically, we're locking up farmland. Even in my area, properties are being bought, the cattle come off and the trees go on, and that's it. We've created a problem with our power because we kept on shutting down our coal-fired power stations to replace them with intermittents, and the power price went up. That’s economics 101: if you reduce supply and the demand stays the same or increases, the price goes up.

Now, with our genius, we're doing it to farmland. And do you know what's going to happen to food prices? They're going to go up because you're reducing the capacity for us to produce food. I'm a farmer. Do you know where the premium market is for our food? It's overseas. Australia comes second. Our big market is overseas. You want us to produce less? Sure, we'll just make more money. But you'll pay more. That's where we'll make it up—you'll pay more. This is what we're doing to ourselves. There has to be an epiphany for what we're doing. You're getting swindled, you're getting ripped off and you've got secret agreements—the whole deal is dodgy.

I'll close on this. This is all about the environment; we're looking after the environment. Thirty-one per cent of New England and the Upper Hunter is going to be covered in intermittent power precincts—31 per cent. That's 400 square kilometres of solar panels. What that looks like, if you're driving from Newcastle to Tamworth, is 500 metres of solar panels on either side of the road all the way along. It's the equivalent of that. Don't you think there's something slightly odd about that? Isn't there something wrong? We will have 4,000 square kilometres of wind towers with transmission lines. In other areas, we're locking areas up, kicking off the cattle, planting trees and hoping that we evolve into a higher form of termite so we can feed ourselves in the future. This is insane. It's a cult. It's crazy. It's not premised on facts; it's premised on desires and on a faux virtue. It's protected by this belief that, if you get into a corner with an argument, just say the words 'climate change' and you're out—that is the get-home-free card.

It's got to be turned around. My part, for my nation, is to make sure that I annoy people as much as possible. It's to try and make sure that we look after this. If we're going to continue down this path, then, you see, that's exactly it—you're against a religion, and out the door they go, because they're believers. But I'm not.

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