Barnaby Joyce (New England, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That all words after "whilst" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House calls on the Government to initiate a review of this Bill for any potential areas of conflict with other legislation, including but not limited to the Safeguard Mechanism".

I'd like to acknowledge that what we have got to understand is that—I heard the previous speaker, the member for Warringah. With all due respect, electric trucks are absolutely ridiculous. A Toyota Land Cruiser weighs a little less than three tonnes. One of those trucks has more than four tonnes of batteries. Of course that means its capacity, its range is not comparable to being able to deal with Australia. And you haven't got the roads, if you're fully loaded, to be able to take it on the number of axles they provide. It's just this mythical thing.

What I have put forward here is this: we've got to move away from the climate change department. One of the big issues, after all the work of bringing fuel into Australia, is it runs into a thing called the Safeguard Mechanism. The Safeguard Mechanism is precisely there to push the fuel back offshore again. So we're on both the clutch and the brake and also the accelerator all at the same time and wondering why the engine's not going well and why we're not going anywhere. What we have to do as we move this legislation is clearly look at other things that impede us from the greatest efficacy possible. The safeguard mechanism for the emissions of carbon dioxide over 100,000 tonnes is precisely that. If we go to electrification, then we will have a huge problem, because our electricity grid has been destroyed by our desire to somehow change the temperature.

There's this idea that Australia will change the climate. We actually, insanely, have a climate change department—a department with thousands of employees to change the climate. I don't know when you get to sack them if the climate hasn't changed appropriately. El Nino is coming. If we had efficacy, then I would want it stopped. That's the thing we should be doing. Stop it now so that it starts raining. People say, 'Well, that's an absurdity;' well, the whole department's an absurdity. If we go to electrification, we will go from the highest fuel prices to the highest electricity prices in the OECD. And the area with the greatest amounts of intermittent power is not renewable. That's just the nomenclature of those who want to rip you off. If you go to the place with the highest amount of intermittent power, it's South Australia. And guess what? It's got the highest price. It's the highest price in the country with highest price. And you want to strap your nation to that? If we talk about culture wars, there seems to be a culture war against the internal combustion engine. If you really don't believe them, go to the next election and say you want to ban internal combustion engines, and I'll see you in opposition. It will be quite simple.

We have to have an epiphany here. We have to start thinking about Australia and how to strengthen it. What is happening now in the Middle East is merely a minor play for the big one, which is the Taiwan crisis. When the Taiwan crisis happens, it won't just be fuel that shuts down; it'll be everything. President Xi says he's going to take Taiwan back by 2027. We live in 2026. We should have every minister on their pegs, saying what their plan is, saying how we're going to get alternate supplies and saying what the contingency plans are. What's happened with this is something that we should have been planning for at the start of the year. I mentioned at the start of the year in interviews what the biggest issue is for us: the potential of a Taiwan crisis. Why? Because of the restriction on supply lines and the calamitous effect that it could have on Australia. Well, I didn't get the predicament wrong; I just got the war wrong. The war ended up being in the Middle East. But that's just part 1.

This amendment talks to how we should look at what we're about to do, which I commend—in fact, I work with the government to do it, which I commend—but we've got to make sure that it doesn't start running into further obstacles the moment the fuel starts arriving in Australia. If we don't have fuel, then we don't have food. It's a pretty simple equation. If we don't have the reliability of fuel, then the first question people will ask in the country is: can I plant? And is the cost of planting so excessive that it's not worth planting, so should I reduce how much and reduce the risk? The next question will be: do we have fertiliser so that we get a fair return from planting? The next question will be: do I have security of fuel throughout the term of the crop? The last question will be: do I have the fuel to take the crop off, and do people have the fuel to take the crop away? That's whether it's carrots, barley, wheat or cattle. It doesn't matter. I don't think this nation has properly addressed that issue.

I heard from the minister for agriculture, Minister Collins, in the last sitting, and I did not get an answer that left me with any confidence whatsoever that the government had a plan or the foresight to see what is happening with regard to food security. Today, when you turn on the television, the issue they're talking about is food security. It's a ripple-through effect of the fuel crisis. The reality rather than the fantasy is that we're still using, and will continue to use in the long term, internal combustion engines. The reality is that you cannot move to electric vehicles, and to suggest that in the middle of a crisis is just oblivious to the circumstances that Australia is currently in. We've had electric vehicles for a very long time; they're called golf buggies. They've been around for a very, very long time. If there had been a buck in them, they would have expanded them. It's a wonderful thing called the marketplace. What we're trying to do is to legislate ourselves into alternative forms of energy—to just put aside all sense of physics and economics and believe we're going to arrive at this energy nirvana.

Today is the wake-up call. So what we should be doing, in this parliament, is this. We're on the way. We've got half of us that don't believe in net zero—great! The next step is to get out of the Paris accord, because that's just net zero with a French accent. And the next step after that is to just get to rid of the climate change department completely—remove it; get rid of it.

I'll tell you right now: if you want to get a cheer when you're out talking to a room, tell them you're going to get rid of the climate change department—that's the one they react to the best. They're way ahead of us. They're vastly more enlightened and vastly more perceptive about trying to get this place back to a sense of reality and away from the fantasy that we currently live in because certain people, who have very loud voices and very small constituencies, take you out to dinner on the weekend. If you just forget about them and start thinking about the people you meet at the bowling club, you're probably going to go a lot better electorally.

What we have to do is: be honest, and understand, first and foremost, that we need fuel. Where are you going to get it from? And the legislation talks to that. In very simple terms, there is a spot market out there. It's just that it's the price you want to pay. And people aren't really concerned, to be quite frank, about the price going up. Say you're bringing in a tanker—and the biggest tanker is about 250 million litres, so let's say you're bringing in that. So, if you're making a play for a hundred million litres at—I don't know—$2.20, it's 220 million litres that you're out there for. And you're terrified of downside risk. So the best thing is, if you can, to get yourself a cap-and-collar arrangement and offload your risk to someone else. But no-one's going to take that risk at the moment, so there's a role for the government to come in and take that risk. Now, if you want to have a discussion later on about a cap arrangement, I think that's a viable thing to have a discussion about.

With that, when they say, 'Oh, well, this is going to help the miners,' that just shows no understanding. Miners are on contract; they go on contract for megalitre buys. It's not that there's an option out there with magical fuel. There's a financial instrument and that offloads their risk. So they don't care about the spot market.

This is talking about securing up the spot market, which is vitally important. If we don't do that, it's going to exacerbate the problem.

I might say that, from talking to independent distributors before coming into this chamber, they still don't have access to product; there are legal issues, where it can't be delivered. But their frustration is that they hear us, with this, saying, 'Oh, well, this will fix it.' I might say, in a sobering form, 'No, it won't.' This assists. It doesn't fix it. The problem is still there, and it's there in an incredibly substantive way. We have to be able to acknowledge that. Tomorrow I'll have some of those independents in the building. They're having a meeting with the energy minister. The Labor Party is the government, so that's where they've got to go; that's who they've got to meet. And then, later on, they'll be meeting in the Treasurer's office. I think it's incredibly important that the government understands how this is working on the ground in regional areas, because that informs the decision process. If we have an informed decision process, we cannot get ourselves out of the crisis but we can mitigate it.

The longer-term plan, though, has to be for Australia to have a wake-up call and clearly understand that you are not going to change the weather. Forget it. That's fantasy. I might be an apostate as to the whims of this chamber, but it is absolute fantasy. You are not going to change the weather. You're not going to make it hotter. You're not going to make it cooler. You're not going to make it windier. You're not going to make it drier. You're not going to make it wetter. But you will make Australians poorer; you will do that. And you will put our country at risk; you will do that. And you will spend, absolutely, over 10 years, hundreds of billions of dollars, trying to achieve the impossible; you will do that. The only way we can stop doing that is to get rid of the department. That's its whole purpose. Its whole modus operandi is to change the climate, as absurd as that idea is—that a department on the continent of Australia can change the weather.

So I put forward this amendment. It just asks for you to consider. If you don't consider, well, I suppose then you're ignorant to the facts. And if you don't consider, it means generally that you know what needs what is going to be said and you don't want it to be heard. I move:

That all words after "whilst" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House calls on the Government to initiate a review of this Bill for any potential areas of conflict with other legislation, including but not limited to the Safeguard Mechanism".

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