Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The CSIRO continues to consolidate their image as a laughingstock irrelevancy or an environmental prostitute. They have commissioned an assessment of ethanol by the greenhouse gas emissions office—'assess' being a code word for 'destroy' ethanol. They reported that ethanol will increase CO2 in the atmosphere. That's a good trick when, of course petrol goes up and stays up but ethanol goes up and the grain on the sugar cane pulls it back down the next year. So it's a pretty good outcome. Twenty-three of the 24 in the American library of parliament—their parliament is called the United States House of Representatives—says it decreases dramatically the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere.

They said that dugong numbers are dropping by half, which is quite a flagrant lie. What happened in the southern half of the Great Barrier Reef, which is what they quoted, is that their numbers had dropped in half but in the northern half they had doubled in numbers. So that was a positive lie.

They then brought out a publication which said there were only 45,000 hectares of land available for irrigation in North Queensland. Of course, current reports delineate 350,000 hectares! (Time expired)