Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I wonder whether people know that Liberal, Labor, Nationals and Greens climate policies and renewables subsidies are costing households $13 billion every year? That's $1,300 per household. I wonder whether Senator McAllister is aware of the growing anger within the parliamentary Labor Party towards new Labor's insane anti-coal position which is killing workers' jobs and killing Australian industry?

At least the new Labor Party, in abandoning blue-collar workers, abandoning small businesses, abandoning large employers in trade exposed industries, abandoning mine workers, abandoning rural communities, abandoning manufacturers and abandoning city and rural families is clear in its message.

I wonder what Mr Fitzgibbon from new Labor thinks about this disallowance motion? What about Senator Sterle? Senator Gallacher? Senator Farrell? These senators are trying to be true to their working roots yet find it increasingly difficult facing the unicorns who ride their rainbow coloured bikes to parliament in a vain attempt to mimic the virtue signalling yet hollow Greens. These senators try to put the 'u' back in Labor, vainly, and we support them. I've just acknowledged a quote from Mr Michael Ravbar, the head of the CFMEU in Queensland. He says the Labor Party is a 'creche for party hacks'. Labor is a creche for party hacks. It has lost touch with workers.

Next is the Greens. It's now day 352 since I last challenged Senator Waters to debate me, and she still won't debate me. It's day 352 since I asked her to provide the empirical scientific evidence for doing something about human produced carbon dioxide, and all she can do is shriek 'climate crisis'—no data, no facts. Here's what drives One Nation: facts, not slogans.

Senator McKenzie mentioned the New South Wales parliament lifting the ban on uranium mining. That was driven by Mark Latham from One Nation. Here are some facts: 39 per cent of electricity bills are due to climate policies that have driven $8 billion in private sector malinvestment, destabilising and destroying base-load power. These costs are the work of respected economist Dr Alan Moran, who used the government's own data and thus cannot be sensibly refuted. Energy-intensive industries and value-adding food and minerals processing are moving to countries with cheap energy like China, India and Asia, who use our high-quality clean coal to generate cheap power while the same power from our clean coal under Australian climate policies has a price three times as high thanks to Labor, the Liberals, the Nationals and the Greens.

Australia once had the world's cheapest electricity, yet now our prices are amongst the world's highest. Manufacturing in our country has dropped from 17 per cent of our national economy in the 1980s to now be just six per cent, and many hundreds of thousands of blue-collar worker jobs have been sent overseas. The Greens say we could be rebuilding manufacturing like China, who use coal, hydro and nuclear and have one-third of the cost for electricity because they don't have the climate policies and subsidies of the Greens, Labor, Liberals and Nationals.

As a kid, I lived in the bush. In my first year of high school, I cycled to school every day. We road past the Kurri Kurri aluminium smelter in the Hunter Valley, which was built there because of cheap, reliable, stable, secure and environmentally responsible coal-fired power in the Hunter. It's now shut due to climate policies, driving power prices to double what they were just 10 years ago. Gone are the jobs—kaput!

Climate policies are ravaging agriculture after stealing farmers' rights to use their own land thanks to the policies put in place by Prime Minister John Howard's and John Anderson's government. This is destroying food security and increasing food prices. High electricity prices are gutting manufacturing, gutting agriculture and gutting small and large businesses. Our nation's productive capacity, economic sovereignty and economic resilience are being decimated and turning our country from being independent to dependent on other nations.

Climate alarmists are pushing policies aimed at fundamentally decarbonising the economy from 2050. That means de-industrialising Australia. Such a radical change with severe consequences to lifestyles and livelihoods should be based on extraordinary evidence—empirical data from solid measurements with specified quantified impacts which must first justify fundamental change. High-cost policies need solid scientific evidence as justification. The policies' impacts must be specified before implementation and measured during implementation. None of this was done in this country. I'll discuss this next week. For now, I'll discuss some of the specifics of the Moran report's insights into electricity prices.

The government claims that the proportion of household electricity bills that is due to renewables is $90 a year. Dr Moran's report, which cannot be sensibly refuted because it includes the government's own information, says direct costs are $536 per household. The total costs per household are $1,300. The additional cost of climate policies on our power bills is not the 6½ per cent the government claims; it's 39 per cent. Renewables distort low-cost coal-based power and more than double the wholesale electricity price from $45.50 to $92.50. China and India use our clean coal to sell electricity at 8c a kilowatt. Australian electricity is three times that, at 25c a kilowatt hour. All Australians have a right to benefit from our rich natural resources. Australians need to know that the true cost of electricity would be $13 billion less per year if cheap, affordable, reliable coal production were not lumbered with policies that distort the market toward expensive and unreliable wind and solar. These renewables or intermittents destroy jobs, kill productive capacity and waste investment. As I said, Dr Moran uses the government's own data and can't be sensibly refuted. What he's also found out is that this data, although it's still available, is not easily found by the layman. It used to be consolidated—no longer. It's hidden so that people can't see the real cost of these intermittent energy sources that create artificially high electricity and energy prices, savage our living standards and undermine our economic resilience and competitiveness—and they are going to be needed during the COVID recovery.

Ironically, in the last 170 years we have got away from being at the whim of nature: famines, the impacts of climate and the impacts of weather. We've become independent of these. Now we're going back to weather-dependent wind and solar, and we've got $8 billion per year in private investment diverted to these inefficient destroyers of industry. After two decades, these generators still continue to receive subsidies. After 20 years with subsidies, renewables remain unviable and are a parasitic malinvestment in our energy systems. Why do I say parasitic? They kill their host—the people of Australia. Wind and solar have inherently high consumption of resources and very low energy density, which means they're even less efficient. A coal-fired power station needs 35 tonnes of steel per kilowatt hour generated. Wind requires 543 tonnes of steel per kilowatt hour generated. That's why wind is such an inherently high-cost item. Weather-dependent wind and solar will never move beyond being dependent, parasitic infants, and taxpayers will forever pay for their inherent deficiencies. Climate policies and renewables are a malinvestment in the economy. If the same money were invested in the real economy, it would increase productivity, jobs and health. For every subsidised so-called green-energy job, 2.2 jobs are lost elsewhere in the real economy or could have been created in the real economy with that same money. That money is wasted on subsidised green-energy jobs. They're parasitic and they're killing their host.

There has been a study by Dr Brian Fisher, the former head of the Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, using the government's model, which he has updated. His study of renewables showed that Labor's 50 per cent renewable energy target would cause Australia to lose income of $1.2 trillion between now and 2030. That's more than half of this year's gross domestic product. Basically, we'd be working for the next half a year and it would be wiped out in the next nine years—just from the Renewable Energy Target. Think about these facts. It would require an electricity price of $157 per megawatt hour, more than double what it was in 2016, plus—think about this, Labor Party—wages would be cut to 23 per cent below what they would have been and there would be 568,000 fewer jobs. The biggest falls would be in coal, oil and gas and in energy intensive industries and export offset industries. But the Liberal-National policy is to increase intermittents to 40 per cent above the current level, to 28 per cent, which is more than half of Labor's. That would also be devastating.

One Nation has zero intermittents, zero renewables and zero subsidies. That's because we are the party of the worker. We are the party of the investor and the party of small-business people. Labor is no longer the party of the worker. The Greens never were and the Liberal-National coalition never were. And the Queensland Premier? I ask you: who looks after Queenslanders when you have an absurd 50 per cent renewable policy? The Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, has committed to Queensland having a 50 per cent renewables and intermittents target. She sneers at the plight of coalminers, farmers and all Queenslanders who use electricity—all families who use electricity. Deb Frecklington, her opponent, commits Queensland to higher levels of intermittents. Senator Canavan spins like a wind turbine, at first a climate sceptic, then, in cabinet, a believer who spoke of the anti-coal need to cut carbon dioxide from human activity. Facing the exodus of voters from the Nationals, and finding himself outside cabinet, he started murmuring for coal.

The Liberal-National coalition is split into three groups: firstly, the 'Zimmerman wets', who want to embrace Greens policy and serve United Nations strategies to achieve UN goals; secondly, the 'true Liberals and Nationals', who want to return to serving Australia, a shrinking yet nonetheless admirable group containing people like Craig Kelly and Senators Rennick, Abetz and Fierravanti-Wells; and then we have the 'somersaulters', the third group, with members like Mr Barnaby Joyce and Senator Canavan, who say one thing before entering cabinet, say the opposite in cabinet and then, after leaving cabinet, meekly try to squeeze out pro-coal words. What to believe of this assorted combination?

We have additional costs coming onboard today. They were introduced in the lower house today, I believe. The clean energy finance corporations bill was introduced, with an extra billion dollars to upgrade transmission and grid security due to destabilising intermittent wind and solar sources. That's half the cost of a new coal-fired power station, and coal-fired power stations do not need stabilising, because their power, like hydro and nuclear power, is synchronous—it's stable.

What about the cost of the Howard Liberal-National government's stated desire to comply with the UN's Kyoto climate protocol in 1996 that led to the stealing of farmers' rights to use their land—the land that the farmers paid for? In 1996 in Canberra, the Liberal Prime Minister, the National Party Deputy Prime Minister and the Liberal environment minister, Senator Robert Hill, did a partnership deal with the Queensland National Party's Premier Borbidge and Ministers Littleproud and Hobbs. A Liberal-National consortium did a deal, called a 'partnership agreement'. Then Mr Howard and his government did a deal with Premier Beattie from the Labor Party, and then Premier Bligh. On that foundation, Annastacia Palaszczuk and Jackie Trad built their latest strangling of farmers' rights to use the land that those farmers bought and owned lawfully but cannot use. Why do Queensland's Premier and Labor Party remain silent on the theft of $1½ billion each year from Queensland's electricity users due to high power prices under the corporatised Queensland electricity supply?

What a shameful mess. What we need is to build a coal-fired power station. We are pleased the Liberal-National coalition are now supporting coal—at least in words and in a feasibility study. One Nation says build the damn thing now. Get on with it. Actions speak louder than words. We invite the Liberal-National coalition to review the facts on climate and to reverse all climate policy. Stop shrieking 'climate crisis' like the Greens. Stop all destruction of our nation's vital electricity. Get real, this disallowance motion— (Time expired)