Sam McMahon (NT, Country Liberal Party) | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this matter of urgency from the Greens. As always, the Greens overexaggerate on climate change for their selfish political purposes. It is disgraceful, absolutely disgraceful, to politicise recent natural disasters and tragedies, trying to score political points on the back of human misery and suffering. Shame on you. Shame on you for doing that. That is just terrible.

Let's look at some of the claims that the Greens are trying to push. They're claiming that climate change has caused the flooding that we have seen recently in eastern Australia. These claims simply do not stack up. The CSIRO, in their Climate change in Australia report, showed that rainfall extremes in northern New South Wales have been only slightly above average, and in South-East Queensland they have been average. We have other rainfall records to back this up. The Brisbane River, for example, experienced a major flood last month, but there have been 10 floods that have been greater over the past 150 years. In fact, dangerous floods have occurred in every Australian state over the last 150 years. We can name some of them: in 1852, Gundagai in New South Wales; in 1916, Clermont in Queensland; in 1934, Melbourne; in 1893, Ipswich, Queensland; and, in 1927, Brisbane, Cairns, and Townsville in Queensland. That 1927 flood caused 47 deaths, destroyed 16 homes and caused an estimated 300,000 pounds in damages. This was at a time when our population and the value of property destroyed were far lower than they are today. Can you imagine the effects of that flood today? These floods go back over 100 years. These are not a new phenomenon, as the Greens would have you believe, Madam Acting Deputy President.

Let's talk about bushfires. The CSIRO admit that there is no evidence linking climate change with bushfires at this stage. As they state in their Climate change in Australia report:

… no studies explicitly attributing the Australian increase in fire weather to climate change have been performed at this time.

Yet the Greens, shockingly, try to blame government policies for the deaths and destruction of property in fires.

All these events are tragedies. It's a tragedy for someone to lose their life, their home, their livestock or their pets in a flood or a fire, and we shouldn't be politicising and trying to score cheap points on the back of these tragedies. But not all tragedies have an actual human cause—someone you can point the finger at and say, 'You did this.' The Greens try to. They point to the Prime Minister and say, 'You did this.' That is just absolutely ridiculous. These are natural weather events. We've been having floods, fires, tsunamis, hurricanes and cyclones for as long as we've got records, and we can even point to these events happening back before we had records.

Even if the Greens' outrageous claims were true—they're absolutely not true, but let's pretend for a second that they're true—their attempts to pin the blame on Australia for these outcomes would be completely ridiculous and absurd. Let's have a look at what Australia does produce. We produce six per cent of the world's coal, 3.7 per cent of the world's gas and 0.6 per cent of the world's oil. Even if Australia were to shut down all our coal, oil and gas tomorrow, it would make no difference to the temperature of the globe or to any of the natural disasters that the Greens are trying to pin on it.

If we look at carbon dioxide emissions by country, China accounts for 29 per cent; the USA, 14 per cent; India, seven per cent; Russia, 4.5 per cent; Japan, 3.4 per cent; Germany, two per cent; and Australia, 1.1 per cent. In 2020, China emitted greenhouse gases equivalent to 13.8 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. By comparison, Australia emitted the equivalent of 512 megatonnes. That's roughly one twenty-seventh of China's emissions. In 2021, China was running 1,058 coal-fired power plants. That is more than half the world's capacity. China's emissions have more than tripled over the previous three decades. They emit more greenhouse gas than the entire developed world combined. Yet the Greens want us to wreck our economy and our way of life for the massive 1.1 per cent that we contribute.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't do our bit in reducing all types of pollution, and I'm not just concerned about global warming and climate change. We've got a lot of other things to worry about, such as plastics in our ocean. Maybe the Greens could show a little bit of care for our oceans instead of banging on about what Australia does to the world's climate. I can tell you that our little millifluff of a percentage of emissions is not going to do a damn thing—even if we cut it to zero—to the effects of greenhouse gases on the world's climate.

As we can see from what's happening in Europe today, if Australia were to stop mining coal, oil and gas then we would only strengthen countries like Russia that threaten to bully, and are invading and killing, their neighbours. Europe is currently paying Russia more than $1 billion a day for coal, oil and gas. Europe has reduced its own gas production by 30 per cent over the past decade, while its consumption has decreased by less than 13 per cent. Europe has more gas reserves than Australia, so its extra reliance on Russian gas is completely self-inflicted. This is why, when Ukraine asked us for help to fight Putin, they asked us to send coal, not solar panels.

Europe's dependence on Russian gas is partly because it has allowed Russian funding of anti-fossil-fuel campaigns to remain unchecked. We have a lot of evidence that Russian oligarchs are funding some of the anti-fossil-fuel campaigners and the activist groups that are campaigning—certainly overseas and even right here in Australia. Isn't it ironic that the Greens have a slightly well-hidden dirty little secret? Their campaigns are actually helped by the funding Putin provides to anti-fossil-fuel organisations. That's right—funded by Russia, with love!

Senator Whish-Wilson also talked about food. Well, if we look at food security, products of the oil and gas industries account for approximately 45 per cent of the world's food production. We all know that urea, which is part of the composition of most of the fertilisers that we use in this world, comes from the oil and gas industry, which they want to stop. They want to stop this industry with 45 per cent of the world food production. So the Greens not only want us to freeze to death they also want us to starve to death. This will hurt the world's poorest nations.