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

Last week, Australians witnessed a terrifying demonstration of where our future lies under this Labor-Greens government, which implemented policy that the Morrison government initiated. It's a future that does not include the right to free speech or even the right to hold an opinion which conflicts with the government's. Labor senator Michelle Ananda-Rajah used her position as the Deputy Chair of the Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy to impose her views on witnesses, the reverse of the committee process, which allows all opinions to be heard. From that testimony the truth shall emerge. The senator dismissed expert testimony from the Institute of Public Affairs with this comment:

The thing about science is it is contested until it is not. When consensus is arrived at, it is not contested anymore.

The senator has a PhD in artificial intelligence, has published 40 papers and should know better.

The United States National Academy of Sciences defines the scientific method as 'a process for developing and testing explanations of the world that relies on evidence, with the understanding that new evidence may revise or replace existing explanations'. There is no consensus provided for in that definition of the scientific method. Senators and witnesses who disputed the belief, based on the evidence, that humans are responsible for our changing climate were subjected to hostility, rudeness, smugness and arrogance unbefitting the Senate. The inquiry is a travesty of the Senate process. It's a waste of taxpayer money and is designed to justify legislation to censor opinions it does not like. The government does not get to shut down dissent, censor inconvenient truths and cancel the right to free speech. One Nation will fight, every inch of the way, your attempts to set the government up as the thought police of Australia. You will not turn our beloved country into communist China.