High Speed Rail! It’s a great slogan for politicians in election campaigns, but it just doesn’t work for Australia.
Our cities are too small, the distances too long and geography too complex to build it cheaply enough.
Our money is much better spent on other infrastructure like dams, power stations and a national rail circuit that’s up to scratch.
Transcript
As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I speak to the High Speed Rail Authority Bill 2022—or, as I prefer to call it, the ‘elect Chris Minns as New South Wales Premier bill’. It’s not a coincidence that this bill provides for the national high-speed rail network proposal to start with just one section: between Sydney and Newcastle—just in time for the New South Wales state election in the coming March. Oh, the photo opportunities and announcements! I can see them now—for example, ‘Vote Labor and we will get you to work in 40 minutes.’ What dishonesty. What treachery.
I appreciate that that the Central Coast and Hunter are now dormitory suburbs of Sydney. Every day, more than 100,000 residents use rail and road on their daily trek to Sydney for work. High-speed would be a wonderful way to make that trip. One problem with making that promise is that high-speed rail on that route is never going to happen. It’s impossible. Here’s why. The route consist of mountain ranges, massive sandstone cliffs and waterways. Unless the High Speed Authority sprinkles magic dust, there is no way it will make a straight, flat track with the solid foundations necessary to sustain high-speed rail through the Hawksbury, Central Coast and Lower Hunter.
The current discussion involves sending high-speed rail along the existing alignment through the Central Coast, through the Gosford waterfront, through residential areas to Wyong and then via YE into the lower Hunter. The area’s geography makes any other route almost impossible, at least without substantial environmental impact, meaning massive, long tunnels and cuttings through national parks and equally long and heavily engineered bridges across the frequent waterways and soft ground.
Anything can be done at a cost, although the cost here will ensure a white elephant for taxpayers that will never recover the investment. I shudder to think how much the tickets will cost, certainly more than working families can afford, the families who are being targeted with this false, deceptive promise.
While Australia does need a modern rail network connecting our capital cities, airports and major ports, high-speed rail is not the answer. The federal government last examined the possibility of building a 1,748-kilometre high-speed rail link from Brisbane to Melbourne in 2013, when the cost was estimated at $114 billion, with the Sydney-to-Newcastle section costed at $17.9 billion. At that time, by the way, the Inland Rail was costed at $4 billion. It’s now $20 billion. That’s five times higher. So I would expect this same inaccuracy factor would apply to the fast rail, costing out the Sydney-to-Hunter section alone at $90 billion in today’s dollars.
The Grattan Institute has found high-speed rail projects have little chance of passing the cost-benefit test based on the typical discount rate used for transport infrastructure of about seven per cent. Marion Terrill, the current director of the Grattan Institute’s Transport and City Program, has said:
Australia is just not suited to high-speed rail because our cities are too small and too far apart.
Too small means the passenger volume will not be sufficient to justify the capital expenditure, leading to prohibitive fares or massive government subsidies—or, most likely, both.
To illustrate this point, when New South Wales XPT trains were purchased in 1982, the intention was to create fast rail in New South Wales. The XPTs are designed to travel at just 150 kilometres per hour. So what stopped fast rail at that time was the inability to build a track capable of supporting those speeds. This is essential for safety and reliability. Our rail lines curve around too much. The Great Dividing Range provides serious hurdles to fast rail, and our waterways along the coast complicate the flat sections that we do have. For clarity, fast rail is generally speeds up to 150 kilometres per hour. High-speed rail is 250 kilometres per hour to 300 kilometres per hour. Fast rail requires entirely different and substantially more expensive rolling stock and track.
It may be feasible with a large government investment to upgrade existing rail lines on the Sydney-to-Hunter route to travel express services at fast-rail pace rather than high-speed rail pace. One Nation would strongly support immediate feasibility studies on upgrading the Sydney-to-Hunter line to fast rail since New South Wales already has the rolling stock.
Senator McKenzie will be moving an amendment to this bill that will introduce Productivity Commission oversight of proposals and a transparent reporting system. If this amendment is passed, this bill will gain the checks and balances it should have had all along, and One Nation will support it. Without those checks and balances, One Nation will oppose this bill. We have one flag, we are one community, we are one nation, and we don’t lie for any reason—certainly not to the public to get votes.
The National Anti Corruption Commission (NACC) has passed Parliament and will be established next year.
So what’s covered by the NACC and what is One Nation’s view on these issues? I spoke on this in Parliament this week.
Something to tackle corruption is long overdue, we’re looking forward to having this body up and running and fine tuning it so that corruption is punished.
Transcript
As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I support the National Anti-Corruption Commission Bill 2022. Shoddy governance is Australia’s greatest problem and biggest threat. The absence of data in making policies and legislation—some parties go to great lengths to avoid data and substitute emotion. That is partly corruption, but this bill that we are discussing today goes to real corruption, illegal corruption.
Initially I thought parliament contained the procedures for self-accountability. After two years, I realised I was wrong. Then I started participating enthusiastically in presentations and discussions in this building and outside, around a national crime and corruption commission. I thank that many people I listened to—lawyers, judges, former judges and everyday Australians concerned about corruption. I appreciate the conversations that I had with former senator Bill Heffernan. I realised when I spoke out about the fact that we need to have a commission in place to provide oversight of four main groups: federal members of parliament, federal bureaucrats and public servants, federal judges and federal police.
Now I turn to the government’s proposal. For too long corruption in government has been almost impossible to deal with because current protections are totally inadequate. Each state has a body to deal with corruption at the state level of government. All the state bodies, however, face jurisdictional and evidential hurdles. Whistleblower protections, particularly for private-sector whistleblowers, have failed to provide assumed protections. In recent years, many whistleblowers have had their lives and/or careers publicly and privately trashed—destroyed. Some have faced criminal charges or been destroyed financially through civil actions.
Integrity as an expected attribute of those in public office has been invisible and left to chance. That lack of integrity destroys the people’s trust in the governance of this country. This bill, when passed with appropriate amendments, will go a long way towards setting up a workable scheme, ensuring that integrity becomes a fundamental feature of our legislative and executive arms of government.
To get this bill right, a number of issues need to be addressed through internal or external amendment. One thing this bill does not address is third-party corrupt conduct, where the person being dealt with is an otherwise innocent public official dragged unknowingly into a circle of corruption. This is a scenario included within the jurisdictions of most state anticorruption bodies, except those of Tasmania and Western Australia. To be comprehensive, the bill must include this scenario to ensure that corruption, even involving innocent public officers, can still be investigated for corruption.
It’s important to understand that this bill is not designed to be purely or only punitive. It’s much more than that. It’s designed to get to the root cause of corrupt processes, practices and systems, to rectify, eliminate and prevent corruption and to systematically do that and systematically prevent corruption. This provision will assist in identifying relationships vulnerable to abuse and exploitation so that processes may be introduced to provide effective risk management, oversight and accountability. This will be an alternative to relying on the ability to satisfy the restrictive requirements of proving crime beyond reasonable doubt. That’s highly restrictive. We need better than that. Another power that should be clarified in the bill is the commission’s power to commence investigation of its own volition, without being reliant on external referrals from other agencies and individuals. This clarification would ensure that the source of complaints or information did not limit the full ambit of justification for investigations.
The issue of public hearings has challenged those in favour generally of establishing this commission. It has been suggested that holding public hearings may expose a person to vilification of their reputation, and potentially there may be insufficient evidence to establish an offence. People are worried that this will be used as a mechanism to turn into unjustifiable political witch-hunts, as we’ve seen in some of the states. This was one of my concerns, and it was the reason for my rejection of the bill in its earlier form. To address this, the bill indicates that hearings may be held in private unless the commissioner is satisfied that exceptional circumstances—exceptional circumstances, as it says in the bill—justify holding the hearing in public and it’s in the public interest to do so. The phrase ‘exceptional circumstances’, if included in the bill, would make it virtually impossible to hold public hearings, as it would require a court to determine whether circumstances are in fact exceptional. That’s a lawyer fest for sure. The removal of the requirement for exceptional circumstances is essential, and there are proposed amendments before the Senate that will fix this problem. I support these amendments. It would be appropriate that, if a public hearing were held, the commissioner or a deputy commissioner preside, because they are legally qualified to deal with the more obvious legal issues.
Another concern raised with me is the composition of the proposed parliamentary joint committee, where the chair is required to be a member of the government. This raises questions on the independence of the joint committee. A better solution may be that the chair should not be a member of a political party forming government or should at least be a person enjoying bipartisan support of the committee. It’s important that an extensive whistleblower protection authority be established to ensure protection for genuine disclosures. The government assures me that the introduction of such an authority is imminent and an essential supportive element of this bill’s operation.
Next, I raise what Senator Bill Heffernan has raised with me in extensive personal discussions, as well as senior judges and practitioners of the law. What’s missing from this bill is the jurisdiction to overview the misconduct and actions of the judiciary. This option is desperately needed, and there is information showing that this jurisdiction has been overlooked for far too long. It needs to be included—it must be included. It would be welcome to think that our judges are all free from human weaknesses, but they’re human. In practice, it’s not a realistic conclusion that they are free from human weaknesses. Judges are human and susceptible to the human frailties that may lead to misconduct in their offices. We know that. The judiciary must have a mechanism that provides independent review of the conduct of its members.
I look forward to the development of a bill to cover judges and senior police and associated amendments to strengthen the safeguards designed to protect our society from evildoers hiding behind public office—a bill the government has flagged with us. The Australian public deserves protection and reassurance. The people deserve integrity. To be effective, government must be trusted. We do not have trust in governance at the moment, but that’s what we need. We have one flag above this building, one flag for the nation. We are one community. We are one nation. And we support the integrity of our political representatives and public officers whose duty is one of service to the people.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/nGEoc7BChOc/0.jpg360480Sheenagh Langdonhttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSheenagh Langdon2022-12-01 13:48:112022-12-01 13:48:16Wrap up of the National Anti Corruption Commission
Another party is in Government but it’s still the same old protection racket being run for the banks.
Whether it’s bail-in, regional branch closures or restricting cash, Anthony Albanese’s Labor Government is continuing the Liberal party’s tradition of running protection for the big banks.
Transcript
It seems Stephen Jones is to the Labor Party as Josh Frydenberg was to the Liberals: the bank’s man in the government.
Whether it’s defending the right of the banks to bail in the cash in your account; whether it’s turning a blind eye to banks closing their rural bank branches, which has increased this year under Minister Jones; whether it’s allowing the King’s currency to be shunned so the banks can force everyone onto electronic banking, with every transaction helping bank profits and every sale providing a data- and profit-rich environment for the banks; or whether, as it is today, it’s letting banking executives off the hook for egregious behaviour, that should be criminal.
These hideous, inhuman banking crimes were brought to light during the Senate’s Select Committee on Lending to Primary Production Customers in 2017, an inquiry that Senator Pauline Hanson got and that I chaired.
Four years later, not one of those victims has been compensated nor a banker prosecuted. Minister Chalmers is protecting the banks over the best interests of the people.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/Oyv6RguEW-U/hqdefault.jpg360480Sheenagh Langdonhttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSheenagh Langdon2022-12-01 13:06:542022-12-01 13:07:51Liberal/Labor running a protection racket for the banks
If you know a 16 or 17 year old send this video to them.
To you, 16/17 year old, don’t worry about protesting the end of the world. Focus on having fun, hanging out with your friends and getting your P plates.
We adults wish we had more time to do that.
Transcript
This is my message to our 16- and 17-year-old Australians. You can okay boomer me as much as you want. I’ll happily cop it. Yet, as someone who is 67 and grey haired, I want to let you in on a little life secret. The Greens over here want you to think voting makes you an adult. It’s a trap. It’s something that no one here has really mentioned, but I remember that when I was your age you really don’t want to be an adult yet. Trust me, it kind of sucks and it’s hard.
The Greens are adults. Listening to their speeches, do they seem like happy people? Adults have lots of bills: car rego bills, electricity bills, water bills, gas bills, car insurance bills, private health bills, dental bills, phone bills and more. You might even have to start paying for your own Netflix. Then you have to go to work everyday, on repeat, daily, for 40 years until you retire or die. It’s 9 am to 5 pm—at least!—in an office. It’s up early before the sun rises if you’re a tradie. Don’t forget to do all your laundry in between as well. Then, if you work really hard and get a good job, the government will start stealing 33 cents out of every dollar you earn and waste it on something. These are just some of the responsibilities that come with being an adult.
As fun as I’m sure all this sounds, there’s much more. These are just some of the responsibilities that come with voting. They will all come more quickly than you think, and you will be voting sooner than you realise. Until then, just focus on finishing school or choosing a trade. Don’t listen to the people saying that you need to protest or the world will end. It won’t. For decades we’ve been told the lie that the world will end in five years or maybe 10 years. Hang out with your friends. Just have fun and practise to get your P-plates. You’ll soon have plenty of time to protest and vote and do all the boring stuff that comes with being an adult. It will be sooner than you think—much sooner than you think.
It feels like everywhere you turn politics is mixing with sports. Is it too much to ask that sports celebrities be good at the game they are playing?
When you get down into the details of their grandstanding it never stacks up. Just play the game and do your team proud, Australia already hears enough of the politics.
Transcript
The Australian netball team rejected an offer of sponsorship from Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting because they refused to wear their logo. Who is this company our netballers rejected? Hancock Prospecting grew into one of Australia’s largest companies on the strength of their Roy Hill iron ore mine. Iron ore is still their largest product—Hancock mines coal as well. Since the Greens seem to be ignorant of metallurgy, let me educate you lot: the only way to make steel is using coal to heat iron ore. The Greens talk about green steel as an alternative—it’s not. Green steel is so brittle it’s unusable. There’s no realistic chance of green steel ever being used to replace coal-fired steel. Green steel does have a role as a photo opportunity to sustain the green steel lie designed to destroy the coal and steel industries for whatever visible reason the Greens advocate.
Australian netballers rejected steel. Senator McKim’s motion is rejecting steel. I hope that all those who feel as Senator McKim does go home tonight and rip out their steel stoves, turn off their steel fridges, throw away their steel microwaves, their cutlery, their knives, their saucepans—you get the idea. How will Senator McKim and his steel haters get home? Not in a car or even an electric vehicle. Those are made from steel and other products made with coal and hydrocarbon fuels. These other products include aluminium, glass, fibreglass and plastic. They can’t travel in a train, bus, cycle or scooter—more steel, more oil. Walking home is, of course, an option—just avoid steel-capped work boots or any boots made with steel tools. The hypocrisy in this motion is breathtaking!
Hancock Prospecting enjoys strong relations with the local Aboriginal communities, who benefited over the last seven years from mining royalties totalling $300 million. We have one flag, we are one community, we are one nation—coal-powered and steel-built thanks to miners.
The Earth simply doesn’t have enough of the rare earth materials used in batteries and net-zero products to reach net-zero.
That’s even when you take into account the materials gained from strip mining the ocean floor and covering the surrounding ecosystem in silt.
One Nation supports real environmental protection, not the environmental destruction the UN net-zero is pushing.
Transcript
Unreliable, weather-dependent solar and wind power has put a price tag on our oceans. The phrase ‘blue economy’ is used to soften the ugly truth that, to achieve Australia’s transition to net zero, the world’s oceans must be strip-mined for rare-earth minerals. Batteries, solar panels and wind turbines are produced in China, in part using materials that companies, mostly Chinese, mine from the sea floor. Polymetallic nodules needed for solar panels, wind turbines and batteries lay along active volcanic rifts mostly found on the seabed. Giant vacuums suck up the seabed ecosystem to bury and choke the surrounding area in a thick layer of silt. Animals, eggs, sediment, plants—everything is taken off the seabed.
A Greenpeace research fellow, distressed with what was being done, said:
In all cases, seabed mining will, by its very nature, destroy species and habitats within the mining zones. There is no justification for a ‘gold rush’ to mine the seabed …
International waters, particularly in the Pacific, contain more value than the combined mineral wealth of Earth’s continents.
The Pacific is ground zero for this green rush, with China holding the majority of licences that the United Nations International Seabed Authority handed out. The UN International Seabed Authority supports undersea mining because it aligns with the UN’s 2030 so-called—and bogus— Sustainable Development Goals. The former head of the Office of Environmental Management and Mineral Resources at the UN International Seabed Authority is on record saying that the UN International Seabed Authority is ‘not fit to regulate any activity in international waters’ in part due to a perceived conflict of interest with mining giants. Corporations are in control, and, on behalf of those corporations, climate warriors are destroying everything they touch. Explain that to our children. We are one community, we are one nation, and we want our oceans protected from crazy climate warriors.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/LGjGLEdifSo/hqdefault.jpg360480Sheenagh Langdonhttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSheenagh Langdon2022-12-01 09:17:552022-12-01 09:18:05Net-Zero means strip mining the sea floor for rare earths
Labor’s much-hyped goal of net zero and electric vehicles for 2050 will run out of charge between 2025 and 2030, when lithium supplies are predicted to dry up.
No-one is looking at the harm these electric vehicles cause out of sight in the Third World or asking why they still have a social licence, given that most of them source raw materials on the back of child slave labour either.
You can have your electric vehicles, I’ll keep my turbo-diesel and tow my trailer as far as I like.
Transcript
As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia I speak to the Treasury Laws Amendment (Electric Car Discount) Bill 2022. The history of climate change and related energy bills is replete with terrible governance, shoddy governance, deceitful governance. There have been genuine errors made, there have been decisions taken on greed and self-interest, contradicting the science, and now we have inappropriate market manipulation from a cynical, meddling government. This bill is designed to force the uptake of electric vehicles. What hubris, what deceit—and who pays? As always, the people are paying.
How can the Albanese government ignore the critical shortage of minerals essential to producing this many electric vehicles? Lithium has been a global arms race fought between electric vehicles and Labor’s other loves: batteries, solar panels and wind turbines. There’s not enough lithium on earth for one of these follies, let alone all four. Stuart Crow, chair of Lake Resources, said:
There simply isn’t going to be enough lithium on the face of the planet, regardless of who expands and who delivers, it just won’t be there.
So what’s the government’s plan to handle the lithium shortage in the electronics industry as net zero sucks up supply of cobalt, lithium and copper? Demand inflation will force these resources up in price over the next few years. How’s the government going to explain to citizens why their phones, laptops and household goods have been made unaffordable from so-called sustainable, green technologies? By the way, have you noticed how United Nations World Economic Forum sustainability programs can exist only with subsidies, meaning they’re not sustainable?
Back to the point, the engineering boundaries are real, and wishy-washy responses about finding new solutions don’t work when the best solution, lithium, is being wasted on the vanity of net zero. Labor’s much-hyped goal of net zero for 2050 will run out of charge between 2025 and 2030, when lithium supplies are predicted to dry up. This shortage is already manifested in mineral prices. In 2020 lithium was $6,000 per tonne. Today, what is it? I’ll tell you: it’s sitting around $78,000 per time, 13 times higher. Everything this precious resource is being wasted on will be sitting in landfill before 2050. I say it again: everything this precious resource is being wasted on will be sitting in landfill, buried before 2050. Every wind turbine, every solar panel, every big battery, every home battery—all of it rotting while the earth and its oceans are torn apart to feed the monstrous dream of net zero through the strip mining of the seabed for rare earth minerals that are necessary for the production of these follies.
Even electric vehicle manufacturers admit to being in trouble. The World Economic Forum, whose policies seem to find their way into Australian legislation, thinks we need five billion electric vehicles to achieve net zero. That’s not five billion through to 2050; that is five billion every five to 10 years for ever. No wonder you’re looking startled; this is news to most people in this room. The reason electric vehicles are so damn expensive is that, in manufacturing electric vehicles, they are resource and energy hogs. They are resource guzzlers with a huge environmental footprint, far greater than petrol and diesel cars. These price hikes, which have already started, are set to push almost all purely electric vehicles beyond the luxury car threshold required to qualify for Labor’s amendment to the Fringe Benefits Tax Assessment Act.
After the amendment moved by the Greens and Senator Pocock goes through, in 2025 hybrids will no longer be included in the bill. Price inflation will ensure not much else will be either. When President Biden gave a $7,000 subsidy, the first thing that happened? Car manufacturers put up their prices by $7,000. Subsidies make things dearer, not cheaper. They shift the price label but not the affordability. Perhaps some cheaper EVs that are made in China and that may or may not still be working in 2030 will benefit.
Labor could, of course, raise the threshold, but at what point do we say that big business is being given a subsidy from working Australians to buy luxury vehicles? Our European friends are a decade ahead of us in this madness. They’ve dismissed policies like this as expensive, wasteful and counterproductive. Their conclusion is that government interference benefits rich companies at the expense of natural market competition. It’s why German finance minister Christian Lindner said:
We simply cannot afford misguided subsidies anymore. These cars have so far been subsidised over their lifetime with up to 20,000 euros, even for top earners. That’s too much. We can save billions there, which we can use more sensibly.
Germans are saying this.
This bill for luxury foreign electric vehicles is designed to fix a number on Labor’s spreadsheet of carbon dioxide output. It’s not to assist a transition to electric vehicles for the general public. The fastest rise in product quality occurred when electric vehicles were forced to compete on merit against their oil and gas hydrocarbon fuelled betters. It was only then, when the customer was king, that their price came down. Their quality went up and their range increased slightly. When European governments handed the electric vehicle market billions in subsidies, car manufacturers grew fat and lazy. They took the money, slacked off on development and raised their prices knowing that public money would cover the difference. This is transferring wealth from taxpayers to electric vehicle manufacturers.
Labor’s bill is more of the same failed economics that fundamentally misunderstands what drives success. Given the price dynamics at play, if anything this bill penalises full electric vehicles and preferences hybrids. At the same time hybrids begin to win the consumer war, this government’s net-zero policies are pushing up the price of fuel and leaving every car owner worse off. We’re quickly reaching a point where car ownership will become a rare privilege that won’t impact at all anyone in this chamber, yet it will make the lives of everyday Australians an intolerable misery. As Norway, the world’s premier electric vehicle buyer, has stated, they want to reduce individual car ownership and see their population walk or catch public transport. The United Nations World Economic Forum EV policy is not about having different cars; it’s about no cars—no cars. Good luck telling Australian tradies that, but that’s what will happen.
These EVs have no resale value because they tend to be sold when the batteries are cooked. If we’re talking about sustainability, electric vehicles are on a swift path to landfill, unlike conventional cars that have many lives and many owners. To get electricity consumption down in order to improve range, EVs are made of composite materials, aluminium and plastics. Most of the steel in the subframe is needed to hold the extra weight of the battery. Recycling is, of course, possible, although with the price of electricity in Australia, thanks to weather-dependent solar and wind driving up power prices, our recycling industry is struggling. Think about this: much like used plastics, glass, solar panels and wind turbines, EVs will not be recycled beyond their copper wires and the little steel that has been used. If electric vehicles are a less desirable product at a terrible price heading towards extinction, what are their alleged climate virtues? Let’s consider that: this virtue is not based on science; it’s not a calculation of their cradle-to-grave life cycle. It’s a self-declaration. Electric vehicles identify as net zero, and so this government treats them as such.
No-one is looking at the harm these electric vehicles cause out of sight in the Third World or asking why they still have a social licence, given that most of them source raw materials on the back of child slave labour—child slave labour. What is the environmental cost of the Third World mining operations to build a car that sits in an Australian dealership with a green virtue sticker on the side? That’s completely irrelevant as far as this government is concerned. Why else would Labor throw good money after bad behind Congo cobalt? Labor are turning a blind eye to the 40,000 children in the Congo mining the cobalt for EVs—after this bill, 45,000. Leading electric vehicle manufacturers claim to be free of child slave labour, yet their supply contracts for cobalt are with companies with child slave labour in their supply chains—deceit.
We like to think that our civilisation has advanced, yet these net-zero technologies, more than any other, are indulging in the cheap, largely unregulated labour of our poor neighbours and their children. When it’s not children down mines clawing at the ground with their bare hands, it’s the toxic mining practices for rare earths that make coalmines look like an oasis. This is the truth behind the green sticker. Electric vehicles need mining, and the Greens hate mining—or so they tell us. Greens and teals demand coal stay in the ground. How can anyone make more EVs without using coal to smelt the steel and the aluminium, process the plastics from coal and oil and make the glass? How can we make more electric vehicles without oil in the bearings? It seems the government and the Greens and teals cheer squads are determined to find out. It’s impossible.
Added to the list of disasters waiting to happen is the effect of this many electric vehicles on the national electricity grid. Now we’re talking about something that’s hurting everyone. All it takes is three or so electric vehicles on an average suburban street to charge at the same time, and the powerlines melt down or shut off. Weather-dependent power like solar and wind cannot charge this many electric vehicles—full stop, that’s it. I’m sure this bill will lead to government departments buying another off-market round of electric vehicles to zip around Canberra. What it will not do is save the planet. What it will not do is make electric vehicles more affordable. What it will not do is ease the cost of living. What it will not do is create a better, more competitive product. And who will pay? As always, the people will pay for this government’s stupidity and deceit.
Even if they are miraculously delivered in this fit of madness, as a product electric vehicles have serious unresolved issues, like their tendency to spontaneously combust. Australia’s firefighters have complained that they do not have the ability to put out lithium-ion battery fires in electric vehicles. So what happens when our underground car parks are packed full of these things and one starts off a chain reaction? What happens if they catch fire beneath apartment blocks, inside shopping centres, in tunnels? The ventilation of buildings and car parks is not designed to handle the safety issue, the hazard and risk issue of the scars, and there will be serious accidents in tight residential areas. If there’s a fire, the water used to fight that fire is 10 times the amount for a conventional car fire. Firefighters are terrified of this. Even worse, that water becomes toxic as a result of contact with a toxic battery fire and must be captured and treated. Allowing firefighting water to run off site is an environmental contamination. EV does not stand for electric vehicle; EV stands for environmental vandalism. This bill states that its purpose is, ‘To encourage a greater uptake of electric cars by Australian road users to reduce Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions from the transport sector by making cars more affordable’. Let me be straight: this is a big-business perk to help the richest people in this country improve their environmental virtue-signalling and their social credit status on paper. It is nothing more. Labor is offering another incentive to the rich, urban, professional teal voters to come on over to Labor and to keep their buddies in government, the Greens, with them.
Yet underneath it all, the Australian people are left to pick up the bill for Labor’s empty virtue-signalling and economic stupidity. This government needs to stop sucking up to the teals and start governing for Australia, and replace policies from the United Nations and World Economic Forum alliance, that began in 2018, with policies instead that serve Australia.
I want to mention a couple of points from Judith Sloan, the economist and journalist. At a time when United Nations and World Economic Forum policies drive goals of converting our transport fleet to electricity and hugely increasing demand for electricity, our bureaucrats push United Nations and World Economic Forum policies to kill reliable, baseload coal power and replace it with expensive, intermittent, unreliable wind and solar. And here’s what Judith Sloan said:
It is surely ironic it was Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen who explicitly outlined the numerical challenge in front of transforming the NEM in such a short time frame. He has told us we will need 22,000 solar panels every day and 40 wind turbines every month for the next eight years. There will also be a requirement for at least 10,000km of additional transmission lines.
At the same time, we’ll see 11,000 megawatts of coal-fired generation coming off capacity. This is insane. And who will pay? It’s the people who will pay. We need sensible government—honest governance. We have one flag. We are one community. We are one nation. And we stand for affordable, clean, secure mobility for all Australians.
Our children need to be armed with the critical thinking skills for a changing world. There’s no place for single-minded ideology in our curriculum. All viewpoints must be presented to students in a balanced manner.
Transcript
As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I speak in support of Senator Hanson’s bill, the Australian Education Legislation Amendment (Prohibiting the Indoctrination of Children) Bill 2020. I support it because I have been the president of the board of a Montessori school. I’ve been on the advisory board of the International Montessori Council. I agree with the primacy of the family, the tripartite role between parents, teachers and child, in understanding education and supporting it. I want to correct something, though: the previous speaker seemed to have their imagination running wild, because he said, ‘These men come in here’. Well, Senator Hanson is a woman! She initiated this bill, and she’s a woman! During COVID, heavy-handed lockdowns forced children into learning from home, locked away from their friends and suffering through jerky attempts to teach through a Zoom screen. Of course parents were locked up at home with their children as well, listening to their classes in a way they never could before. Many were absolutely shocked as they heard the rubbish being taught to their children for the very first time. This bill tries to steer education back to the basics, to give our children critical thinking skills and to put the power back in parents’ hands to make sure that’s all they’re being taught.
In this bill, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority would need to ensure that education provides a balanced presentation of opposing views on political, historical and scientific issues. Senator Hanson’s bill would require that, where opposing views exist, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority is to ensure that the teaching profession is provided with the information, resources and support required to provide a balanced presentation to students. Wonderful! Federal funding would be conditional on states and territories requiring schools and their staff to provide a non-partisan education to students, while consulting with parents and guardians on the extent to which this has been achieved.
One Nation has been trying to keep this in check, with motions condemning the teaching of critical race theory and the curriculum’s erasing of history because it’s said to be too ‘white’ or Christian. There are lots of examples showing that stronger action is needed, and I commend Senator Antic and the others who spoke here today on that very point. There is, though, for example, the Parkdale Secondary College, where students were told to stand up if they were straight, white Christian males and be humiliated by the class because they were, ‘oppressors’. Without trial, they’re ‘oppressors’. Then there is Brauer College, where all the boys were forced to stand up at assembly and apologise to all of the girls on behalf of their gender. No specific crime was mentioned or identified for these boys to apologise for, except that they were the wrong gender. And only today One Nation New South Wales leader, Mark Latham, has drawn our attention to Mount Kuring-gai Public School. They are feeding fiction to students about history, forcing them to learn a play where Captain Cook arrives with the First Fleet in 1788 as a coloniser. For those who have forgotten history from their schooling, Captain Cook was long dead by the time of the First Fleet.
This bill is necessary to stop examples like this infecting our children, to return our teaching to the basics, to restore balance to the way topics are presented and to stop our schools from being indoctrination centres. This bill puts the teaching of balanced, critical analysis and parents in the driver’s seat of children’s education, as they should be.
The cost of everything is going up, but the Albanese Labor government is pouring more fuel on the fire by tipping billions into policies that will make electricity prices even higher. With more wind and solar in the grid than ever before power bills have never been higher. Time to give up on this pipe dream.
Transcript
President the Albanese Government’s behaviour goes well beyond a broken election promise to give cost-of-living relief. The Government is actively making inflation worse.
The inflation rate is 8% and will remain at 8% into the future, on the back of increases to energy prices. Electricity, gas, diesel and petrol are all inputs into every corner of our economy.
Forcing energy prices up to appease the sky god of warming will force up input costs right across our economy and lead to more inflation.
Weather-dependent solar and wind power will never provide baseload power. Doubling down on more solar and wind, before the added cost of changing out every wind turbine and solar panel with new ones before we even get to 2050 will lead to more inflation.
Taxpayers pay for these things twice: once in taxpayer subsidies to wind and solar and through higher inflation. Energy inflation.
Not only do we have a lack of wage rises, we have a lack of wages. Businesses are closing all over Australia as inflation wreaks havoc in the productive economy and energy costs drive manufacturing overseas.
This Government has no answers. We have just seen a child care bill that gives handouts to millionaires but fails to create a single job.
Failing to use government policy to create jobs while allowing 220,000 new migrants into Australia every year will create a pool of unemployed, resulting in reduced market power for labour. That can only mean lower wages, even before losing 8% a year off their pay packet through inflation.
One Nation believe the way to break the inflation cycle is a comprehensive root and branch review of the taxation system, to return bracket creep to wage earners while forcing big business, especially foreign corporations to pay their fair share.
Queensland Labor’s Health Department still mandates COVID injections for health professionals. Injection mandates must be abolished now. Let anyone who wants to work, work.
We are one community, one nation and Labor are a threat to breadwinner jobs.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/fnM1HJ-REX0/0.jpg360480Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2022-11-23 18:19:002022-11-23 18:19:05Albanese pouring fuel on the cost of living fire
If Climate Change talk-fest COP doesn’t want to come to Australia that’s their loss. We’ll keep our abundant protein-rich red meat, delicious range of seafood, cheap and reliable coal-fired power, huge gas reserves and efficient petrol and diesel cars. Let COP eat their bugs in the dark while they wait for their electric vehicles to charge.
Transcript
Great news, Vanuatu still exists.
Experts told us it would now be underwater due to global warming and rising sea levels. Just like Al Gore forecast Mount Kilimanjaro would have no snow by 2016.
How many islands has Vanuatu lost due to rising sea levels? None. Mount Kilimanjaro is still topped with icy white powder.
Maybe that’s why it’s now called climate change instead of global warming?
I thank the Australian Greens for this breaking news that Vanuatu’s climate minister would only back Australia’s bid to host the 2026 Conference Of Parties, COP, if Australia doesn’t commit to any new coal or gas projects.
With that headline the solution is clear.
Australia must immediately fund and build as many coal and gas projects as humanly possible so there’s no chance we’ll have to host the expensive UN-WEF talk fest for climate elites, the 2026 COP.
What is the COP?
The UN’s Conference Of Parties involves millionaires, billionaires and politicians bouncing around the world in fuel-guzzling private jets to luxurious locations.
Gorging themselves on prime beef while preaching to we lowly peasants to reduce our carbon dioxide footprint, stop flying, stop driving and stop eating red meat.
If the 2026 COP was hosted in Australia, taxpayers would be forking out for the UN’s globalist elite talk fest.
We’d be paying for them to tell us to destroy our energy grid and commit economic suicide to appease the sun gods.
If COP doesn’t want to come to Australia that’s their loss. We’ll keep our abundant protein-rich red meat, delicious range of seafood, cheap and reliable coal-fired power, huge gas reserves and efficient petrol and diesel cars.
Let COP eat their bugs in the dark while waiting for their electric vehicles to charge.
We have one flag. We are one community. We are one nation.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/00H50W31Bgo/0.jpg360480Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2022-11-23 16:32:072022-11-23 16:32:13Climate talk-fest not coming to Australia is a win!
