We’re the world’s most energy rich country yet we have some of the highest electricity prices. We export our energy resources while skyrocketing power bills and taxes ensure the flow of money from everyday Australians’ pockets to the carpet-bagging predatory billionaires behind the net-zero fraud.
Climate scammers fear the net-zero tide is turning. The public is waking up to this economic suicide and seeing the climate agenda for what it is – a corrupt globalist ideology and wealth transfer scheme.
The latest unhinged meltdown from the Greens has nothing at all to do with rising temperatures. It has everything to do with fear of political irrelevancy.
I was pleased to hear the Liberals and Nationals speak supportively three times on our motion, but disappointed that not one member of those parties were in the senate chamber for the vote.
The message is clear and the backlash globally is now growing: Australia must cancel net-zero or the cost will be ruinous.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/VrGMLu6WHfE/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Sheenagh Langdonhttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSheenagh Langdon2023-08-01 19:23:042023-08-01 19:23:13Australia Slow to Hear the Net-Zero Wake Up Call
I questioned the Snowy Hydro Authority on the Snowy 2.0 project at Senate Estimates.
Snowy 2.0 is a ‘big battery’ that pumps water from the Talbingo Reservoir up to the Tantangara Reservoir during the day when there is excess wind and solar electricity, then lets the water down during the evening peak to generate electricity when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing.
If this sounds like we are planning on generating electricity twice to use it once, that is exactly what pumped hydro does.
The original cost of $2 billion is now out to $5.9 billion and likely to go over $10 billion. In addition, the transmission lines to bring the power into the grid will gouge out national parks and farmland, and cost another $10 billion. And their main boring machine has been bogged for more than a year.
I asked if this project is worth continuing.
The lack of detail around how much the power will cost electricity customers is frightening.
Listen to the answers. It sounds like the Snowy Authority is planning to profiteer by having the only power available when solar and wind are not generating enough power.
All I can say is be worried – this Government is actively planning massive increases in power bills.
Transcript
Senator Roberts: Thank you for appearing again today. Florence is now acknowledged to be bogged. When will it be unbogged?
Mr Barnes: I expect in weeks, not months. As soon as the slurry plant is operating, we’ll push forward, obviously in close consultation with our colleagues at DPIE and Parks, but we expect it to be relatively soon.
Senator Roberts: I empathise with you, having managed underground projects, some quite large—not as large as this one. There is a lot of uncertainty, and it’s hard telling people who are looking on how to think about this. It’s very difficult to describe.
Mr Barnes: You’ve got to see it to believe it.
Senator Roberts: That’s right. We’ve got journalists—admittedly journalists—now saying it’s time to cut our losses on Snowy 2.0. If the project is completed and all the high-voltage transmission lines are built across farmyards and national parks, there must be a calculation that takes the capital cost of the project as a whole and divides that by the life of the project to get a figure for how much the annual amortisation charge for the capital costs will be. Do you have the latest projection, please?
Mr Barnes: There was quite a lot in your question. Obviously we haven’t got an updated cost here, and we’ll provide that in months. We don’t have the cost of transmission, so I wouldn’t be able to provide that. I fully expect, through our corporate plan process, we’ll assess the returns from Snowy 2.0, and, if anything, the commercial case for it has got stronger since FID.
Senator Roberts: Sorry?
Mr Barnes: The commercial case for it has gotten stronger since the financial investment decision.
Senator Roberts: There were many factors that drove that commercial decision in the first place. Well, it wasn’t commercial, from what we understand, because there was no cost-benefit analysis, and the business case was redacted heavily, under Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership. This annual amortisation charge, which you can’t provide, is combined with annual costs like labour and maintenance to calculate what the real cost per megawatt hour will be once the project starts. You wouldn’t have the projected cost per megawatt hour either then?
Mr Barnes: That’s correct, but to think about Snowy 2.0 in megawatt hours is perhaps not the right way to think about it.
Senator Roberts: It’s a battery.
Mr Barnes: Yes, but it’s the provision of dispatchable demand over very long storage duration that allows lots of variable renewable electricity to be delivered. So we look at the business case in a much more fulsome way across the whole Snowy business. For example, over the past few years, we’ve procured 1,500 megawatts of solar and wind PPAs to enable the transition, which assets like Snowy 2.0 support. I think you’ve got to look at a whole-of-business business case, and the simple amortisation plus labour is, perhaps, too simplistic a way to consider the business case.
Senator Roberts: Now you’ve got me really worried. It’s not your responsibility with the solar and wind, but now I’m terrified of it. Your website lists the levelised cost of storage at between $25 and $35 per megawatt hour. On 340,000 megawatt hours each year, this suggests an annual cost of $11 million, including operating costs, maintenance, capital costs and the cost of buying the electricity to pump the water uphill. Is the $25 to $35 figure still accurate and, if not, what is the new figure?
Mr Barnes: I’ve not got a calculator that capable in my head, but I think there might be a multiplying factor out on those numbers. The levelised cost of storage I think we have on our website is sourced from international studies and our view of levelised cost of storage. I don’t have the updated figure in my head at the moment.
Senator Roberts: Our staff team did some calculations. Now, admittedly, we don’t have all the costs, but it just seems ridiculously low. When we pile on these extra costs of the delay, we’re wondering about what will happen.
Mr Barnes: Just to be clear, the levelised cost of storage is what one would add to variable renewable electricity to provide a firm product. Also, the 340,000 megawatt hours of storage is not deployed over a year. It will be deployed multiple times through the year, depending on the market dynamics.
Senator Roberts: It seems to us that the capital cost is becoming a huge stumbling block. Even if you take just the cost of the project, at $6 billion—and there are serious doubts about that now—and amortise those across 50 years, the annual capital charge will be $120 million, and double that if you add the pole and the wires. That puts the cost of your electricity at over $700 per megawatt per hour, including the poles and wires. The current spot price for last weekend—admittedly the weekend was cold down here—for last weekend was $150 per megawatt hour. Is there something we’re missing?
Mr Barnes: We’ll certainly do a full financial review of the project when the increased costs are known. But I think you’re mischaracterising the nature of the asset in that it isn’t an energy provider. It’s an insurance provider for when the wind isn’t blowing, the sun isn’t shining or there is plant failure elsewhere. So we don’t sell it as a baseload energy price, which is what you’re referencing.
Senator Roberts: Hasn’t it been touted as a peak period source of electricity?
Mr Barnes: The two major sources of revenue will be the difference between the price we pump the water up to Tantangara, which will soak up demand from solar and wind when it’s not required, and the price at which we sell it in peak periods when solar and wind aren’t available or other plants are not available. So it’s an asset about being there when everything else isn’t. It isn’t sold on an energy basis, which are the reference prices you’re quoting.
Senator Roberts: Okay. But the projected cost must be the single most important KPI of this project.
Mr Barnes: Cost and schedule are my most important KPIs. The reason we came out with the schedule is that there are many stakeholders interested in the schedule, and we’ll work through the cost and associated business plans around that.
Senator Roberts: There seems to be a real risk, though. I acknowledge your point that we can’t just charge per kilowatt hour—or we can’t just recognise a per kilowatt hour figure. But there seems to be the real possibility that the price of electricity generated, recovered and stored will be massive, even without government subsidies coming in year after year.
Ms Barnes: I think that’s for others to comment on. My focus is on getting the project at schedule and cost and making a business case for it, which I think is very strong. There are many other factors which will determine the price of electricity.
Senator Roberts: Minister, can you provide on notice the current projected cost per megawatt hour of electricity generated by Snowy 2.0 on the first year of operation, please?
Senator McAllister: Senator, I will take that on notice. I would also direct you to the evidence given to you already by Mr Barnes in relation both to the variability in the electricity market that Snowy will participate in but also—
Senator Roberts: A lot of variability means uncertainty.
Senator McAllister: Senator Roberts, I think that Mr Barnes has given an indication that he thinks it’s a strong business case and they’re presently working through it. I have taken your question on notice.
Senator Roberts: Thank you. This had nothing to do with your government, but right from the start of this project, Malcolm Turnbull’s government refused access to the cost-benefit analysis and heavily redacted the business case. There have been lots of questions about this project right from the start and now there are even more questions—and I don’t blame Mr Barnes for that.
Mr Barnes: My interest is running a commercially viable and efficient company, and that’s what I’ve done all of my career. The reason I joined Snowy was to get the opportunity to deliver Snowy 2, because I think it’s an incredibly important asset to the energy transition. I fully expect it to be very commercial. We’re trying to deal with the hardest part of the transition, which is providing deep storage to enable more renewables. So I expect it to be a very commercial business.
Senator Roberts: Can I confirm media reports that Snowy Hydro was found in a third independent audit last year to be noncompliant on environmental plans in 15 instances and that you have at last 10 management plans overdue?
Mr Barnes: I think, Senator, that you’re maybe referring to a National Parks Association report that was released last Thursday, without consultation with Snowy Hydro. We are currently operating under all of our construction approvals. So there are no breaches there. The plans and requirements as a result of the construction and operation of Snowy 2 obviously changed in nature over time. There are some that are relevant to construction, and we’re fully compliant with those. There are some that are relevant to operation and some that are relevant to rehabilitation. We work closely with all of the agencies to make sure that they’re reviewed and consulted on in every thorough way. I think there’s been a misunderstanding of some of the dates on various websites. So I have reached out to the National Parks Association to help them understand how it operates.
Senator Roberts: So it’s a misunderstanding that 10 of the 16 management plans for multibillion-dollar pumped hydro projects are overdue by 31 months, as reported in the media, citing the National Parks Association? So you think they’ve got it wrong somewhere?
Mr Barnes: The plans that are being referred to are prepared by Snowy and they are reviewed by various agencies. In consultation with the agencies, some of the dates that were originally envisaged are not being met and, therefore, are phases of the project which are way into the future. One of the things that may be useful for us to do is to work with the various agencies to make that understanding of how this process works. I would have happily taken the National Parks Association through that process.
Senator Roberts: Okay; so they jumped the gun?
Mr Barnes: They didn’t consult with Snowy Hydro before releasing it to the media.
Senator Roberts: Can I go to your opening statement? You recently announced a one- to two-year delay. That’s a heck of a range, 100 per cent—from minimum to major.
Mr Barnes: It’s a project that’s being constructed over more than one to two years. It’s been in construction a few years. I think it was appropriate to give a range until we do more work.
Senator Roberts: I appreciate your honesty. I am not questioning your honesty—and I appreciate that you have given us that figure. But, for the project, that’s a pretty big number. What was the original planned project duration?
Mr Barnes: It was before my time. Perhaps we’ll come back to you. We gave a notice to proceed in mid-2020 and power was expected in 2025-26.
Mr Whitby: First power was for 1 July 2025, from a notice to proceed from August 2020. So five years was the original—
Senator Roberts: So the delay is 20 per cent to 40 per cent?
Mr Barnes: That would be the simple maths.
Chair: Senator Roberts, I’ll get you to wind it up and share the call, if that’s okay?
Senator Roberts: Okay. You mentioned in your statement the combination of four factors. What are the four factors? I’ve been through your statement and I couldn’t see them.
Mr Barnes: In our advice to ministers and in our media release we identified the effects of COVID and bushfires on the mobilisation of the project, the effect of many global factors on the availability of skilled labour and also the costs of materials. There’s a lot of steel and concrete in the project. We’ve found that some elements of the design—as we’ve gone through the process of design—are, in some cases, more costly to complete. And finally, the site conditions, of which the Florence ground conditions are the most impactful, also includes things like additional eroding. They’re the four factors.
Senator Roberts: Good luck getting that machine out.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/Dn5_k9SAKDE/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Sheenagh Langdonhttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSheenagh Langdon2023-06-01 13:27:322023-06-01 15:30:30Snowy 2.0 continues to throw good money after bad
The Bureau of Meteorology has been in the process of replacing mercury temperature probes with digital probes at weather stations across the country.
After a long Freedom of Information process, we now have field logs from the Brisbane Airport station showing that the two different devices can record different temperatures at the same place at the same time.
The Bureau have said both of these sets of data has always been available but I don’t believe them and I think they’ve been caught out. We need a transparent inquiry into all of BOM’s temperature measuring.
Click Here for Transcript
Chair: Senator Roberts, over to you for 10 minutes.
Senator Roberts: Thank you again for being here, Dr Johnson and Dr Stone. I would like to table these two articles, Chair.
Chair: Certainly. What are they?
Senator Roberts: They are newspaper articles.
Chair: Given they are public documents, we probably don’t need to table them; we can just circulate them around the committee.
Senator Roberts: The first document is about two articles in the Australian newspaper about parallel temperatures at Brisbane Airport—following on from Senator Rennick. The other one is about forecasts from the Bureau of Meteorology that have been inaccurate. Going to the first one, I’ve tabled some important news about parallel temperatures at Brisbane Airport, showing that your temperature probes do record different temperatures to mercury thermometers in the same location at the same time. If I could please go to Freedom of Information 30/6155, regarding the daily maximum and minimum temperature parallel observations for Brisbane Airport, which the stories relate to, what date did you first receive the FOI request? I think you said 2019.
Dr Johnson: It was received on 12 December 2019.
Senator Roberts: What date did you release the documents to the applicant?
Dr Johnson: Well, the documents were released, as agreed with the respondent, on 6 April 2023, but, as I said in my earlier response to Senator Rennick’s question, the documents released were the ones that we were quite happy to provide in 2019 to the respondent, but the respondent didn’t wish to avail themselves of that material back in 2019.
Senator Roberts: Why did you fight to keep this information a secret?
Dr Johnson: We didn’t fight. Again, I reiterate my response to Senator Rennick: we didn’t fight anything. We were unable to fulfill the request that we received in 2019 because the information that was requested did not exist in the form that the respondent requested it. So we offered the respondent the material we had. They declined and sought to appeal it through the various appeals processes. Our decisions were reaffirmed by both the Information Commissioner and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, and the information that we offered to provide the respondent back in 2019 was provided in April this year. So this notion that the bureau’s withholding information is a fallacy.
Senator Roberts: So we’d have to look further into that, but not here.
Dr Johnson: That’s the record and the truth.
Senator Roberts: You’re paid by the taxpayer, Dr Johnson, just like I am. You’re meant to serve the
taxpayer, as I am. You have a remuneration package of over half a million dollars a year from taxpayers. The information you have, the work you do, belongs to the taxpayer, correct?
Dr Johnson: As I said in my response by Senator Rennick, all of the bureau’s data records are available to the public, either in digital or analogue form. They’re held in the analogue form in the National Archives, and the digital records are available on the bureau’s website.
Senator Roberts: I’ve heard that before, but I’ve also seen people who can’t access the information.
Dr Johnson: I can only tell you the truth, and the truth is that those records are available on our website or in the National Archives by request.
Senator Roberts: Why did it take an application to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal for you to back down?
Dr Johnson: I reject that comment. The information that was requested by the respondent or the proponent—I’m not sure how you want to characterise it—was not available. We can’t create something that’s not available. We offered the respondent a set of alternatives, which they declined initially and then subsequently agreed to take. So, again, this notion that the bureau is withholding information from the public or from this particular respondent is just not true; it’s inaccurate. I can’t be any clearer on that.
Senator Roberts: No; you’re clear. Do you disagree that your temperature probes are recording different temperatures to mercury thermometers in the same place at the same time?
Dr Johnson: I’ll let Dr Stone address that.
Dr Stone: No, you actually expect pairs of measuring instruments to have different measurements.
Senator Roberts: So if we had two probes, they would be slightly different. I understand the natural
variation.
Dr Stone: Within tolerance, yes.
Senator Roberts: Would the difference between the two probes be less or greater than the difference between a probe and a mercury thermometer?
Dr Stone: I’ll reiterate that liquid-in-glass thermometers have a tolerance, an acceptable error, of 0.5 of a degree. Our electronic probes that we’ve been using for 30-odd years have a tolerance of 0.4 of a degree. The electronic probes that we’re about to roll out have a tolerance of 0.2 of a degree. You can expect a difference between the two probes that is the sum of the tolerances of the two probes.
Senator Roberts: I understand that. So there is a difference between the mercury in glass and the probes?
Dr Stone: In which sense? In tolerance?
Senator Roberts: No, in the actual measurement. There’ll be difference in the two measurements?
Dr Stone: Sometimes, because they operate within that tolerance.
Senator Roberts: I understand about tolerances.
Dr Stone: For the ones operating at Brisbane Airport, for example, I have the figures on the distribution of readings and the mercury-in-glass. I don’t have the exact figures, I’m sorry, but approximately 40 per cent of the time one of the probes measured a higher amount than another.
Senator Roberts: The figures are 41 per cent—
Dr Stone: About 30 per cent of the time, they measured below, and the balance of the time they measured very similar.
Senator Roberts: So there is a difference. There has to be.
Dr Stone: Correct, and we expect the difference—
Senator Roberts: So 41 per cent of the time it recorded a warmer temperature, and cooler temperatures were recorded 26 per cent of the time.
Dr Stone: Something like that, yes.
Senator Roberts: So are you saying that the analysis of Marohasy and Abbot is incorrect? Or are you
saying that it may be correct but it’s within allowable tolerances, so you don’t care?
Dr Stone: Which part of their analysis? They did quite—
Senator Roberts: The 41 per cent warmer and the 26 per cent cooler.
Dr Stone: If they are the figures. Sorry; I’ve got them here. Yes.
Senator Roberts: 41 per cent and 26 per cent?
Dr Stone: That is correct.
Senator Roberts: Thank you. Do you think it’s significant that your new temperature probes are, on
average, recording warmer temperatures than the mercury thermometers in the same locations at the same times?
Dr Stone: They are not, on average. There is a difference of two-hundredths of a degree, which is not a significant difference.
Senator Roberts: I said on average they’re recording a warmer temperature.
Dr Stone: No, sorry. On average, there was a difference of two-hundredths of a degree between the liquid-in glass-thermometers—
Senator Roberts: So, on average, the probes are recording a warmer temperature.
Dr Stone: 0.02 degrees is not a significant difference.
Senator Roberts: On average, they are recording warmer temperatures than the mercury.
Dr Stone: No. 0.02 degrees is not a significant difference.
Senator Roberts: Graham Lloyd is a credible journalist; I’ve seen his work many times. The story also
says that you, Dr Stone, claimed in response to these issues—presumably he asked you—
Dr Stone: No, he didn’t.
Senator Roberts: that all temperature data is publicly available on your website, including the parallel data. Is that true?
Dr Stone: All of our digitised data is available on the website, and, as Dr Johnson mentioned to you earlier, data that hasn’t been digitised is available from the national archive.
Senator Roberts: The temperature data that was released in the freedom of information request was not available on your website, was it?
Dr Stone: There were two pieces of information provided. One was scans of field books which hadn’t
previously been digitised. Those were digitised upon request and provided. Then the electronic data is available on the bureau website.
Senator Roberts: Well, why were you in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal trying to keep it secret?
Dr Stone: Sorry?
Dr Johnson: Senator, with respect, I think we’ve addressed this. This notion that we are withholding
information from the public is just false. The administrative appeals process was instigated by the proponent, who disagreed with the decision that both the bureau and the Information Commissioner had made in respect of the freedom of information request. Again, I reiterate that the bureau’s actions were affirmed by both the Information Commissioner and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. So this notion that the bureau withholds data is false, and it’s very important that it’s on the record, because, as you say, taxpayers have a legitimate expectation that the data that is generated with their money—
Senator Roberts: Can you take me—
Chair: Last question, Senator Roberts.
Dr Johnson: is available. I just don’t know how much clearer we can be on this.
Senator Roberts: Can you provide the URL where the parallel temperature data was available on your website prior to the FOI?
Dr Stone: This is a key point. The applicants asked for ‘the report’ in which parallel data was recorded. I’ve just explained the data existed in two places. The respondent refused the offer of data on the basis that we couldn’t provide it in one form. It doesn’t exist in one form: there are field books that have the manual temperature readings written down, and there’s electronic data. Bring those two together, and you can construct the parallel dataset, but they specified that they would only accept reports of parallel data, which don’t exist.
Senator Roberts: I know—
Chair: Senator Roberts, we need to move on. Your time is up.
Click Here for Transcript
Chair: Senator Roberts, you have one or two questions?
Senator Roberts: Yes, that’s it. I just have three very short questions.
Chair: Go ahead.
Senator Roberts: The information you scanned from the field book for the freedom of information request—where was that available before the FOI request?
Dr Johnson: That would have been available as a paper record in the National Archives.
Senator Roberts: The scanned information from the field book and the FOI information—where is that available on the bureau’s website today?
Dr Johnson: The scanned information from the bureau’s field books is not on our website. That was a specific request undertaken for a particular proponent.
Senator Roberts: So it’s at the National Archives.
Dr Johnson: But, to my comment earlier: if anyone from the public wants to access our field books they can put a request in through the National Archives. There’s no issue in doing that.
Senator Roberts: Science thrives on debate—open debate based on objective data. A truly scientific body would be encouraging people like Marohasy, Abbott, Bill Johnson and others to actually challenge the Bureau of Meteorology. So why do you run from those challenges? You’ve had many, many scandals—
Dr Johnson: Senator, I just can’t agree with the premise of your question. We don’t run. We welcome engagement with all sectors of society in the work that we do. I think this has been an ongoing subject of public discourse for a long time. Our records are available to anyone who’d like to access them. We welcome all members of the public if they have an interest in our records. There’s no impediment to them accessing them.
Senator Roberts: There’s a list of scandals, if you like, or accused scandals, involving the BOM and global weather agencies. The question—
Dr Johnson: Sorry—Senator, I don’t know what you’re referring to.
Senator Roberts: I’m questioning your data.
Dr Johnson: What are you referring to by ‘scandals’?
Senator Roberts: Questions about temperature fabrications lead to a call for a full inquiry. That inquiry was not held.
Dr Johnson: There have been assertions about these which have been tested in independent inquiries on at least two occasions since I’ve been Director of Meteorology.
Senator Roberts: One of them was just tea and bickies! It looked at the process, not the data.
Dr Johnson: Senator, these are independent—
Chair: Let’s not speak over each other, please.
Dr Johnson: These are independent reviews commissioned by the Australian government into our practices.
Senator Roberts: One of them I know was a cursory look over the processes and did not go into the data.
Dr Johnson: I’m not sure what you’re referring to—
Senator Roberts: The one under Tony Abbott as Prime Minister.
Dr Johnson: but all I can say is: in response to community interest in our practices, certainly since I’ve been Director of Meteorology, or aware of it, or within the vicinity, 2017 was the last one. It was commissioned by then minister Frydenberg. An esteemed panel of national and international leaders—
Senator Roberts: It looked at the process.
Dr Johnson: confirmed that our methods were fit for purpose and sound. These are world experts.
Chair: Senator Roberts, maybe, if you would like, you could catalogue the issues that you’re detailing here and place that on notice for Dr Johnson to respond to.
Senator Roberts: I am happy to.
Chair: It could be that we have a difference of opinion here. Just so that we have the facts on the record, that would be really handy.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/-cgolns86is/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Sheenagh Langdonhttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSheenagh Langdon2023-05-31 13:53:472023-05-31 13:53:53Same place, same time, different temperatures. What’s the BOM hiding?
The Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner has a sole focus on receiving complaints about wind, solar, pumped hydro, battery and power line projects among others.
If you have been affected by a project underway or even one that is proposed you need to submit a complaint by following the steps at https://www.aeic.gov.au/making-a-complaint
Transcript
Chair: Senator Roberts.
Senator Roberts: Thank you for being here this morning. I understand one of my staff called you yesterday?
Mr Dyer: Yes.
Senator Roberts: He had a very pleasant talk. Thank you very much for opening the door. Is it accurate to say that you are the national commissioner for complaints about wind and solar projects?
Mr Dyer: I’d like to characterise it as the ombudsman of first and last resort. If you have a concern about a powerline, a wind farm or whatever that might be in our jurisdiction and you don’t know how to get it solved, you can come to us and we’ll figure out the right process to get the concern addressed.
Senator Roberts: When you say ‘you’, that was used in a colloquial sense. This is open to any citizen in Australia?
Mr Dyer: Yes. We’re a national service and we get complaints from around the country.
Senator Roberts: That’s wonderful to hear. So anyone who has a complaint about wind projects, solar projects, batteries or transmission can make a complaint to you?
Mr Dyer: Yes. If you go to our website, which is aeic.gov.au, the second or third tab along says ‘making a complaint’. There’s the process, the form and the policy. You can call us, you can mail us, you can email us or you can arrange to meet with us.
Senator Roberts: How many are in your office? I understand you have a small office.
Mr Dyer: We’re a very efficient team.
Senator Roberts: I wasn’t being critical.
Mr Dyer: We have, I think, five people.
Senator Roberts: And you’re meant to take care of people’s complaints about solar and wind. And you work with the state government, with the federal government, with private entities?
Mr Dyer: Yes.
Senator Roberts: Thank you.
Mr Dyer: The respondent is usually the developer to a concern. But sometimes it’s a planning process or an EPBC issue. It’s not always the developer, but usually that’s the case.
Senator Roberts: So it could get pretty complex?
Mr Dyer: Yes. We’ve had some of them going for a long time, but we get through them.
Senator Roberts: Can you perhaps talk a bit more about what you can do for someone who has a complaint that you can look at, because people are not aware. Talk to everyday Australians.
Mr Dyer: I don’t have the budget for a front page ad in the Sydney Morning Herald. But people do find us. If you’ve got constituents who have concerns, we should talk about how they can come to us. The best thing to do is promote our website, and that has all of the details. Typically our process is that, if we get a complaint, we’ll do some research on the project and the proponent, and what is going on. If we don’t already know the proponent, and in many cases we do, we will go and get a briefing or open the door, and sometimes the complainant is known to the proponent. Often they’re not known, and so we’re able to build and bridge a relationship between the complainant and the proponent to work through whatever the concerns are. Many concerns are solved by just provision of factual information. It’s often a misunderstanding or misperception that has caused them to come to us.
Senator Roberts: I certainly agree with that. I would like to ask whether you’ve received any complaints in relation to the proposed Eungella or Burdekin Pioneer pumped hydro project in the hinterland near Mackay and the proposed Borumba Dam pumped hydro and the transmission lines around Widgee, which is near Gympie in Queensland.
Mr Dyer: No.
Senator Roberts: Not any?
Mr Dyer: No.
Senator Roberts: There’s a massive community movement in both cases.
Mr Dyer: Then feel free to connect them to us and we’ll work through it.
Senator Roberts: Okay. It’s shocking to me that, in both of those projects, it appears there has been an appalling level of community consultation. This is entirely from the Queensland government. In Eungella, for example, people who were going to have their houses compulsorily resumed and flooded for the new pumped hydro dam found out via media release. Then they found out that they couldn’t get loans for their business, renovations or sell their house, because their land is now jeopardised. Transmission lines for the Borumba project near Gympie are currently proposed over prime agricultural land, which would be again compulsorily resumed despite the community pointing out that there are state-owned land corridors available nearby. Does this lack of consultation sound like it meets the needs for best practice that your office would recommend?
Mr Dyer: We find that most proponents need help in some way, shape or form. I did have a look last night at the Queensland hydro website, and it didn’t jump out to me how you might make a complaint, for example. So, it’s possible that we may need to help them get their complaint process in place. We’ve had to do that with all the TNSPs, and help them get that in place, and the policies put in place, make it transparent on the project website, and away they go.
Senator Roberts: Thank you. What does the best practice consultation look like?
Mr Dyer: It’s a long topic, but it’s about knowing who your stakeholders are and being fairly well advanced in your thinking about what you’re trying to do. If I reflect on a call I had last night, it’s don’t go about it in secret. We often get developers that want to have one-on-one discussions with the landholder to sign them up for hosting the wind farm or the solar farm and say, ‘This is very confidential. We can’t let you talk to your neighbours.’ Before the developers leave the front gate, the whole street knows what the deal is.
Senator Roberts: And they know that these guys are wanting to cover it up?
Mr Dyer: Yes.
Senator Roberts: Which doesn’t build trust.
Mr Dyer: Yes.
Senator Roberts: To build trust, developers need to listen first and then talk once they understand people’s needs?
Mr Dyer: Yes. It’s, for want of a better word, not a crude word, it’s a professional sales role that they’re in. But it’s got to be done with ethics and transparency and thinking like a landholder will think—how you go about matters.
Senator Roberts: I’ve been up to both projects, but already there are many constituents who are saying that this will never be built. It’s just going to do enormous damage. It’s just the Queensland government diverting attention in the media and in the community from serious problems like the Mackay Base Hospital. That straightaway has destroyed any trust in that community.
Mr Dyer: It sounds like they might need some help, so I’ll approach the chair and we’ll start the process.
Senator Roberts: We’ll get your website and your name and we’ll send it to—
Mr Dyer: I’ve got a card here for you. You can take that after the session.
Senator Roberts: I’m intrigued about bonds on solar and wind generators. In the coal industry, for every acre that a surface mine uncovers the coal company has to provide a bond to the government, and then it doesn’t get that bond back until the land is fully reclaimed. Sometimes the reclaimed land is far more productive and far cleaner than the original scrub. What is the bond on solar and wind generators?
Mr Dyer: It’s up to the commercial arrangement between the landholder and the proponent. It’s no different from you owning the milk bar as a commercial landlord down the main street of town. If the tenant defaults and leaves the building, you’re stuck with the bain-marie.
Senator Roberts: So, without a bond, at the end of life, solar and wind generators can just walk away from it? Where are the funds to ensure remediation?
Mr Dyer: Some landholders are quite savvy, and I have seen everything from bank guarantees to bonds being in place, but it’s not across the board. That’s not to say it’s not happening and not being done, but it needs to be a standard practice.
Senator Roberts: There is a standard in the coalmining industry, but there’s no standard in the solar and wind industry?
Mr Dyer: It’s something I’ve advocated for a long time. It’s in section 8 of my report in appendix A, that is, the need to have licensed developers accredited to have the skills to carry out the process, as we are doing in offshore wind, and also that the area being prospected has been sanctioned ahead of time.
Senator Roberts: I want to put on the record that I appreciate Mr Dyer’s frank and complete comments and his openness. It’s much appreciated. Thank you.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/j8DeENYeZaI/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Sheenagh Langdonhttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSheenagh Langdon2023-05-24 19:19:022023-05-31 14:42:21Listen to this if you’ve been affected by a wind, solar or power line project
Senator Roberts: Thank you for appearing today. The latest figures I have about funds committed, as at June 2022, is $1.86 billion committed across Australia. That is from the 2021-22 annual report. Do you have the most recent figure on what you have committed?
Mr Miller: The most recent figure is $2.15 billion.
Senator Roberts: It’s constantly jammed down Australian throats that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of energy. Why do you have to commit billions in subsidies to wind and solar if this is the case? If they are so much cheaper, shouldn’t they be able to survive without your subsidies and just simply beat coal and gas in the market?
Mr Miller: ARENA hasn’t given much, if any, support to wind projects, in our history. When ARENA was formed 11 years ago, wind was relatively mature and didn’t need much support. Solar was an industry where Australia had a research advantage and a burgeoning research community, and ARENA stepped into that space and continued providing research funding to solar.
I think it’s entirely appropriate that we aim for lower cost, higher efficiency and more sustainable solar materials. That is what the work that we do supports. In terms of our support for solar, our key program in that respect was in 2016-17 where the intervention that ARENA and the CEFC provided the industry, with $92 million funding to two large-scale solar projects, drove the cost of that technology down from $2.50 a watt to $1.25 a watt following that program to the point where large-scale solar is economic in Australia—and the International Energy Agency says is the cheapest form of electricity generation in history.
ARENA’s continued support for solar R&D is to create a sustainable, comparative and competitive advantage for Australia in this important technology, to unlock the potential for solar to be that form of ultra low-cost generation to support a giant iron and renewable steel manufacturing capability in Australia and to provide low – cost energy into our industrial system and to our domestic users. We take that responsibility seriously, and we are very excited by the opportunity to continue to support solar PV research, manufacturing and production in Australia to that effect.
Senator Roberts: Could you take on notice to explain in depth the cost structures around solar that you are contributing to at the moment, please? In simple terms, the generating of solar is cheap but, by the time we add the doubling or the tripling of the area needed because of the variability in nature and then you add the battery storage, it’s very, very expensive.
Mr Miller: Senator, I’m not clear what you want me to do.
Senator Roberts: I would like the levelised cost of solar produced electricity equivalent to coal in terms of quantities and reliability?
Mr Miller: I would point you to the good work that the CSIRO has done in collaboration with AEMO in their GenCost analysis, which is thorough analysis by the team at the CSIRO, which shows you the levelised cost of solar on its own and wind on its tone and then adds storage to that, which is a proxy for firming. I would suggest that we would not be able to provide you with any more information than that high-quality work that has been done by the CSIRO.
Senator Roberts: That’s fine; thank you, Mr Miller—because the CSIRO’s assumptions are just woeful. If that’s the best and you term it excellent, we’re in trouble. That’s my view. So thank you for saying that.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/W1T-3O56F00/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Sheenagh Langdonhttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSheenagh Langdon2023-05-24 19:09:052023-05-25 16:40:49ARENA hands out $2.15 billion in subsidies to supposedly “cheap” renewables
What are the two words too scary for the Treasurer to mention even once in this budget? They are mining and agriculture.
Ladies and gentlemen of Australia, booming mining and agriculture have yet again saved Australia’s economy. The budget surplus is due to mining and agricultural exports, not to the Treasurer.
Is he keeping it secret because Labor wants to continue to destroy these vital industries? We should be opening more coal mines, not blocking them. We should be building more coal-fired power stations, not blowing them up. And we should be setting our farmers free to feed and clothe the world.
Labor’s energy relief plan is an admission that net-zero policies cannot lower power prices. Today we have the highest ever amount of wind and solar, yet the Treasurer needs to step in and use taxpayer money to cover up how high they are driving power bills.
On inflation, how inflationary will 400,000 new migrants be? Every single one of the 400,000 people arriving this year will need a roof over their head, a home. That’s inflation.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/le0P9Oil_uk/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Sheenagh Langdonhttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSheenagh Langdon2023-05-11 12:26:182023-05-11 12:26:22Labor wants to kill the industries that just saved their budget
We are winning. The truth always wins in the long run.
My address to a community event last week at Mudjimba on the Sunshine Coast.
Transcript
Thank you. Thank you so much for the welcome. My first task is to apologise. I plugged into the Apple Maps to be here at 10 to 1. I got here at 10 to 2. Yeah, I’m very sorry about that. I didn’t see any car smashes on the way up, but lots of traffic jams, so I don’t know what was going on. Second thing I want to do is thank everyone for being here. It’s wonderful to be here with you. I know you’re concerned about the country and I’ll explain what’s happening in the country, or why we need to be concerned and what we can all do about it. I want to thank Abby, because Abby has really struck a chord up in the Sunshine Coast, with what she’s doing. I want to acknowledge, wait for it, Case Smit and Curry Smit, because they formed the Galileo movement in the early days of, what? 2011, ’12? Yeah, that did a lot of good work.
I was very proudly a volunteer in the Galileo movement exposing the climate road. I’m happy to talk more about that, but I want to say that we are winning. Very important to understand. I’m not giving you a line, we are genuinely winning. Have we cracked it yet, in terms of the COVID mismanagement? No, we haven’t, but I’ve been very heartened with Naomi Wolf, who spoke at Hillsdale College. I can see a lot of people nodding their heads. She is wonderful and we’ll talk about her later, in question and answer, but I want to get through the core parts. Why do I say we’re winning? The LNP, which put in place the heinous, inhuman mismanagement of COVID now supports revealing the Pfizer contract that they wouldn’t reveal when they’re in office. Yes. The Labour Party, the Greens, and David Pocock still suppress the Pfizer contract.
The LNP now supports a motion on inquiry into excess deaths. We are having enough excess deaths that would cover two plane crashes every week for a year. If we had one plane crash, people would say, “What the hell’s going on?” If we had two in a week, we’d say, “What’s going on?” We are having around about 30,000 excess deaths a year and they didn’t start until after the COVID injections. They are clearly due to the COVID injections, we’re starting to crack people on that. The mouthpiece media is starting to crack. Adam Creighton, who’s part of The Weekend Australian, has been against mass injections, restrictions, mandates from the start, but he’s now starting to speak up about the injection deaths. Look at the ridicule that the World Economic Forum had globally as a result of its Davos meeting. It’s now the source of ridicule, because we bashed them over it and we exposed it. Now it’s okay, that’s very important to understand. Just by telling the truth. We’ve seen the resignations of Greg Hunt, who introduced…
What did he say now? With regard to the COVID injections, “We are engaged in the largest clinical vaccination trial.” It is a gene therapy experiment. That man and Scott Morrison enabled it to be mandated and now we’re seeing the penalties of that. I don’t care if someone’s been injected or not, what I care about is whether it was voluntary or not. We’ve seen Skerritt now going from the head of the TGA. In Senate estimates, the last Senate estimates in February, I asked him a question about approval. We already knew this, but he admitted that the TGA has not done testing of these experimental gene therapy-based treatments in this country. Why not? Because they rely upon the 15,000 employees and billions of dollars in the budget of the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration in America. Guess what? The Food and Drug Administration did not test the damn things either. The Food and Drug Administration relied upon the word of Pfizer. We can talk in question and answer about Naomi Wolf. We can see now Brendan Murphy, another one of the unholy trinity. He’s the Federal Health Department secretary, he has now announced his resignation. Agencies are getting nervous as the news emerges. These agencies… I’ve got a lot to cover, so I won’t get into detail there. I’m happy to answer in question and answer. The people now are becoming aware of the injection injuries. They’re not vaccines, I don’t call them vaccines. They are injections and they’re hideous. I’ll say it, I’m not a doctor, but if you’ve had one injection, that’s potentially harmful. If you’ve had two, much more harmful. If you had three, it is serious stuff. Four? Highly serious stuff. The people are waking up. Recently, we saw demonstrations in Paris, and where did they demonstrate?
Speaker 2: Outside BlackRock.
Malcolm Roberts: Thank you. As this lady says, outside BlackRock offices. People are waking up. We’ve also seen the digital identity bill that was raised by Scott Morrison and Barnaby Joyce, but now being foreshadowed to be introduced by Katie Gallagher as head of the Senate, for the Labour Party, and Anthony Albanese. The good news there is that we’ve exposed the incompetence of the Digital Transformation Agency, they won’t pull it off. They won’t pull it off, they’re not competent. You’ve heard of Errol Flynn? They’ve got the Errol Flynn complex. Everything they touched, they wreck. Then, if you look at it, though, this is good news for Australia, there’s not a single New Zealand member of Parliament who speaks up against the COVID mismanagement. It was coordinated globally, we know that. There is one, maybe two, United Kingdom MPs who speak against it, there are a few USA MPs, there are six of us in Australia. Six.
My topic today is rekindling human progress. We’ll cover human progress in a minute. It may seem overwhelming what we’re facing, but there are huge opportunities for Australia. Look at the material progress in the last 170 years. Look, these things weren’t invented until 2008. We’ve had them for 15 years, yet now they govern so much of our lives. That is a huge benefit. It’s also a huge risk, because they can use these things to control us. It’s up to us, though. We are now immune from famine in this country, immune from famine in most countries, except for some in Africa, some in Asia. That’s it. Humanity’s been lifted in just 170 years out of dependence on nature to become independent of nature, but that doesn’t mean we trash nature, because one of the most important things to recognise is that the environment is essential for civilization’s future.
If we trash the environment, we wreck civilization’s future. The best way to protect the environment is to protect civilization. Civilization gives us industry, which reduces, reduces, reduces our environmental footprint. Case I know as a scientist, he’s also an environmentalist. He knows that, he can back that up. Now, I don’t like everything humans do. There are people like Adolf Hitler, Maurice Strong. Anyone heard of Maurice Strong? I’ll talk about Maurice Strong in the Q and A. Maurice Strong, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, and a whole bunch of people in the World Economic Forum. They’re responsible for millions of deaths. I don’t like what they do, but I am fiercely pro-human. We are a wonderful, wonderful species. We are the best species on the planet. We don’t do everything right, but when we screw up, we look and we identify where we screwed up. The environment we were making a mess, because we were ignorant of it in the ’70s. Now, it’s far healthier than it was in the ’50s.
There are more trees in the developed continents now. There’s about 30% more trees in the developed continents than there were 100 years ago. Did you know that? Because we need less ground for agriculture, we need less ground for industry. That’s fact. Humans care and take responsibility, we fix things. What characterises most humans? This is your turn to answer. What characterises most humans. What traits? Love? Compassion? Resilience? Some greed, but most of the people in this room wouldn’t be here… None of us would be here except for this four letter word starting with C. Care, care. We would not be here, but for that word. I only realised what I almost said there. You thought of it, not me. That’s why I’m fiercely pro-human and I love human beings. I love our country and our forefathers. What do you appreciate about our country? Sorry? Freedom?
Speaker 3: The way it used to be.
Malcolm Roberts: We are going to go there, the way it used to be. All right, you’ve already beaten. This is what I appreciate. Did you know that this country, our country, Australia, had the highest per capita income of any country on earth about 120 years ago. Did you know that?
Speaker 3: With Argentina.
Malcolm Roberts: Yes, and Argentina collapsed more quickly than we did, because they went socialists, whereas we’re partly socialists, largely socialists. We’ve punched above our weight in sport, war, inventions, culture, business. Australians used to take responsibility, personal responsibility, and that’s fundamental for strength of character. Instead of blaming others, our politicians used to take responsibility. Freedom of choice is essential for responsibility. Anyone heard of Maria Montessori? She said that the essential years for the development of both character and intellect are birth to six.
We’ll come back to that, but another thing she said is, “Wherever you see a lack of responsibility, you’ll see a lack of freedom.” You cannot have responsibility if you don’t have choice. Fundamental to human development and strength of character. Choice leads to responsibility, ownership, respect, primacy of needs, efficiency, and many other benefits, but government has become about control. The opposite of freedom. I don’t believe in left versus right, that’s an abstraction that’s been concocted up to confuse us and distract us. The real message is “Control versus freedom.” It goes right through human history. Christ, Buddha, and other sages taught us responsibility as a source of personal power, and that leads to self-discipline and the sanctity of life. Why are we languishing? What concerns you about today’s culture? Lack of care. Selfishness. What else? Lack of education. We’ve got wonderful schools. Of course, that’s right.
Speaker 3: Lack of thinking and gullibility.
Malcolm Roberts: Lack of thinking and gullibility. Accepting what the government tells us. Sorry? Apathy. If you can’t have an effect on the government, you’re going to be apathetic to the government, aren’t you? We’ll talk about whose fault that is. What else? Would it be fair to say that many people in this room are feeling concerned? Frustration, confusion? You know where you’re going. Yeah. Compared to where we were 20, 30, 40 years ago, you’re confused as to why. You might not be, but many people are angry, uncertain, fearful. Not fearful of the rubbish they tell us through climate change lies, but fearful of why they’re doing it and where they’re trying to take us. Yeah? Okay. No common sense. You’re frustrated about that? Also, some people are feeling hurt and very uneasy. What are the needs? What are the needs you have that are not being met? Leadership, certainty.
Speaker 3: Truth.
Malcolm Roberts: Truth, who said that?
Speaker 3: I did.
Malcolm Roberts: Good on you.
Speaker 2: Trust.
Malcolm Roberts: Sorry?
Speaker 2: Trust.
Malcolm Roberts: Trust, yes.
Speaker 2: Respect.
Malcolm Roberts: Respect. Respect is two ways, isn’t it? If politicians don’t respect us, we don’t respect them.
Speaker 4: Transparency.
Malcolm Roberts: Transparency.
Speaker 5: Free will.
Malcolm Roberts: Free will. Thank you.
Speaker 6: Informed consent.
Malcolm Roberts: Informed consent. These are fundamental. Three years ago, would we have believed that we’d be saying these things today? Not at all. Governments need to serve the people. We need to be heard. We’re not heard, whereas Case said, “We’re indoctrinated and given propaganda, or they try to.” We need understanding, trust. We need to see governments that work in the national interest, don’t we? The national interest. We need fairness, leadership, restoring responsibility, choice, and resilience. What culture do we need? A bit like the old culture in our country where we had personal responsibility, free expression, we were safe, we were secure? Our property was secure, it’s not anymore.
Speaker 2: Incentive.
Malcolm Roberts: Incentive. You don’t want to be given incentive, you just want to let the government get out of the way, so you can use your own incentive. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3: Predictability.
Malcolm Roberts: Respected, predictability. Some kind of certainty. Honesty, honest leadership, be heard. People love to be heard, because it’s fundamental. I can tell you a lot of stories about the benefits of letting people be heard. How do we shape culture? It is now the most important thing in business. A switched-on business person will understand that he or she needs to provide leadership, but also develop a culture in which people can work freely and to the best of their ability. Culture is now far more important than a machinery, than buildings, than anything else in the business. Far more important. How did we slip out of our previous culture that was so productive, get to where we are now, and still in a downward spiral? How did we get into that? Think about how to shape and change culture.
Most of the people in this room have got grey hair like I have. In the 1970s, what was the attitude towards drinking and driving under the influence of alcohol? Yeah. “We all did it,” she says. That’s true, that’s fundamental, and that’s a very important point, because we all did it. State governments then got concerned about the number of fatalities on the road, so they started bringing in advertisements on TV and in the media saying things like, “65% of fatalities involve alcohol.” What impact did that have? Nothing, nothing. So they got smart and they used what politicians use, and that’s emotion to sell. Advertisers use emotion to sell. They showed pictures of dead babies on the road, mothers crying, drivers behind bars. What impact did that have? It raised awareness, but it didn’t change any behaviour, so it didn’t change the culture. So then Victoria became the first state in the world to introduce random breath testing. What did that do?
Speaker 3: Fear.
Malcolm Roberts: It is fearful, yes, but only if you drink and drive. It changed behaviour, it changed behaviour. Sorry, I missed that. Ran around it. The cops work up to that, though. Good people with a sense of humour. Think about this, it fundamentally changed. [inaudible 00:17:27], one of Australia’s foremost sociologists said that it fundamentally changed the culture in Australia with regard to families, men, and women. Men, instead of going out on Friday nights and Saturday nights alone, they needed drivers, so they went with their girlfriends and wives. Now, that’s funny, and it’s meant to be funny, but it’s truthful. It’s truthful. It changed the culture dramatically with regard to the sexes in this country, because it used to be boys’ night on Friday and sometimes Saturday, right? Let me ask you. We just said that the behaviour in the past was drinking and driving is okay and the behaviour was people drank and drove. What’s the behaviour now largely? People do not drink and drive. What’s the attitude? You can legislate behaviour, you can’t legislate attitude.
But what’s the attitude now? If you’re caught drinking and driving, it’s shameful. The attitude has changed to catch up with the behaviour, and that’s significant. Culture is basically a combination of behaviour and attitudes. What people think about what they do and what they do. Remember that, legislation and laws are about behaviour. I won’t go into that in any more detail, but there are many other things there. Let’s look at some of the major global initiatives, global initiatives, that are occurring in this country, our country. Education is really indoctrination, corrupting our children. I haven’t gotten to this today. My wife is an American and Australian, very proudly dual citizen, very proudly citizen of Australia. She was reading on the lounge as I was leaving, and she said, “Get a load of this.”
They did a survey of people in America who believe in the woke rubbish. They were all college graduates, because university is the place where they infect people’s minds and they include that in teachers. Teachers go out and infect kids’ minds, so we’re now seeing our children’s sexuality being distorted as early as four or five years of age. We’re seeing gender dysphoria, which is a normal part of adolescents for a very small minority, now being distorted into mutilation and cutting off genitals, cutting off breasts. If a parent gets involved and says to the child, “Come and have a talk,” in Victoria, that parent can be thrown in jail.
Rockefeller, in the late 19th century, said, “We don’t want education systems to produce brain surgeons, ballet dancers, sportsmen, businessmen, doctors, we want them to produce cannon fodder, factory fodder.” Don’t think this has been a deliberate dumbing down. ABC, I questioned them in senate estimates, “Why have you got a page devoted to Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, which is complete crap?” Because, Senator Roberts, it’s in the national curriculum. We get the national curriculum in front of us in the senate estimates to say, “Is Dark Emu anywhere in the national curriculum?” “No, Senator Roberts. Not one bit.” The ABC is lying. Why is it lying? Okay, that’s our children being mutilated and corrupted by our education system. Let’s look at our health system. COVID has destroyed… Sorry, sorry. Government’s dishonest, deceitful, inhuman response to COVID has destroyed our healthcare system. We have 7,000 nurses still furloughed in Queensland, because they wouldn’t take an experimental gene therapy-based injection. Yet we were told by Palaszczuk and by Yvette D’Ath, “We need all hands on deck.”
We see a 40% increase in ambulances carrying coronary care patients. Yvette D’Ath, the health minister says, “I wonder what that could be.” All of this. I won’t go into the details, I don’t have time, but I asked for the data on COVID severity and transmissibility. The chief medical officer eventually gave it to me and it shows quite clearly on his graph, his graph, not mine, that the severity of COVID is low to moderate. We were told it was severe. Low to moderate, we were all going to die. If you think about it and you break that down, COVID is very stratified. It doesn’t affect children, it doesn’t affect teenagers, it affects very few young adults, middle-aged adults, it does affect some people over 65. Some, some. When you rule that out, COVID is very low severity compared to even some past flus. On the chief medical officer’s diagram, it showed lower severity than some past flus, but we turned our country upside down, stole freedoms, and disrespected people. Took away basic human rights. Why? That’s where we get to. We saw coercion, compulsion.
We saw the leader of this country, the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, lie repeatedly every day for a fortnight saying there are no vaccine mandates in this country. He funded it, he bought them, he gave them to the states, indemnified the states, made the data accessible, so the states could enforce the vaccine mandates. Yeah. The TGA, supposed to look after people. I was talking about ivermectin. This is the first time anywhere that we have withdrawn a proven, safe, effective, affordable, accessible treatment. That works and where it’s been used around the world, it has worked. It has stopped COVID in its tracks, but that was withdrawn from us, so that people had no alternative, but this mad shot. I’ll say it again, I don’t, don’t demean anyone who’s taken the injection. I saw a wonderful lady at an inquiry we ran, she came down from Toowoomba. She jumped up in the middle of the inquiry, lifted her shirt, and there was a scar from there to her pubic bone.
She nearly died three times, the surgeon operated for 12 hours to save her. A massive rupture in her main artery. She said she only got it, because it was safe and effective, she was told by Scott Morrison, and because she wanted to see her parents overseas in Sweden. We saw a national cabinet… The TGA. I was talking a lot about ivermectin. Got banned on YouTube for a while for talking about it, we kept talking about it. Now, the TGA sent me a threatening letter about two and a half, three and a half pages long saying that I’m advertising ivermectin. It’s against the law and they inserted quotes in the letter from where I supposedly was breaching the law. With a bully, you don’t count out to them. I wrote back a very brief letter, “Thank you for your letter. How dare you interfere with the duties of a duly elected senator representing the people of his state?” By the way, the federal government has blood on its hands. I got a response, “Thank you for your letter.”
Now, it’s difficult to stand up to bullies, because many of the things were brought in… The mandates were brought in about. I’m very much in favour of proven, safe, effective, affordable, accessible drugs. Proven, tested, proven. I’m completely against unproven, untested drugs. Even more so against drugs that are untested and forced on people through coercion. Even more so when they say, “If you want to feed your child, to keep your job, you will take this shot.” I don’t care about your attitude towards the shot, that’s your choice, but when someone has to be forced to keep his girls and boys being fed, that’s just inhuman. That’s what we got to. Medicinal cannabis, a wonderful treatment that Pauline and I have been pushing for quite some time, and are starting to get relaxed slowly and slowly, is banned for access – has minimal accessibility now, because it is a proven, safe, effective, affordable treatment that you cannot overdose on and that is wonderful for so many things. In the 1930s, it was the most prescribed medical treatment in America, and it was banned because of big pharma. That’s why, because it works and they can’t patent it.
Fluoride. To get a little bit of fluoride in our teeth… Some dentists disagree, but let’s assume that fluoride’s good for our teeth. Do we need to flush it through our toilets, wash our car wash our cars with it, water our lawns with it, shower in it just to get it on our teeth? It’s rubbish. That is also enforced medication, unless you buy a reverse osmosis filter. Then we’ve got the World Health Organisation developing international health regulations and a treaty for future epidemics. They want to take control, through that treaty, of our health system in this country. They will be telling you whether or not to take an injection, whether or not you’ll be locked down, whether or not you’ll be having various restrictions, and get this, they’re writing it, so that they can declare a potential pandemic. That can only become law if the donkeys in Canberra accept it and pass the legislation making it possible.
The World Health Organisation is a criminal, corrupt, incompetent, dishonest organisation. I belled them from the start. My very first speech in parliament in 2016, I said, “Get out of the UN.” Oz exit. The World Health Organisation is funded primarily by Germany and the United States, which are the two biggest homes of pharmaceuticals. No, no. He’s number three. I thought he was number two, he’s number three. No, he’s number three. I was corrected the other day. Bill Gates, who invests in injections, but we can talk more about him. Look at that family. We’ve covered children, health, family. The Family Law Act was brought in, it’s sourced from the United Nations. It’s been the slaughterhouse of the country, been crippling families. Look at our energy, our economic lifeblood. They’re destroying our energy now. We had the cheapest electricity in the world, we’ve now got amongst the most expensive, because of subsidies due to the crap that they’ve put up there on climate change. We can talk about climate change later. Who benefits from solar and wind subsidies?
No, some people do. They’re billionaires, including Malcolm Turnbull’s son. The billionaires who are feeding off these subsidies. If they’re so damn good, why would they need subsidies? We have the highest level of subsidies of any country in the world. We are the world’s largest exporters of hydrocarbon fuels, coal, and natural gas. The largest exporters. We can’t use it here. We can ship it to China and then we’ll buy their products back. When you are buying a product made in China, you are buying something that came from coal. They turn a blind eye of that. Look at our science, been completely destroyed. I might read a quote from Carl Sagan. Basically, our science has been destroyed, because anything they want us to do, they say, “Do it for the science.” If you don’t get a shot, you’re a granny killer, so they tell us lies.
Maurice Strong is the father of global warming, he concocted it. The man is a mass murderer, he’s responsible directly… Sorry, indirectly for 40 to 50 million deaths, and I’m happy to talk more about that in detail later. We have now government grants that are being funded in various entities to control the science, to give us propaganda. It’s not science at all. In the name of science, carbon dioxide. Do you know, does anyone know how much carbon dioxide’s in the atmosphere? 0.04%. That’s four one hundredths of 1%. Although Case put up a wonderful slide showing the greening of the planet, we are not responsible for that, because our carbon dioxide that we produce has no impact whatsoever on the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. None at all.
There have been two massive global experiments in 2009 and 2020 that proved that fundamentally, and I can discuss that in questions. Let’s have a look at our economy and look at tax. Multinational companies, since 1953, have paid zero or little company tax. 90% of Australia’s large companies are foreign owned and, since 1953, have paid zero or little company tax. Who pays the tax? We do. When you see the tax system… We’ll talk about that if I get time later. Our tax system is actually destroying competitive federalism, one of the core tenets of our constitution, and accountability in this country at state and federal level. Destroys it. Look at life itself. Some of the practises that have come in here that are anti-human. We can now have abortions in this state right up the term.
Yep. Three or four liberal nationals voted for it, the Labour Party voted for it, we didn’t vote for it, Katter didn’t vote for it. Yes. Not Victorian government, but in Victoria and in New York, some people are talking about legalising abortion to within three months after birth. Yes, that’s murder. Childhood mutilation, destroying life for kids for the rest of their lives. With puberty blockers destroying the adolescent mind, destroying accountability. Paedophiles are now being sanitised with the term… You don’t call them “Paedophiles,” you call them “Minor-attracted.” This is what they’re doing. Now, our food. We’re talking about fundamental things here, our food. They’re now talking about using lab meat. Meat that is not meat at all, but cultivated from fat cells and it’s thought that they’ll be carcinogenic. Highly cancerous. Certainly not fit for food. In-vitro meat. That’s what it’s called, lab meat or in-vitro meat. Grown in a Petri dish, fake meat, bugs. The Morrison Joyce government gave $64 million of taxpayer money in this country a few years ago to the 2021 UN Food Summit to develop bugs for food. Bill Gates was here in the country back in February and he met with Anthony Albanese. Anthony Albanese’s office said, “They talked about food, energy, climate, agriculture, and health.” Not one of those things does Bill Gates have any qualifications in. In every one of those things, he has enormous conflicts of financial interest and our prime minister’s listening to him. The banking system has been designed through regulation to enable the avoidance of accountability. The voice is a concoction to take control of our land as well, again, from the United Nations. It’ll destroy our constitution, it’ll feed the aboriginal industry. The aboriginal industry is one of the most serious blockers to the aboriginal advancement in this country. They are taking the money on the way through and controlling resources, controlling water, stealing this money. It’s unworkable, it’s hidden by deceit. Albanese won’t talk about the details of it (the voice), because he knows we will certainly reject it if we do, so he is madly trying to hide the details. There is no basis for it. The Uluru Statement from the Heart, I saw Nampijinpa Price, Jacinta Price, tear that apart.
There’s no basis for the Uluru Statement, none at all. It came originally from Zaire (Africa). Copy. Immigration. Anthony Albanese in February last year, before the election, said the federal government at the time was blowing up immigration to cover its sins. Used to be about 250,000 come in a year. Albanese wants to take it to over 300,000 a year, 330,000 a year. Amazing what happens when he gets into office. Then think about language, language is a system controlling thought. Examples of labels. If you have a certain expression of your own free will, you can be called a transphobia, a racist, a homophobe, Islamophobe, a Nazi, a climate denier. That’s all designed to suppress debate. People like Case and I, we won’t be suppressed. You can call us climate deniers, we don’t deny climate at all, but that has held back academics in this country from discussing a lot of the topics.
Labels are the refuge of the ignorant or the dishonest. If someone calls me a label, I say, “Thank you very much for admitting that I’ve just won the debate, because you didn’t present any data, you didn’t present an argument. Therefore, I’ve won. If you had the data and the argument, you would’ve presented it, but you haven’t, because you haven’t got it.” They also use language to turn the hideous into attractive things using soft or attractive words. It’s gender affirmation, not mutilation. The identified sex and bodily mutilation is now called transitioning. A male body wearing lipstick and a dress is transgender. No, he’s still a she. I’m not downplaying the very, very small percentage of people who have serious gender dysphoria, they need our support, they need our love, and above all, they need our truth. They’re turning the beneficial to harmful. Affirmation, for example, as we’ve talked about. Greenhouse gases, fossil fuels. They call them fossil fuels. They have liberated humanity. What have we used for lighting 170 years ago? Whale oil. The whales think coal is wonderful. What do we use for cooking and for heating? Wood.
The forest thinks coal is wonderful. Coal has a far higher energy density than just about anything except uranium. They give us propaganda to dumb us down, to disengage us, to deceit, and hide us. The language is under attack, yet it’s hidden. The truth is under attack, yet people don’t see it. I’ve got that, I talked to Abby. Thank you. The next form of what drives behaviour and shapes culture is our leaders. Our leaders. People assume, don’t we? That our leaders are doing what’s best for the country and what’s best for us.
Speaker 3: Used to.
Malcolm Roberts: Used to. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. People follow leaders who are honest and effective, yet now we’re finding that our leaders are dishonest and corrosive. Adam Creighton, who is a pretty good journalist in my opinion. He’s an economist, he’s based in America, he works for News Corp. News Corp went woke, because they have a lot of investments and advertising coming from pharmaceutical companies. Adam Creighton, I’ll give him his due, he’s a conservative economist. You’d call him that, wouldn’t you, Case, conservative? He’s writing in The Australian, he wrote this. He quoted someone, I’m going to ask you who he quoted.
“Look what the West are doing to their own people. It is all about the destruction of family, of cultural and national identity, perversion and the abuse of children, including paedophilia, all of which are declared normal in their life.” Who said that? Yeah, it was Vladimir Putin who said that. He’s opposing the globalists. I’m not necessarily endorsing him, but I do take pride in the fact that I’m the only senator in the Senate, when they introduced their motion talking about going to support the Ukraine, I’m the only one who said, “Just wait and ask a few damn questions,” because I’m tired of following the Yanks. I love the Yanks, I’ve been in all 50 of their states, I’ve worked in eight of their states, I’ve been educated in the states. They’re wonderful, wonderful people, but their government is hideous. It’s been overtaken by the globalists for decades now. That’s a fact.
What the hell happened? I’ll tell you what happened. The United Nations and allied globalist agencies have captured our bureaucracy, some of our politicians, and changed the system. One of our politicians, who I’ve got a lot of time for, he’s now retired, because he didn’t get pre-selection in the Liberal Party. One of our senators, he spoke in 1994 or 1998 at a conference extolling the virtues of UN Agenda 21. When I found out about that in 2015, actually 2013, I wrote to him and said, “What are you doing?” Took him two years, but he finally met with me. This is before I got in the Senate. He dodged the question, but in doing so, he acknowledged the basis of my request, because he would’ve been conned into supporting Agenda 21, because Robert Hill, the senator, environment minister, is the one who pushed that rubbish.
He is the one, along with John Howard and John Anderson, who stole farmers’ property rights to comply with the UN’s Kyoto Protocol. Didn’t know that, did you? No. I thought John Howard was a wonderful prime minister, then I started doing some research. No, let’s talk about it. John Howard brought in the… He was the first leader of a major party in this country to have a carbon dioxide tax and emissions trading scheme. Did you know that? No. He was the one who brought in the renewable energy target, which is now destroying our electricity sector. Case knew that. He was the one who said we would not sign the Kyoto Protocol, but we will comply with it. He had a choice, his government had a choice. Do you shut down industry? No, because we would’ve revolted in 1996/97 if that had been the case, so what did he do?
He went to the people who are most vulnerable, the farmers, because they don’t have adequate representation, they’re small in number, and his government made a deal with the states to steal their property rights, to control what they grow, to control what they clear. Now, he had a problem. Section 51, Clause 31 of the Constitution says, “If the federal government interferes with someone’s property rights or rights to use their property, they must pay just terms compensation.” We’re looking at, back in those days, 100 to $200 billion in compensation. Whoa, can’t go there, so the Howard government did deals with the states, because the states don’t have any such restrictions. So they legislated native vegetation protection. How can you disagree with that? It was really stealing the farmer’s rights to use their land, because they’re telling them they couldn’t do certain things. That’s a fundamental for Western civilization. It’s a fundamental of the Liberal Party. You do not interfere with property rights, you defend them. That’s what that Howard Anderson government did, it stole farmers’ property rights and it’s been hollowed out even more. That’s what’s happened. The allied agencies I talk about are the World Economic Forum, Club of Rome, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, WWF, Greenpeace. All unelected, low accountability. This is the global governance that they would want to shove down our throat. The United Nations’ senior bureaucrats have told us their aim is to have an unelected, socialist global governance. Many of them have said that. Correct, Case? They’ve all said it. Not all, sorry, a lot of them have said it. And they have admitted that climate is about redistributing resources and redistributing control. They want to allocate resources and control the means of production. That’s communism. Without owning resources.
They want to hollow out the regions, our regions are being hollowed out. Our industry has been hollowed out, our industry has been exported to China. We pay subsidies to the Chinese to build wind turbines and solar panels using our coal. They install them here, we subsidise that. They run them, we subsidise that. That raises the price of electricity. The number one cost component of manufacturing is not labour, it is now electricity. When you raise that price artificially, what are you doing to your manufacturers? Shutting them down and sending them to China. Then we send them more of our coal, they produce 4.5 billion tonnes of coal. We produce 500 billion total and export most of it. They produce nine times the coal we do and they want our coal. They’re growing phenomenally, because they’re doing what we did in the West using hydrocarbon fuels. A miracle fuel, miracle fuel. As Case pointed out, hydrocarbon fuels produce no pollution these days. Tiny bit of pollution, car exhaust, but it’s almost nothing. It’s 1000th the amount that was in cars in the 1970s, just half a century ago. 1000th.
They’re hollowing out the individual spirit and the sense of responsibility. They’re hollowing out the family spirit, they’re hollowing out the national identity and spirit. Who pays for all of this? We do, that’s exactly it. Lost jobs, lost freedoms, and we lose financially by transferring our wealth to the wealthy. COVID, they didn’t shut Bunnings, they didn’t shut… Made the coals, but they shut the corner hardware store, they shut the corner grocery store, little restaurants. Small businesses got hammered, because you don’t control small businessmen and women. They keep people in fear and they make us afraid of being human, they make us afraid of other humans. These humans, we’ve got to… Humans, the UN tells us, are greedy, rapacious, uncaring, unreasonable, and irresponsible. They’re not, we’re not. Then they say, “To protect you against that sort of person, we need more government.” What makes up government? Humans. It’s illogical, and yet we fall for it.
Some of us do. They lock in fear, they lock in insecurity, and then they say the problem is humans. Now, government. Thomas Jefferson said many years ago… Very, very, very wise American founding father, said, “The government has to be kept small and minimal at central level, because it is so open to the control of the ego and the control of other people. Government enables control, government invites control,” and that’s what you’re seeing. Our constitution was set up so that the federal government, just like the American government, which came up with the idea, had minimal central power, the states have most of the authority to do things. That was done deliberately. Joh Bjelke-Petersen, most people in this room would remember him. Joh abolished death duties, and what happened? They all came to Queensland to die.
Okay, that is funny. The reality is they came to Queensland, the retired people, so that if they died, or when they died, they would leave their money to their children here. What happened as a result of that? Queensland grew, Gold Coast took off. What else happened? What happened in the other states?
Speaker 3: Everybody lost money.
Malcolm Roberts: Yeah, they lost money, so what did they do? They abolished death duties. Now, Bill Shorten and the Labour Party are talking about bringing it back at a central level where you can’t abolish it. You can, but you’d have to get a lot of support. That’s what I mean. They centralise and they say the problem is humans, but the problem is government. Common themes of the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and the other globalists are fear-based. Their language is emotional, they wrap terms in lovely terms like sustainability, gender affirmation. Sustainability in the UN is only sustainable with subsidies. It’s not sustainable, it’s a crop.
They drive corrosive, anti-human culture based on spreading fear and guilt. Children in schools today, from when they first enter school right through the university, are riddled with guilt and fear. Completely unfounded, because we’re the best species on this planet. The UN World Economic Forum is driven with the aim of being in control. Then what they do is they transfer wealth through donkeys in parliament to multi-billionaires who then support their agenda, they then drive grants to academics to support their agenda, and then they label, berate, and humiliate anyone in academia who stands up.
So why are the climate sceptics all retired? Look at Peter Ridd, he stood up. Wonderful man. He stood up and he lost his job as a result of it. Maurice Strong knew that systems drove behaviour, so there are systems all around us… See the little labels when you go to buy a car or a refrigerator, an appliance. How much carbon dioxide [inaudible 00:49:23]. Oh, my god. Terrible. See what they’re doing? They’re reinforcing everywhere. How much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere? 0.04%. Some people will say, “Oh but Senator Roberts, cyanide can kill you at less concentration.” Yeah, it can kill you, but cyanide kills you through a chemical action. This is a physical action, which means 0.04 cannot hurt you. It cannot hurt you, it cannot hurt our climate.
They dumbed down society, which destroys responsibility. Then they create victims, whether it be women, whether it be aboriginals, whether it be Muslims, whether it be any other minority group, and some of them fall for it. When they create a victim, what are they doing to those people? Marginalising? Not quite, but what they’re doing now is they’re removing responsibility for their position. They’re destroying responsibility, they’re destroying people. Fortunately, a lot of people don’t believe it, but some do. What I’m saying is they’re destroying people just to get their narrative across. Destroys responsibility, creates and perpetuates dependence. Victims go through life in a dependent state and then, for every victim, what else do they create?
Speaker 2: Perpetrator.
Malcolm Roberts: Perpetrator, exactly. They sow division and separation. So they create people who don’t think for themselves, they make them malleable, so the thinking is gone, as this man said in the early days. They also destroy productive capacity, look at our electricity sector now. This has not been accidental. UN Agenda 21. It’s now 2030, because they didn’t get it in by the start of the 21st century. Not a thin book. According to governments in Canberra, initially, that didn’t exist. Didn’t exist. Then, when we proved it, or when other people proved it a few years ago, they said, “Oh yeah, but it doesn’t mean anything.” They then legislated as Australian legislation. Who drives the UN agenda? BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street. The UN was formed to actually push this stuff. That is part of their reason for being. Some of the destructive systems are… I’ll go into that in question and answer, I just want to come back to now – Australia’s potential. We have the people, our education is shot, but we still have good people. We’re very innovative, creative, and enthusiastic people, very good workers. We have the world’s best resources, the United Nations have said that in this report. We have huge opportunity with markets in Asia, the biggest markets in the world, and our country is clean, so we have huge potential. The solutions that I see are several. Small central governments, send the services back to the states where they belong. The education department, the health department, the environmental department should be abolished in Canberra and sent back to the states. That’s where they need to be. We don’t need 4000 bureaucrats in Canberra with not one skill. Not one skill. Who’s paying for that? We need to get back to restoring governance based on data and facts. I can tell you now, every major problem in this country is due to that building in Canberra. I’m serious, every major problem.
And they make decisions contradicting the facts and the data, not with the facts and data. Happy to go into that in more detail. We need to comprehensively fix our tax system, comprehensive tax reform. Who are the supreme sovereigns of this country? The people, because we’re the only ones who can change the constitution. That means we are the ones who determine the government. We’ve been asleep, we have just tolerated any crap they dish up. Instead of voting on emotion, we need to vote on strength of character, policies, and candidates’ values. We need everyone in this room to speak up, spread these words, we need to very much reinvigorate ourselves with our belief in humanity. Look at the person next to you. Are they criminals? They’re pretty decent and caring.
They’re pretty decent and caring. They’re not criminals, but that’s what they’re making out. We need to be very pro-nature, because nature is being ruined by the United Nations. We need to be very pro-freedom in all dimensions. Not only speech, but in all dimensions. Need to be pro-Australia, we need to be pro-Christian. Doesn’t mean we have to go to church, but I’m talking about Christian values. Christian values are fundamental to a free enterprise, personal responsibility. Freedom needs Christianity and Christianity needs freedom. They are fundamental. I don’t go to church, but I believe in the teachings of Jesus, Buddha, and many of the other sages, but we need to speak up when they start to dismantle our Christian churches. We need to restore sovereignty, get the hell out of the United Nations. Just remember that politicians are supposed to serve us, the people. Look at our policies, the federal and state government’s policy in terms of energy. Just think about the cost of these things to the everyday Australian. The cost of housing destroyed by huge immigration, which lifts demand for houses, whether you’re rental or ownership.
Energy, taxation, gas prices. The solution is reform and getting back to basics.
So what we have to do as citizens of this country is take responsibility. We have to call out the Greens, because the Greens keep saying, in their election campaigns – “Lots of free stuff here. Vote for us and we’ll get lots of free stuff.” That’s the road to ruin, as Argentinians found out, and we are on the road. We need to stand up for Christian values, we need to remember that we are inherently wonderful as humans, we need to call out the UN, and we need to work together to restore our country, our nation, and our families. Just remember this, please. Governments cannot create prosperity. They cannot. They can only consume it. They can distort it. Who creates prosperity? That’s right, the people. We need the government back in its role and citizens back to our role. Use our constitutional power, the power and the ballot box.
I’ll say again, we are winning, and I’d love to answer questions about Naomi Wolf and the podcast we made with her yesterday, because she’s got 11 points that are fabulous. We have a long way to go, but COVID has really woken people. We had some people awake to the climate scam before, now more people are awake to climate scam, because they’ve seen the COVID mismanagement and they’ve gone, “Hang on, this is similar to climate control.”
So let’s restore the truth about humanity and use it to rekindle human progress, so that we humans are bound and flourish.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/DFzp4kOgB40/hqdefault.jpg360480Sheenagh Langdonhttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSheenagh Langdon2023-05-03 12:28:222023-05-03 12:28:29My 1 hour speech to a town hall on COVID mismanagement
Queensland community, I speak to the National Reconstruction Fund Corporation Bill 2023.
One Nation has, on occasion, pointed out that Labor will run a government for the benefit of their union boss mates, the Liberals for the benefit of their big business mates, and the teals and the Greens for the benefit of their sugar daddies, the billionaire climate-change carpetbaggers. So it was with amusement that I saw an exchange between Minister Gallagher and Senator Rennick on social media over the weekend. Senator Rennick mentioned in a speech that he did not agree with the slush funds that the Liberal-Nationals set up during their government.
I appreciate and compliment Senator Rennick for his integrity. He has shown that repeatedly in this parliament and outside.
Senator Gallagher could not resist. Oblivious to the irony of her comments, Minister Gallagher said Senator Rennick had ‘belled the cat’, admitting to ‘slush funds and rorts galore’. ‘The Bell and the Cat’ is a medieval fable—a cautionary tale on the nature of impossible tasks. Admittedly, it’s an appropriate choice, given the impossibility of the Liberals ever running government for the benefit of the people.
But the irony of the minister’s decision to engage the Liberals on the issue of rorting is tone deaf, considering that this bill was on the Notice Paper at the time. The minister’s words are suggestive of a quite different fable—the pot calling the kettle black, which is 16th-century Spanish homily in which somebody accuses someone else of a fault which the accuser shares and, therefore, is an example of psychological projection—that’s a polite way of saying ‘hypocrisy’.
The National Reconstruction Fund Corporation Bill 2023 is 100 per cent pork barrel—the very thing of which the minister accuses others. This bill creates a $15 billion fund to oversee Australia’s reconstruction. It would have been helpful to define the word ‘reconstruction’, Minister. Minister Husic must have overlooked the fundamental reason for this bill. The word ‘reconstruction’ does not appear in this bill. At a guess, reconstruction must involve infrastructure spending, right? Wrong. The word ‘infrastructure’ does not appear in this bill either. The word was added by the crossbench in the other place, the House of Representatives, as part of their amendment banning—banning!—certain types of infrastructure spending.
The Greens and teals were helpful, as usual! For clarity, that was sarcasm.
The bill does provide for spending on priority projects, yet there’s no definition of what a priority project actually is. I understand these will be manufacturing projects. Why, then, does the bill not mention the word ‘manufacturing’?
Not once is manufacturing mentioned. This is significant because the bill allows the minister to fill in all these details later. Yet if these much needed initiatives—reconstruction, manufacturing and infrastructure—were the purpose of this bill then section 5 would define these concepts and set out what is and what is not ‘reconstruction’, ‘manufacturing’ and ‘infrastructure’. It does not. It fails to do this basic step.
I expected to see a statement of fairness, ensuring projects are funded based on the needs of the region in which the projects are located, having mind to the overarching concept of national interest. There’s a novelty! It doesn’t do that, either—which is not a novelty, because that’s the way this parliament works. It’s not in the national interest.
This bill does have a section on consultation, requiring the corporation to consult with the Australian Banking Association—Minister Jones’s best mates are the first ones on the list; what a surprise!—and the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors, the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the Australian Investment Council, Industry Super Australia and the Law Council of Australia. What an odd list. If this was about infrastructure, the requirement would be to consult with Infrastructure Australia; it’s not there. If this was about manufacturing, then you could consult with Manufacturing Australia, or, to drive manufacturing into a new era, one could consult—one would consult—with the Australian Advanced Manufacturing Council, but no. Taking Australian industry into the emerging space industry offers the prospect of billions in new sales and high-paying breadwinner jobs. The Space Industry Association of Australia should have been on that list; it was not.
There’s $15 billion in funding without once mentioning the fundamental purpose of the spending—$15 billion, without once requiring consultation with the bodies that could help direct this spending to the national interest.
There are no checks, no balances, no guidance to the minister, no guidance to the board of the corporation and no KPIs—key performance indicators. There’s no measure of success, no measure of failure. To call this bill a blank cheque is an insult to blank cheques. And it’s an insult to taxpayers, whose money is being spent.
The Senate Economics Legislation Committee’s inquiry into the bill does cast some light on where this money will be spent. The inquiry heard from multiple witnesses advocating for spending the $15 billion on solar and wind energy boondoggles—more carpetbagging. Australia already has the clean energy fund, spending $25 billion on unreliable, weather dependent power to take us back to before the industrial revolution. If the transition to weather dependent power was actually in the national interest and was dictated by market forces, these solar and wind carpetbaggers would not be buzzing around reconstruction funding like flies in search of excrement. I foreshadow that I will be moving an amendment in the committee of the whole which requires that a corporation cannot invest in an energy project that meets the criteria for funding by the Clean Energy Council—no double-dipping. There is no justification for using this $15 billion of taxpayer money to make Australia’s energy capacity worse.
The title of the bill raises an important question: what exactly are we reconstructing from? Are we reconstructing from three years of ruinous COVID lockdowns and restrictions that gutted the economy—destroyed the economy?
Are we reconstructing from a generation of ruinous net zero measures that have seen cheap, reliable base-load power replaced with expensive and short-lived materials-heavy wind and solar power? Are we reconstructing from the exporting of Australia’s manufacturing sector to China under the Hawke-Keating Labor government in the eighties?
Indeed, discussion on the nuclear subs purchased last week shows that former prime minister Keating has lost none of his loyalty to China. Are we reconstructing from a generation of oppressive development constraints provided across the range of government?
Is it red tape from an out-of-control bureaucracy that demands more and more power with less and less oversight in pursuit of a war against common sense, freedom and basic decency? Is it green tape, designed to make rich, pampered inner-city luvvies feel better about their own environmental footprint while destroying any chance the rural sector has for a profitable business? Or is it blue tape from the mountain of unelected, unaccountable foreign bureaucrats spreading a gospel of everyday Australians having less so that predatory billionaires can own it all? It’s about Australians having less so that predatory billionaires can own it all. That’s their ideological bible. It is not the economy that needs reconstruction; it is the government that needs reconstruction.
Here’s One Nation’s reconstruction plan: just stop it. Stop it. Stop strangling the life out of the private sector. Stop strangling the life out of small business. Stop strangling the life out of families and taxpayers. Stop using taxpayers’ money to pick winners and losers amongst new business ventures, when that task should rightly be performed by the free market and by personal enterprise and initiative, leading to personal responsibility. Stop rewarding your mates in the solar and wind sector, who have spent tens of millions of dollars earnt from renewable solar and wind boondoggles to get pet parliamentarians elected who now have seriously conflicted loyalties. Stop rewarding party donors with taxpayer money dressed up as reconstruction funding. Stop the cronyism.
Australia is not and never will be a centrally planned economy. In fact, no economy will be centrally planned; they all collapse. We have a trillion-dollar deficit, and the Albanese government is throwing around $15 billion like it were Monopoly money. It’s time that the government got out of the way of the private sector, personal enterprise, and let the profit motive and free enterprise competition decide what gets built and what does not. Let the customers decide.
The National Reconstruction Fund Corporation Bill 2023 is last-century Soviet thinking, a product of the comrades deep in Trades Hall who do not seem to have noticed that the Soviet Union has fallen, because it failed to maintain the standard of living of everyday people. Standards of living in Australia are decreasing—the reverse of what is happening to energy prices. That is one of the many causes. This bill is ideological rubbish designed to reward businesses who promote joining union bosses. That is the sentence the minister will put in later.
Subject to amendments, One Nation opposes this bill.
As a servant to the people of Australia and particularly Queensland, I speak on the Safeguard Mechanism (Crediting Amendment) Bill 2023. Here we go again! Once more, the Labor government is putting a Liberal-National climate policy on steroids in a race to see how quickly both of them can destroy our beloved country to appease their globalist masters.
Chris Bowen and Anthony Albanese are building, in this bill, on the safeguard mechanism that Malcolm Turnbull and Greg Hunt introduced in 2015. This bill establishes a new form of carbon credits—or, more correctly, carbon dioxide credits, or, more correctly, a carbon dioxide tax—naming them safeguard mechanism credit units, or SMCs. You might ask: what is a safeguard mechanism credit unit defined as? Is it nine cow farts worth? Ten burps? The entire concept of counting carbon dioxide emissions is a scam; it’s a fraud. While we can poke fun at the scam, the lack of detail in this bill is incredibly serious. Do not let the title fool anyone. The definition of a safeguard mechanism credit is not in the bill. If the parliament passes this bill, we’ll just have to trust the minister or some bureaucrat to tell us later.
The biggest producers of goods in this country will be told to cut their production of carbon dioxide, with the amount not defined in the bill. It may be 4.9 per cent a year. If they don’t, they’ll be forced to buy undefined carbon dioxide credits—an undefined carbon dioxide tax. I use the word ‘producers’ deliberately because this bill will apply to companies in this country that actually make something—or what’s left of them. Because they’ve been forced to buy carbon dioxide credits, these companies will be forced to make less of the things they make and be forced to make them more expensive. It doesn’t matter what fancy scheme the government wants to dress this up as; it is a carbon dioxide tax. It’s a tax on production, and we all know that whenever we tax something we get less of it.
Take a look around at everything you have right now—your phone, your house, your car. If you want a new one in the future, or more things for your children, too bad; the Labor government has decided Australians have too much already and what’s left will only be for the rich, who can afford it. The Greens will smear and label me again for simply telling the truth, yet I believe we should come to parliament to make Australia prosper—not force unnecessary scarcity to appease the sun gods and the climate carpetbaggers. That’s the general rule that should be followed for a prosperous Australia: do what’s in the national interest.
Let’s look at the globalists. This legislation is not in Australia’s interest. Gutless politicians are doing it all to satisfy unelected and unaccountable foreign organisations. All of Australia’s climate legislation has abundant references to satisfying our international commitments, including the UN’s Kyoto protocol, the UN’s Paris Agreement, the UN Agenda 21, UN 2050 net zero and so on and on, with the UN World Economic Forum alliance. The creators of these international agreements are unelected and unaccountable. These foreign bureaucrats believe the prosperity of Australians should come second to their desire to transfer wealth from our people into the hands of predatory billionaires. Don’t be fooled. While this supposedly green pipedream dresses itself as virtuous, the billionaires of the world have untold amounts invested in wind, solar, batteries, green hydrogen and other scams in which they demand a return. Having predictably failed in the free market, they must now hijack international organisations to pressure governments into the forced uptake of their failed investments. With such large amounts of money at stake, the billionaires can afford to buy guns for hire at many different levels.
The teal Independents—Monique Ryan, Allegra Spender, Zoe Daniel, Kylea Tink, Sophie Scamps and Zali Steggall—all peculiarly made submissions to the consultation paper for this bill, arguing it should go even further. Did they declare their clear conflicts of interest? Collectively, the teals received millions of dollars from Climate 200 for their election campaign. Climate 200’s principal donor, Simon Holmes a Court, has massive investments in wind, solar, battery and hydrogen scams. He, along with many other climate billionaires, will benefit hugely from this bill’s passage. It seems the teals’ calls for transparency don’t apply to them and donations aren’t dirty if they come from ‘sugar daddy and carpetbagger’ Holmes a Court. Equally, in this debate I hope Senator David Pocock declares the same conflict of interest that arises from Climate 200’s donations to his campaign, making him a teal. This bill allows the climate billionaires to harvest taxpayer money through their scams like carbon capture, locking up productive farms and other cons. What schemes will be entitled to harvest taxpayer money? What will be the criteria for being accepted? What integrity checks will be in place? Nothing.
Some years ago, Euro poll stated ’95 per cent of Europe’s carbon dioxide trading is tainted with corruption’. Nothing in this bill has the answers. We just have to wait for a minister or a bureaucrat to tell us later, after the Senate has passed the bill, giving them incredible power. We do know that the safeguard mechanism credits will be defined as ‘eligible international emissions units’, meaning they will be able to be traded overseas, globally. As even the Australian Financial Markets Association noted during consultation: ‘There is no good reason for making the credits internationally trade-able’—other than perhaps helping the globalist billionaires suck the country dry.
Let’s look at the carbon dioxide credits whitewash. There are too many problems with this bill to fully address in just 15 minutes. We can’t let that time pass, though, without acknowledging one of the greatest exercises in political whitewashing this parliament has seen—the Chubb carbon dioxide credits review. Australian National University environmental law professor and expert, Professor Andrew Macintosh, said Australia’s carbon market is a fraud on the environment, suffers from a distinct lack of integrity and is potentially wasting billions of dollars in taxpayer’s money. In response to this scathing criticism of the integrity of the carbon dioxide credit system, energy minister Chris Bowen rushed to appoint a panel to review the integrity of carbon dioxide credits, an independent panel, supposedly, but how independent can a government-appointed panel really be?
People will be shocked. The government appointed a somehow independent panel and claimed there was nothing to see here. It made a few superficial recommendations and gave the carbon dioxide credit industry a great big fat tick. As Macintosh responded on January 2023: ‘The review panel acknowledge the scientific evidence criticising the carbon credits scheme,’ but says, ‘It was also provided with evidence to the contrary yet it did not disclose what that evidence was or what it relates to. The public is simply expected to trust that the evidence exists.’ That is an environmental professor seeing right through this. What are they hiding? The Chubb review was a complete sham, designed to give a scam-filled industry a green tick of health to pave the way for this bill. With Ian Chubb’s whitewash review conveniently in place, Labor has given itself permission to rush this bill through, while the scientists who originally raised the integrity issues scream that none of the protests have been addressed. Chubb has repeatedly taken money from Liberal-National and Labor-Greens federal governments to peddle unfounded, false and scary claims. He is a paid gun for hire to push the government line.
Next let us consider the fact, the fact, that we are already at net zero. Why do we need a carbon dioxide credit scheme anyway? As I explained to this chamber in September last year, Australia is already at net zero. Where is the confetti, the streamers, the champagne, the celebrations? Taken directly from clause 4 of the Paris agreement, and as Assistant Minister McAllister in the debate of the climate change bill said:
Net zero is a balance between human production of emissions and removal of those emissions by environmental sinks.
Our country has so many forests that Australia already sequesters or sinks three times more carbon dioxide than we produce. Then when you consider the fact that we are entirely surrounded by oceans, it is even more so. Even to people foolishly believing Australia needs to carry out the net zero kamikaze mission, on net zero we are already the world’s heroes without doing a damn thing.
Let us look at the delegated powers. While the entire concept on which this bill is based is flawed, the way it operates seems to be even worse. The Safeguard Mechanism (Crediting) Amendment Bill 2022 is a shell containing little detail about how the largest producers, manufacturers and resource companies will be regulated. Instead, the bill places huge power in the minister, with out-of-touch federal bureaucrats in the Canberra bubble left to later fill in the detail.
To my colleagues in this chamber: I urge you to please think carefully about the process this bill implements. This is not a vote on some companies cutting production by five per cent—4.9 per cent, five per cent; that number is not even in this bill. It is another ministerial power to decide. This is a bill to give the minister a blank cheque for who this policy will apply to, how much they will be forced to cut, how quickly they will be forced to do it and much, much more.
While some people may consider the current proposal reasonable and proportionate, this nearly unlimited power will almost certainly be abused in the future. Almost all of this policy will be made via legislative instrument, an executive dictate from the minister. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The Senate granting this wide-open power over some of the most significant changes to our economy is unconscionable. The design of this bill to minimise parliamentary scrutiny—the deliberate design of this bill to minimise parliamentary scrutiny—spits in the face of the parliament, spits in the face of democracy and spits in the face of the Australian people who you are meant to serve in this chamber.
Let’s think about the consultation. Predictably, we can assume that Labor will—wrongly—assure us that they have consulted widely on this bill. Just like we saw the Treasurer wanting to ‘start a conversation’ about tearing down the economic fabric of our country, Labor’s consultation process is a sham designed to give them cover for doing whatever they please. To consult means actually listening. Labor has no intention of listening. Numerous stakeholders noted the staggered release of the draft bill, the legislative instruments and the Chubb review. Combined, these steps limited the ability to consider the implications of the proposed reforms. How can Labor claim to have consulted, when many of the detailed operational elements of this entire policy are contained in legislative instruments which do not yet exist? How could anyone be consulted on those legislative means? That’s not unusual for Labor.
The bill is unfounded. It is damaging for Australia—it is suicidal—and it is we the people who will pay. One Nation opposes this bill and, if passed, will work to unwind it and tear down the global climate scam that drives this bill.
I want to make a couple more comments—basic questions. Why are China and India not doing what this Labor-Greens-teal-Pocock coalition government is doing? Why is Russia not doing it? Why are we punishing Australian families, employers and workers? Why can the other countries have the benefit of our high-quality coal and gas, hydrocarbon fuels, yet we cannot? Think about the primacy of energy; it’s in everything. We’re killing our productive capacity and our children’s future.
Secondly, the costs of the Labor-Greens-teal-Pocock bill are extraordinarily high. Why are we punishing Australian employers and families? Remember that primacy of energy. That will see prices skyrocketing continually.
Thirdly, there’s no justification in science for cutting carbon dioxide from human activity—no empirical scientific data, no logical scientific points to back this up. I’ve asked them, and they’ve repeatedly run. There’s no specific quantified effect of carbon dioxide from human activity, none at all. There’s conclusive evidence from two global experiments that overwhelmingly prove that cutting carbon dioxide from human activity has no effect. In 2009 and 2020 we had global recessions, almost depressions, and the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continued to increase, despite dramatic cuts in carbon dioxide from human activity. It’s pointless. Nature alone determines the level of carbon dioxide. Humans have no effect.
Let’s ask the fourth question. Why are we following in the footsteps of crooks? The father of global warming was senior UN bureaucrat and oil billionaire Maurice Strong. He morphed it into climate change, climate apocalypse and climate breakdown. He was involved in the UN food-for-oil scandal. He was involved in corruption in the water systems of the western United States. He exiled himself in China, running away from the American police. He formed the UN’s climate body that is really a political body. He was the director and founder of the Chicago Climate Exchange, aiming to make billions of dollars trading carbon dioxide credits, like Al Gore’s company, Generation Investment Management. The whole thing is a scam to make billionaires richer, and you in Labor and you in the Greens are following in the footsteps of a crook, Maurice Strong.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/jZsuBa5-Z38/hqdefault.jpg360480Sheenagh Langdonhttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSheenagh Langdon2023-03-29 13:42:412023-03-29 13:42:46Labor and the Greens have decided you have too much stuff
One Nation will not be supporting this motion to suspend standing orders. The real question is something that lies beneath this suspension order request, and that is: are the Greens patsies and fools, or are they complicit in fraud? They’re claiming an escalating climate emergency—a climate breakdown. Here we go again, with no data to back it up. We know that the Greens have never provided any empirical scientific evidence or logical scientific points to back up their assertion of an escalating climate emergency.
I challenged Senator Waters to a debate in public in 2010—13 years ago—and she still will not debate me. She jumped to her feet and said, ‘I will not debate you.’ I’ve challenged her again, almost daily and weekly since 9 September.
Senator Waters:Leave me alone!
Senator Roberts: Now we hear calls of: ‘Leave me alone. I haven’t got the data.’ No. There is no evidence the Greens have that backs up their claim.
Secondly—
Senator Cox:Read the report.
Senator Roberts: I will get to the report in a minute. The second thing is (a)(ii) of the motion, the statement by the United Nations Secretary-General. Did we know that Greta Thunberg, who did not finish high school, was yesterday given an honorary doctorate in theology by the University of Helsinki? It’s a religion, this climate stuff, and the great god is the United Nations. Did you elect the United Nations Secretary-General to run our country? No. I didn’t. They’ve never been elected.
Let’s have a look at the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. The first, in 1990, was built on fraud, but even that showed that the medieval warming period was warmer than today’s temperatures. That was quickly whipped out of the United Nations next report, in 1995. The scientists gathered under the UN banner said there was no evidence of warming due to human production of carbon dioxide. Yet Ben Santer, one of the scientists, went in and changed that report and presented it in 1995 based on a fraud.
In 2001, 2007, 2013 and 2020 there were reports by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Let’s look at chapter 12. In each of those reports there was only one sole chapter claiming warming and attributing it to carbon dioxide from human activity. In 2001 it was chapter 12. In 2007 it was chapter 9. In 2013 it was chapter 10. Not one of those reports’ sole chapters claiming warming and attributing it to human carbon dioxide contains any evidence for that claim. It’s the same in 2020.
The Deputy President:Senator Whish-Wilson, do you have a point of order?
Senator Whish-Wilson:I can put up a lot in this chamber, but having Senator Roberts directly yell at me from five feet away is very difficult to take. Could you ask him to address the chair, as he should according to parliamentary rules?
The Deputy President:He was going through me, but it’s a lesson to us all to speak through the chair.
Senator Roberts: We always see that when someone has no evidence they rely upon slurs, innuendo and misrepresentation. Thank you for not being able to challenge my argument.
Let’s have a look at the basis of this United Nations report. Maurice Strong was a crook. He died in 2015 after returning from self-imposed exile in China.
Maurice Strong started the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a political tool to get his way for his objectives globally. Maurice Strong started the Chicago Climate Exchange. He was a director of the Chicago Climate Exchange. He sought to make billions of dollars of profit from the Chicago Climate Exchange. He was then pursued for the oil-for-food scandal in the United Nations—complicit; another scandal in the United Nations. He was also wanted by American law-enforcement agencies for serious crimes in the United States, including one very big crime in western United States. He fled in exile. He’s a crook!
That’s what the Greens are basing their policies on. That’s what the Labor Party is basing its policies on. That’s what the Liberals and Nationals, with a few exceptions—I note Senator Rennick—are basing their policies on. These policies that are destroying everyday Australians’ lives economically, socially, mentally and morally are based upon a crook, and you’ve fallen for it. What’s more, you’re now getting the people of Australia to pay for it. That is inhuman, it’s irresponsible and it’s dishonest. Are the Greens guilty of fraud or are they simply patsies and fools?
I note that China produces 4.5 billion tonnes of coal and gets more of our coal, while we’re not allowed to use the 500 million tonnes that we produce in this country. They produce nine times as much and yet they have got no agreement for 2050 net zero.
This is fraud, and this is why we will not support this suspension.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/LFUIpBO10cE/hqdefault.jpg360480Sheenagh Langdonhttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSheenagh Langdon2023-03-24 06:14:412023-03-24 06:14:46The “Climate Crisis” was started by a criminal!