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The ASX200 is the Australian benchmark for investment returns, if you’re not matching it many people will ask why you even bothered.

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation “invests” your taxes into pipe dream “renewable” projects. We’re told that these investments are some of the best things in finance, in reality I think they are a scam.

My question was simple, if the CEFC is making such good investments, why would putting money into the ASX200 have made a 22% better profit over the last 10 years?

Click here for Transcript

Senator Roberts: At the last Senate estimates, I submitted some questions on notice asking for how the returns for wind and solar investments compare to other financial investments or benchmarks. The CEFC answered very vaguely and essentially said, ‘Depends.’ The number for that question and response is SQ23-000642. In your annual report, you are happy to tout a percentage but not in your answer to me, apparently. In your report you say, since the Clean Energy Finance Corporation’s inception you have achieved an annualised return of 4.48 per cent, which adds up to 55 per cent in total over 10 years. The ASX 200 over the same period has returned 67 per cent. That’s 27 April 2012 to 20 May 2023. An investment in the Australian benchmark would have returned a 22 per cent better profit than the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. Why are your investments in supposedly clean energy, which is not clean—just have a look at what happens when heavy metals out of abandoned solar panels get into the water supply or oil from a malfunctioning wind turbine leaks into the ocean—so poor compared to the Australian benchmark?

Mr Learmonth: There are a few things in there. Firstly, that 4.48 that you refer to doesn’t just cover renewable energy of wind and solar, if that’s what’s going to be in your sights; it covers the whole portfolio, and that’s everything from green bonds, loans to industrial companies to reduce emissions, technology investments with venture capital, limited partnership interests in funds in sectors like the built environment, agriculture and infrastructure. So it’s very, very broad. You can’t possibly hone it in just around wind and solar.

The other thing I would note is you’re making the point that our returns appear inadequate or are below what other commercial benchmarks should be. The CEFC’s capital is about driving policy outcomes as well as making appropriate return, so it’s about decarbonising the electricity sector. It’s about fuel switching and energy efficiency. In many cases, we may make a below-market return because that’s what’s needed to bring a project online or take a technology down a learning curve. So I don’t think you can use those very sweeping references to apply to the CEFC.

Senator Roberts: Let me interpret that. You’re saying that the subpar performance is a cost of subsidising government policy objectives?

Mr Learmonth: I wouldn’t put it like that. I would say that if you felt that we weren’t reaching some kind of commercial benchmark, that’s probably a reflection of the way that we are using our capital to deliver on the policy objectives of the CEFC. But, equally, we are a lender. Today 70 per cent, broadly, of our portfolio is debt. So you can’t compare it to an index like the ASX or some ETF or whatever it might be, because a secured loan is a relatively low yielding investment compared to putting money into a technology company where you might expect 25 per cent. So, again, I don’t think we are comparing apples with apples.

Senator Roberts: That’s fair enough. I’m asking for more details, because the response to the question on notice was not detailed and not respectful, in my opinion. It was very vague.

Mr Learmonth: I’m happy to provide you with more information around that and break it down by sectors to demonstrate that and give you a bit more background to the return, the 4.48 that you refer to.

Senator Roberts: Can you take that on notice?

Mr Learmonth: I can do that, very happily.

Senator Roberts: Perhaps something else you could take on notice is: why should Australian taxpayers be giving you the extra $20.5 billion Labor has given you in this budget, given you are not even close to the Australian benchmark. You can explain why you’re not close to the benchmark. That’s fair enough. But why should the Australian taxpayers be giving you an extra $20.5 billion?

Mr Learmonth: I can start, and I’m sure others may have views on this. The money is being appropriated and delivered to the CEFC to help deliver on some very defined policy objectives, like Rewiring the Nation, like Household Energy Upgrades and, thirdly, investing in growing technology companies here in Australia. We were proven to have done a very good job over the last 10 years on investing, lending and using capital to achieve these environmental outcomes. One can only assume that’s why the government was prepared to back us into doing more.

Senator McAllister: Senator Roberts, obviously you fundamentally don’t believe that it is necessary to reduce carbon emissions.

Senator Roberts: I know so.

Senator McAllister: It is a difference of opinion between you and the Australian government. As I understand it, it is also a difference opinion—

Senator Roberts: Minister, you have repeatedly failed to provide the evidence for your policies.

Senator McAllister: between you and the opposition, as I understand their policy.

Senator Roberts: I think the opposition wouldn’t agree with me.

Senator McAllister: Putting that to one side, having agreed that our policy is to reduce Australia’s emissions, we therefore have to look at the policy levers that are available to us. One of the very successful levers, in my opinion, in the Australian landscape has been the CEFC. It is a different model to one that might conventionally be adopted using grants or direct funding to proponents, and instead seeks to increase financial flows into the clean energy sector, as Mr Learmonth has explained to you. It is one of a number of tools that the Australian government seeks to use to drive investment in the clean energy sector, and it has met that objective.

Senator Roberts: I understand that, but, repeatedly, you have failed to provide the specific effect of human carbon dioxide on any climate factor—temperature, storms, rainfall. You’ve repeatedly failed to provide that basis for policy. The whole thing is just running on fluff.

Let’s continue the questions. I asked you on notice at the last Senate estimates if you had done modelling on what percentage of your returns are attributable to government subsidies and policies. Your answer to me was ‘yes’, as part of your due diligence. It is question No. 2 from the question on notice that I asked before. Question No. 2 says: Have you done any modelling or investigation to find what percentage of these returns are attributable to government subsidies or policies?

Your answer was: All revenue streams are taken into account as part of transaction assessment and due diligence. So your answer to me was to say yes, as part of your due diligence. Given you’ve done that analysis, what percentage of returns for investments are attributable to government subsidies and policies?

Mr Learmonth: I’m just trying to understand your question, Senator. Our returns come from using government dollars—taxpayer dollars—that are either lent or invested by the CEFC. Therefore, using those dollars, we either receive interest or dividends, or, potentially, we might sell an equity investment and make a gain. That’s where our revenue comes from. When you ask what percentage of that is coming from government subsidies, all our capital is coming from the government. All our returns come from the deployment of government capital. I’m just trying to understand what you mean by ‘subsidies’ there.

Senator Roberts: Do you get a return on your investment?

Mr Learmonth: Absolutely—

Senator Roberts: So what percentage—

Mr Learmonth: You inquired about it earlier, and that’s correct.

Senator Roberts: Right. So what percentage of that is due to government subsidies?

Mr Learmonth: Again, I don’t quite understand your question because all our capital is provided by the government. Someone might say, ‘Well, that’s not really a subsidy, it’s a provision of capital from Treasury.’

Senator Roberts: Accept that.

Ms Learmonth: Therefore, we’re not the recipients of subsidies. I might see if my—

Senator Roberts: Let me—

Chair: Mr Learmonth, I wonder if you could, in a very pithy fashion, outline the kind of organisation you are and its intent, because I think the senator has misunderstood that.

Senator Roberts: Perhaps I could clarify something: what part of your returns from your borrowers enables them to succeed because of government subsidies? They wouldn’t have provided a return without those subsidies.

Mr Every: Are you thinking about matters such as the large-scale generation certificates, which the Renewable Energy Target—

Senator Roberts: No, I’m not thinking about that. I’m thinking about the actual return—the income that a person who is the borrower of your money, or our money, is able to make because of subsidies for solar and wind.  Without those subsidies, would you have got a return?

Mr Learmonth: Oh, so you’re referring to, say, a household subsidy for having solar panels, for example—

Senator Roberts: More to the point: you don’t lend to households, I take it?

Mr Learmonth: We do via intermediaries; we actually do. We use—

Senator Roberts: But most of your lending is to large—

Mr Learmonth: Yes, a substantial portion is to large projects, large companies. That’s part of it, but we also use intermediaries and partners like large Australian banks, for example, to provide mortgages for people to stimulate people to make their houses more energy efficient or to buy a more efficient home. They might access a green mortgage, so there’s a very broad range of borrowers. They pay back the loans out of the money that they’re generating in their business. That might be a small manufacturing company, it might be an agricultural company, or it might be a solar farm. Whether they are entitled through their businesses to subsidies, discounts or benefits through state and federal governments, one can only speculate about that.

Senator Roberts: Your mission and values say that the Clean Energy Finance Corporation is a specialist investor with a deep sense of purpose to invest as Australia’s green bank to help achieve our national goal of net zero emissions by 2050. How many of your borrowers make a return because of government subsidies for solar and wind? In other words, without those subsidies, you would not be getting a return.

Ms Learmonth: I’m not sure about that. Let’s talk about a solar or wind farm. We may lend them money to help them build out the generation plant, the wind turbines, the solar panels, for example. They either sell the electricity into the spot market, or they might have a contracting arrangement, so they generate income through that. Yes, a large utility-scale renewables project will also receive a generation certificate, a renewable certificate, which traces its way back to a different government policy, the RET, Renewable Energy Target, so some component of the income of a renewable energy project does come through a former government policy. But the majority of income comes from the sale of those electrons either to someone who wants them or into a market like the NEM spot market. They make that money, and, if we’re the senior lender, we’re the first person they’ll pay.  They’ll pay us back interest and principal through those revenues.

Senator Roberts: Do you have any idea why, when we’re told that solar and wind are now the cheapest form, we still need subsidies?

Mr Learmonth: We know that wind and solar, based on the cost of it and what they can produce, is today the lowest cost of energy.

Click here for Transcript

Senator Roberts: You told me in the answers to questions on notice that you’ve done the analysis. Now you’re telling me that we can only speculate on what those businesses are receiving in terms of subsidies that contribute to your returns. What is it?

Mr Learmonth: I guess I’m just trying to use some examples to try and flesh out what you mean by subsidies. Are they subsidies that are being provided to our borrowers?

Senator Roberts: Yes. You understand their money streams. What is the proportion of subsidies in there?  In other words, the government is paying to help you get a return on your loans.

Mr Learmonth: In some cases there are companies we have lent to that are recipients of state government benefits. And for some reason they might—

Senator Roberts: The point is you’re investing in something that needs subsidies to survive, so we’ve got the government giving money under a loan and then relying upon other subsidies, from the same taxpayers—maybe state, maybe federal—to get a return back.

Mr Learmonth: Just in terms of wind and solar, even if you backed out the subsidy around the generation certificate, they would in most cases still be able to pay their debt. We don’t come up with the subsidies. We are there looking at projects and companies—

Senator Roberts: I’m not accusing you of coming up with the subsidies. I’m saying that your borrowers cannot pay it back without those subsidies.

Mr Learmonth: I don’t think that’s right.

Senator Roberts: Could you give me the figures that show that, please? You’ve said you’ve got the analysis.

Mr Learmonth: The only borrowers that we have where a part of their direct revenue source or generation may have some form of government subsidy is probably wind and solar, because they are recipients, but there are other ones that have no government subsidies.

Senator Roberts: Let’s move on to something that’s associated, because you don’t know the income streams. I also asked you in Senate estimates, on notice, what the risk to wind and solar investments was from a change in government policy. You didn’t answer what the risk was. You just said that you have assessed the risk, like any prudent investor.

I asked: Political risk is one of the most basic elements of a assessing a business case. What is the risk to wind and solar investments if the government were to abandon their net-zero policy?  Which some jurisdictions around the world are discussing right now. The answer I got was: The question is a hypothetical but suffice to say, like any prudent investor, the CEFC undertakes due diligence into risks to any revenue stream, and structures its investments to ensure that it is not unduly exposed to risk, including policy risk. If you have assessed the risk, what is the risk?

Mr Learmonth: What is the risk of a government abandoning—

Senator Roberts: Financial risk—what is the risk to your loan?

Mr Learmonth: It’s hard to speculate. We would look—

Senator Roberts: But you’ve assessed it.

Mr Learmonth: Yes, because we would have looked at it and we would have gone: What sort of generation would this wind or solar farm produce? Do we estimate that power prices over the term of our loan—it might be five years; it might be seven years—will introduce some element of risk to those cash flows? And then we would have looked at whether or not our debt could be paid back. If a future government changed policies around net zero, it would take some while before that potentially would have any impact. I think it’s not a risk that we would be factoring into it, because we’re looking at the more immediate and realistic options.

Senator Roberts: You’ve said you’ve done your due diligence but you can’t put a handle on the risk. I put it to you that the government abandoning net zero targets would be catastrophic for your investments. Without targets, there are no subsidies, and the generators couldn’t produce a return and pay back the loan.

Senator McAllister: Senator Roberts, I think the problem with the line of questioning you’re pursuing with Mr Learmonth is that you assume that investments in the National Electricity Market are driven by subsidies, which you have not identified. All over the world renewable energy is increasing because of its technological advantages and because of the cost profile of alternatives—

Senator Roberts: Hydrocarbons after—

Senator McAllister: May I finish?

Senator Roberts: Yes.

Senator McAllister: Particularly where either the overall demand in an electricity system is growing or assets need to be replaced. I think you have repeatedly mischaracterised Mr Learmonth’s answers to you and then put the question back to him in a form that misrepresents the position he has just put to you. To be fair to the officer, he is doing a good job at describing to you the processes that the CEFC go through in examining investment opportunities.

Senator Roberts: Well, combining what you’ve said—

Chair: Senator Roberts, I’m going to have to make this your last question.

Senator Roberts: I’ll move on. I note that, as you said in those same answers, you don’t screen any investments for connections to political donations. Don’t you think that some basic due diligence is needed?  Shouldn’t you be bringing it to the attention of the minister if you are about to give a company hundreds of millions of dollars and it has made a political donation?

Mr Learmonth: We undertake very significant due diligence on all our borrowers or investee companies. We would look at whether there was some overt political connection—

Mr Every: We’re actually required to under the AML/CTF laws, the anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing laws. We are required to identify politically exposed persons, and that is part of the due diligence.

Senator Roberts: Senator McAllister, in response to your comments: the world has globally invested trillions of dollars—I think the figure may be $150 trillion, but I may be wrong on that—and the share of energy used on the planet from hydrocarbons has gone from 82 per cent to 81 over the last 10 to 20 years, despite trillions of dollars going into solar and wind.

Chair: I’ll take that one as a comment.

Senator Roberts: Yes. It’s not a question; it’s a fact.

Former Snowy 2.0 boss Paul Broad has just SLAMMED Bowen’s ‘transition to renewables’, calling it ‘bull***t’.

“The notion that you can have 80% renewable in our system by 2030 is, to use the vernacular, bull***t. The truth is, this transition, if it ever occurs, will take 80 years, not eight.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself, Paul.

Transcript

Ben: 17 minutes after 7:00. Well, we’ve said this line a number of times, don’t jump off the boat until you’ve reached the shore, and we say it about Australia’s dramatic switch to renewable energy. We’re switching off coal at rapid rates. The backup plan isn’t ready to go just yet. Take the massive hydro energy project, Snowy 2.0. It’s long been promised to store enough energy for 3 million homes. The project is disastrously delayed and over budget. The former prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said in 2017 it would be up and running by 2021. Now they’re saying 2029. It’s gone from a $2 billion price tag to 10 billion, including all of the linked transmission lines.

I wanted to have a chat to someone who knows about this backwards. His name is Paul Broad. He’s one of Australia’s leading experts on infrastructure. Now, Paul Broad was the CEO of Snowy 2.0 for a decade, but his tenure ended shortly after Chris Bowen became the federal energy minister. Paul Broad delivered Mr. Bowen some home truths about how the project was going. He was sent packing shortly after, or maybe he decided to leave. Paul Broad, the former boss of Snowy 2.0 is on the line. Paul, thanks for joining us.

Paul Broad: Thanks. My pleasure, Ben.

Ben: Did you leave or were you shoved?

Paul Broad: Oh, a bit of combination. The word was filtering down. In fact, I think when Bowen was elected, I was dead in the water, so it was only a matter of time. But I formally resigned.

Ben: Why were you dead in the water? What was it that was such a sticking point between where you stand and where Chris Bowen stood?

Paul Broad: Oh, a series of things, particularly the gas plant at Kurri Kurri, Angus Taylor and I were very strong that you needed gas to keep the lights on. And we had more gas in New South Wales than we know what to do with. We need gas. So when the sun’s not shining, wind’s not blowing, gas, hydro are incredibly important. And Chris Bowen was against Kurri Kurri. Then he said we’re going to run Kurri Kurri 30% on hydrogen. There is no hydrogen in the Hunter, and there won’t be for another 10, 20 years at the earliest.

Ben: You were just trying to help, right?

Paul Broad: Well, yeah, trying to help. I think in the 18 months leading up to it, in the senate estimate, the parliament asking us lots of these sort of questions. So you got a sense of where Chris was coming from, and that’s his political view. I respect that, I just didn’t agree with it and there’s no point being somewhere if you don’t agree with it.

Ben: You could have just drunk the Kool-Aid and said, “Oh yeah. No, this is going to be the answer to all of our problems. It’ll be able to carry the load.” But you were being realistic and he didn’t want to hear it?

Paul Broad: Yeah. Plus the fact, the notion that you can have 80% renewable in our system by 2030 is, to use the vernacular, is bullshit. It’s bullshit. Ben, the truth is, this transition, if it ever occurs, it will take 80 years, not eight. So there’s massive changes need to occur. And I’m deeply concerned about the rush, the notion that somehow this is all magic, I’m going to wave a magic wand, we’ll close a big baseload power plant that’s kept our lights on for yours of my life, we’re just going to close it and there’s all these alternatives out there. Well, it’s not. I can be absolutely 100% certain it’s not available, and the transmission lines are miles late. 2.0, which is a part of the thing is late. I think their own reports tell them you’ll need at least eight 2.0s to achieve their goal, and that’s 80 years not eight.

Ben: Let’s just have a look at 2.0. So the biggest issue is these giant tunnelling machines. They weigh 2000 tonnes. They keep falling through the soft ground. Do we know how far along this project is? Is it halfway? Beyond halfway?

Paul Broad: Yeah. Look, I’ve got to defend 2.0, it was a huge part of my creation, and I’m quite proud of the attempt to build a big pumped hydro, but it’s complex. These tunnel-boring machines have got to do through heaps of rock. There’s 28 kilometres of tunnels, 11 metres diameter. And one of them has got to actually bore uphill. So they’ve got to come in and get access to a cabin, and then you’ve got to drill out a cabin, which is 400 metres long, a kilometre under the mountain. So the complexity of this thing is enormous. So I’m not surprised that we’ve got delays. I suppose what worries me more is the lack of transmission.

So you have this big power plant, it’s of no use to you if you haven’t got a transmission line out the front to run it into where the people are. So the lack of transmission is going to be a big, big problem for us. The lack of transmission to bring all these renewables. The power plants we have are just up the road here in the Hunter, all these new renewables are out west or somewhere else. There’s no power lines to get it here. So the notion you can have all this occurring without transmission and all the other investment which will cost the customer, the consumers a lot, the suggestion you can do all that and price is going to come down. It’s just wrong. It’s absolutely wrong. It’s misleading, it’s false and to keep suggesting that, I think eventually, eventually the average punter wakes up, and there’ll be a reaction.

Ben: We’re listening to Paul Broad, the former of boss of Snowy 2.0. Just on the timeline, I actually had a meeting with someone who’s associated with the project about a month or so ago. And I said, “What’s going on with this thing? Because we were told it’d be done by 2021, and now you’re talking about 2027.” And then they said to me, “Oh, it might be late 2027.” And I said, “Well, that sounds to me like 2028.” Now they’re saying December 2029. When I hear December 2029, I think 2030. Realistically, when’s it going to be done?

Paul Broad: Well, the transmission line is ’27, so I suspect they’ll get first power, I suspect… Now something else will happen. I think the challenges for building it are still in front of them. The biggest challenge they have for this whole project is still to come. So there’s lots of risk with it yet, but I suspect, given the fudges the engineers do, I’m suspecting end of ’27, middle of ’27, that sort of timeframe. But Ben, there’s no point having it if the transmission line… So we’ve got to work out, someone’s got to tell us when are the farmers going to agree to run power lines over their properties? When are they going to agree to pay the farmers a reasonable annual sum to access and run their lines over their property? When all that’s agreed and they work out the direction these things are going to come… We haven’t upgraded them in 50 years, let alone in five.

Ben: We’ve spoken to some of those farmers and they’re worried because they say they’ve got to knock down all of these trees to put the lines in. We’re worried about bush fires. And the other issue is just that old line, “It’s my land, it’s my property.”

Paul Broad: Absolutely. Then well what happened, the truth of it, they had all these shiny asses from Sydney rock up to the farms and say, “I’m going to put a power line over your property.” Well, the farmers said, “Get lost. You’re not coming on my property.” It is their livelihood. It is what they live for. So they got off to a really bad start. All the people around Tumut and Gundagai, all those people are now up in arms because these things have got to be done right. You’ve got to sit down and you’ve got to be able to be flexible about the direction you go to minimise the impact on farmers. They had some power lines going right over the farmer’s house.

So there’s still a lot of work to be done on the transmission. There’s still a lot of work to be done on 2.0. And the reports out saying you’re going to need lots of 2.0. So it’s really just the start of the journey. It’s not the end and I think the notion that we can close these plants, no, Eraring can’t, cannot close. Even now, we’re closing Liddell. We’re on a knife’s edge. You watch when it gets really hot or really cold, just how tight it gets in New South Wales. If the lights don’t go out, I’ll be awfully surprised.

Ben: A couple of quick ones, one of the private contractors went into administration in December. We’ve heard there are still unpaid bills to both workers and to ongoing construction.

Paul Broad: Yeah, the contractor’s got a lot to answer for. And I don’t want to go on air and bag a contractor, but they’ve got a lot to answer for. And I think they were trying games by not paying the local small contractors, and as soon I was there, I was prepared to go and pay the contractors ourselves, and then extract it from the big contractor later. The major contractor has safety problems. They tragically lost a life down there a week or so ago. The contractor has a lot of questions to answer. They’re under a fixed-price contract, so these prices shouldn’t be going up, but they are. They’re on a performance-based contract, they’re not performing. There is some big question marks and Clough going broke halfway as well, 12 months ago, it’s been a big problem. The Clough guys were integral part of delivering it. So the contractor has a huge challenge in front of them and they’ve got huge questions to answer.

Ben: Just on question marks, were you hiding some of the delays from Chris Bowen? Because I’ve seen the Financial Review. A spokeswoman for Mr. Bowen told the Financial Review that, “It was no secret that the government was disappointed in the hiding of delays to major energy projects by the former government including Snowy Hydro 2.0.”

Paul Broad: That is just bullshit. The first meeting with Bowen, my first meeting with Bowen, he asked me and I said, “Yeah, 12 to 18 months.” When I was with last meeting with Angus, which was back in April when the contractor rocked into Angus’s office and said that, “We think you’re going to be delaying going [inaudible 00:09:41] cost increase,” Angus kicked him out of the office and said, “It’s got to be delivered on time and on budget.” That’s the truth. I mean why does his office on this political spin? What is he trying to do? Fair dinkum. Why not just tell the truth? It’s really easy. In life, I find if you tell the truth, you can remember it and you don’t get yourself in too much trouble.

Ben: I said at the start of my introduction, that line that a talk back caller said to me once about the switch to renewables, “Don’t jump off the boat until you’ve reached the shore.” Can you reflect on that for a moment before we say goodbye?

Paul Broad: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. We can’t make this transition until we’re absolutely convinced that the alternative’s going to work, and is going to be at a price point that it won’t kill the economy. At the moment, we’ve got neither of those.

Ben: You say the idea of getting to 80% renewables by 2030 is complete BS. You say closer to 80 years?

Paul Broad: Yeah. Well, you got to build these things. Transmission lines, their own reports say you’ll need eight 2.0s or their equivalents. One 2.0 takes 10 years, so get eight. I could do my maths, it’s got to be 80, 70, so it’ll be another generation before anything like what they’re talking about occurs.

Ben: We know it’s never too late to learn a lesson. What would you say to Chris Bowen if he’s listening this morning?

Paul Broad: Oh, take a big deep breath. You’re a minister now, you’ve got responsibilities. You got to put it all on the line and you got to be honest to everybody about it.

Ben: We really appreciate you coming on the line. You haven’t mucked about, you’re pulling no punches this morning, and we appreciate that, Paul.

Paul Broad: Thanks, Ben.

Ben: Paul Broad, the former boss of Snowy 2.0 and I can only imagine the reaction in Chris Bowen’s office right now. They won’t be liking what they’re hearing, but it sounds to me like he’s just given a unfiltered view of Snowy 2.0, and also the transition to renewables. And you heard what he said about the government’s targets, BS. And he didn’t put it the way I just put it then. He’s also weighed into the other issue, which is just so obvious, about needing to keep our major coal plant open. That is something that Chris Minns entertained during the election campaign, and thankfully since winning the election, he suggested that that is a must, that he’s got to work out how we can keep the supply going and keep the prices low. And the discussions are underway with the operators.

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.

Thank you.

The National Reconstruction Fund is a slush fund that makes sports rorts look like chump change.

We have a trillion-dollar deficit, and the Albanese government is throwing around $15 billion like it’s Monopoly money.

It’s time that the government got out of the way of the private sector and personal enterprise.

Transcript

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.

This week the Safeguard Mechanism Bill will pass after a dodgy Labor deal with the Greens and David Pocock.

More than 200 of the largest companies in this country will have to cut their production. There’ll be less electricity, less essential goods and they’ll all be more expensive.

Just remember, you are the carbon they want to reduce.

Transcript

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.

The “Climate Crisis” are the greatest fraud ever perpetuated on Australians. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was started by a criminal yet this is who governments point to for justification of country destroying climate policies.

The question is, are the people who go along with the scam fools, or complicit?

Transcript

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. 

No you’re not going crazy, life is getting far too expensive.

It’s not going to get any better. Albanese is pouring fuel on the fire, putting more of your taxes into green projects that will make your electricity bill more expensive.

Transcript

As a servant to the many different people across Queensland who make up our amazing Queensland community, I’m speaking to Senator Canavan’s matter of public importance motion. This MPI quite fairly criticises the Albanese Labor government for their record of promises already broken, including a promise not to raise taxation and a promise not to change superannuation.

The Prime Minister is now raising tax on unrealised earnings of large superannuation funds. Way to go! Labor are running a two-for-one sale on broken promises, just in time for the New South Wales state election, where 5½ million voters are going to ask themselves: ‘Do I trust Labor with government? Will they keep their promises?’ 

To be fair, the Albanese government has not resorted to dividing promises into core and non-core promises—yet. But wait; it’s early days. Their promise to bring down the cost of living is already broken. Today, Brisbane’s Courier Mail newspaper reported that an average household in Queensland now has to spend an additional $1,150 a month to pay their bills and keep a roof over their head. That is a hell of a lot of money for everyday Australians to find every month.

The Labor government is wrongly trying to blame international pressures for gas price rises. Gas was already increasing rapidly before the Ukraine conflict. The gas price rise has nothing to do with war between countries and everything to do with the war on coal. As the government closes down energy-intensive coal power and introduces more weather dependent solar and wind power, the grid needs more and more gas to firm the supply and maintain reliable power. 

Household gas is costing more as large electricity generators bid in the market for the gas they need to keep the electricity grid functioning. Increasing gas prices are demand inflation. Housing price rises are demand inflation. Four hundred thousand new Australians arrived in the last 12 months—$400,000—all needing houses in which to live. Of course the price was going to rise. No wonder the Albanese government changed their election promise from ‘cheaper power’ to ‘power going up less quickly’.  

Every coolroom in every farm and dairy, and every Coles store and every other supermarket is now more expensive to run. Every bakery, restaurant, butcher, store and shopping centre is passing on huge increases in power prices. Mortgage repayments are rising because the previous government’s money printing caused increasing interest rates. Labor went right along with those measures and is equally to blame for the inflation that that’s now caused.

Last week, Treasurer Jim Chalmers recklessly, wrongly, uncaringly, claimed the worst of inflation is over. Really? On what basis? New South Wales voters should not believe that for a moment. Inflation is a direct result of this government’s core energy and spending policies.

And this government is not going away until 2025.  

Politicians often point to a CSIRO document called GenCost22 that claims wind and solar are the cheapest forms of energy. In reality however, their model has more holes than a block of Swiss cheese.
The Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro is one of the biggest disasters in our Government’s history.

Originally budgeted as a $2 billion renewable battery, it’s now estimated it won’t get power to the grid for less than $10 Billion. Despite telling me four months ago that the tunneling machine ‘Florence’ wasn’t bogged (it had “encountered soft ground”) the 7.30 Report tells us in the last 10 months the bogged Florence appears to have tunneled just 150m from its starting point before a 50m hole to the surface appeared on top of it.

All of this for a project to produce the same amount of electricity in a year that the Liddell coal fired power station could make in two weeks.
The government continues to push reliable coal fired power out of the grid and push unreliable wind and solar in. Yet no one in Labor will take responsibility for the lights going out when they push it too far.

One Nation believes in cheap reliable electricity for Australia so families don’t have to choose between the power bill and their kids school shoes.