The Climate Change Bill 2022 is totally out of step with the rest of the world. It will do nothing to help the global environment. It will only increase living-cost pressures for Australians. It will cost us jobs in this country and it will continue the total scam that is carbon trading around the world.
I want to start today with a conversation that I had recently with a mayor in western Queensland, the mayor of the Paroo shire, which surrounds the great country town of Cunnamulla in western Queensland. At the moment, thanks to the scam that is carbon trading, 40 per cent of properties in the Paroo shire have been destocked—cattle taken off the land—for the purposes of creating this ridiculous paper of carbon credits. It does nothing for the planet. The farmers are happy. They make money. The investment banks come up from Sydney and buy the properties. The farmers can go and retire on the coast if they like. They get paid. It’s the tyre mechanics, the cafe owners and the hotel owners in towns like Cunnamulla who pay the bill because, when you get rid of all the cattle around Cunnamulla—Cunnamulla is only a small town—there are no fencing contractors coming to town anymore, there are no stock camps coming in at the end of their muster to have a drink. All of that business is lost from Cunnamulla.
What happens with this? What do we do? What do we get from destocking 40 per cent of the properties in Cunnamulla? The mayor was telling me that you go down a road there, and there are 12 pastoral properties on this road—big properties, big road—and nine of them are totally destocked. There are just three of the 12 now with cattle on them. This is the front line of the climate battle that doesn’t get reported on down here. The victims of this are the small country businesses that are told, ‘Your way of life, your lifestyle, is no more’—and it doesn’t do anything for the environment. Do you know what happens to these properties when the cattle go? Weeds come in, pests come in, pigs come in. Come and have a look sometime. It’s a total environmental disaster because there’s no-one left to manage it. These investment banks in Sydney don’t come and manage the property. They don’t come and take out the pigs. They don’t come and manage the weeds. You know what they’re doing? They’re collecting their cheques on the carbon credits. They’re clipping that bill and making a lot of money, a lot of bonuses, off this scam that is carbon credits.
You’ve always got to look at any of this sort of legislation. When things go through this place and we debate these things, you’ve got to ask the question—the Latin phrase is ‘cui bono’: who benefits? Who benefits from this legislation? It’s not going to be the environment. It’s not going to be the Great Barrier Reef. The Great Barrier Reef is doing fine; coral is at a record level. It is going to be the bankers who run these scams of carbon credits and carbon-trading schemes. That’s why the banks all support it. That’s why the banks love this. They’re all in favour of all this because it’s another line of business to get them more bonuses, to buy that other house, to extend the butler’s pantry in the kitchen. That’s why they want this legislation. It doesn’t do anything for the environment.
We’re totally out of step with the world now. I hear these conversations here in this building about how the world is waiting with bated breath for our parliament to put in this 43 per cent target ahead of the European winter. Is anyone watching the news? Has anyone in this place turned on a TV? The Greens party in Germany has reopened 21 coal-fired power stations this year—21. The Greens party in Germany are in government with the Socialist party and, I think, with a libertarian-type party. And the energy minister there, Mr Habeck—he’s a Greens party politician—has been responsible for reopening 21 coal-fired power stations. We’ve only got 19 in Australia, but they’re opening more coal-fired power stations in Germany than we have.
Senator Antic: He’s my hero!
Senator CANAVAN: That’s right! I’ll take that, Senator Antic: he’s a hero! He’s a hero, this Greens minister. He’s trying to provide energy to his people; that’s what he’s prioritising—just as the new Prime Minister in the United Kingdom, Liz Truss, is doing when she says she’s looking to overturn the ban on fracking in the UK. That’s happening in the UK. If you turn on the news at the moment, that’s what’s happening in the world.
If you turn on the news at the moment, China has announced plans to expand its coalmining by 300 million tonnes a year. India are looking at boosting their coalmining by 400 million tons a year. We only produce about 450 million tonnes of coal a year in this country. Together, those two countries alone are looking at increasing their coalmining by more than we produce in any one year. Why are they doing that? Because they’re worried about where the energy of the world is coming from. They’re worried about the cost of living. People are on the streets, all around the world, protesting the fact that they can’t afford their energy bills anymore because of this insane net-zero agenda driven by a Swedish teenager. We are taking advice on our energy system from schoolchildren who strike because they want a day off school. I wanted days off school when I was a kid, but I don’t think I should ever have been put in charge of the energy policy settings of the world. But that’s what we’re doing! And the consequences are there for all to see.
I have been very much against this agenda. I think it’s a little bit strange that we should seek to fundamentally transform the way we make energy and food, in a generation, without thinking a bit about it. And I’m the radical, I’m the extremist, in this debate. So let’s just take a temperature check of where we are. The mainstream position in Australia, in polite society in Western countries, is that we should fundamentally transform how food and energy is made within 30 years, within a generation—without the technologies around. We don’t have a lot of the technologies that people want, this green steel and fertilisers not made from natural gas—look how that worked out for Sri Lanka. That stuff doesn’t exist, and we are playing with fire here, because, as you can already see, in Sri Lanka and Europe they are struggling to feed and warm their own people because they are not taking proper advice about how things are. They do not understand how the world works, really. They don’t understand how food is grown, how steel is made and how we manufacture things in the world. They just flick a switch and things happen. So the flick-a-switch generation—who think you just push a button and things turn up; you go on an app and your food arrives in an Uber; you set your thermostat and everything is fine—have no idea how coal is mined or how a blast furnace works in a steel mill. They’ve never been to these places, and that’s why we’ve ended up in the situation we are in.
The funny thing about this particular bit of legislation—and it continues this agenda which is enormously damaging for the world and is causing enormous pain right around in the world—is that it doesn’t do all that much, at least in the primary bill we’re debating. All this legislation does—for all the high rhetoric we’ve heard from the Labor Party about how they’re saving the planet and the oceans are breathing again and all this rubbish—is say, ‘Okay, our nationally determined commitment to Paris is this’—in this bill; it’s a very short bill—’43 per cent is now our target, as is net zero by 2050.’ We don’t need legislation for that. They don’t need this bill. And the government has admitted this; the climate change minister, Chris Bowen, has admitted that they don’t need legislation to enshrine our Paris Agreement targets.
So, what are we doing? People are struggling to pay their bills in this country. Interest rates are going up. And we’re wasting all this time on a piece of legislation that is unnecessary. We do not need to do this. We could be doing other things for the Australian people with our time here and the Labor government could still enshrine those Paris targets, without this legislation. Some may argue that this locks in the Paris targets for any future government—if the Australian people dare vote in the future for a government that wants to change our Paris commitments!—that they’re trying to lock us in; they’re trying to deny future Australians that agency. But even then, who cares? The Paris Agreement doesn’t have any penalties. None of this actually binds. If a future Australian government does not meet 43 per cent emissions by 2030, guess what happens? Nothing happens. There are no penalties. You do not get kicked out of any kind of club.
We can see that because the rest of the world is ignoring these things. As I said, Germany is opening up coal plants. Asia is opening up coalmines. Everyone has and is ignoring these climate agreements—except ourselves. We met the Kyoto target, and I think New Zealand did, too—I think one other country. No other country did. And we are imposing these costs on our people, denying our country our job opportunities, and the rest of the world is having a big laugh. I mean, Xi Jinping didn’t even bother turning up at the Glasgow conference. Neither did Vladimir Putin. I think both of them were just too busy laughing! They wouldn’t have been able to hold a straight face at Glasgow if they’d turned up, because the other countries of the world were happy to commit economic suicide to make it harder to, as I said, feed, clothe and warm their people, while China and Russia could go on their merry way. Does anybody in this place believe it? Actually, some people do; some people seem to think that because China is committed to net zero emissions by 2060 they’re going to somehow meet that. How stupid can we be, to believe a Chinese communist dictator, to take what he says at face value? I mean, they might say something and do something different. That might happen—and it is happening. That’s all the evidence we see.
There are some parts of this legislation that I do want to highlight that are risky. Most of it is completely innocuous and doesn’t really make a difference to the world. However, in this legislation the government is also enshrining the climate objectives and net zero emissions objectives into a bunch of Commonwealth agencies, like the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility and Export Finance Australia. This could have a big consequence, because it will deny job and other opportunities associated with investments in those spaces. More importantly, I worry that it’s going to weaponise our courts, that it’s going to weaponise our judicial system. We’ve seen this in the past, with the EPBC Act and other issues, where stuff that we thought was rather innocuous going through this place became a huge weapon in the hands of an activist judge seeking to expand what was actually enshrined in place.
We’ve seen it with climate legislation overseas. Heathrow Airport has not been able to expand because of climate legislation in the United Kingdom—something that I don’t think any, or many, of the members of the House of Commons realised at the time: that the legislation they proposed is now putting caps on the number of people arriving in London. It is hard to get into the place now because of that climate legislation. We’ve seen it in the Netherlands, where European Union nitrogen targets have led to this absurd rule where farmers have to reduce their production by 30 per cent. They’ve been asked to cull their cattle in the Netherlands. Those of us who do flick on the news—and as I said, not many people in this place seem to watch the news—can see that in the Netherlands right now there is a revolt of farmers, of a new farmers party that has been formed against this unilateral shutting down of the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural goods in the Netherlands. It’s an amazing thing, but that’s sometimes the consequence of these kinds of targets that we don’t understand.
That brings me back to where I started: the victims of this type of legislation. They’re the people who shower after work rather than before work. They’re the ones who are going to cop it with this legislation. Look at most of us who come into this building. I usually have a shower before work, and my colleagues thank me for that. But, if you’re a farmer or you’re working in a steel mill or, definitely, if you’re working in a coalmine, you’ll have to shower after work because you’ll be smelly and dirty because you’ve been working outside. Maybe you’ll shower before work, but you’ll have to shower after work. Those are the people that we see on the tractors in the Netherlands that are going to cop it from our naive changes that we have not thought through to the way food and energy is made in Western countries. Then those people will typically be the ones we ask to go and fight wars and other conflicts that will arise from this, as we see in Ukraine.
There is a straight line between the naive environmental net-zero targets that Europe has adopted and the extra strength and leverage that that has given to Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. Putin has got a lot more ability to pressure Europe and to take a risky decision to invade another country because he’s not scared of Europe. He is not scared of those countries because they rely on him for their gas. They have totally removed their own independence and sovereignty and have become vulnerable to aggression and to the bullies that do exist around the world. It’s news to the Greens and their naive followers in the Australian Labor Party: there are people who wish to do us harm in this world. There are countries that don’t necessarily want to see Western, free and democratic nations prosper and grow, and we are playing into their hands by unilaterally reducing our economic strength, our industry and our capability to grow and manufacture the things that an industrial economy needs.
The primary reason I’m against these radical changes is that I do not trust the Chinese Communist Party. I do not trust them. I do not trust what they say. I do not trust their relations with other countries. We cannot afford to continue to export our jobs and our manufacturing industries—our commanding heights of our economy—to a country that we cannot trust. China is not a place that you can do business in at the moment. You can’t; people can’t even travel there from this country. But they are the world’s largest emitter of carbon by far, and that is growing because the Western world continues to rely on them for cheap goods and subsidised materials, and we’re doing nothing about it.
The legislation only entrenches that trend. It only makes it harder for us to walk away from that dependent state we are sleepwalking into. We should oppose it because we should be putting this country first. We should be making our own energy again and we should be ensuring that those people who work hard for us have a great job and a good future.
