- Senator Roberts.
Thank you Madam acting deputy president.
As a servant to the people
of Queensland in Australia,
I wonder whether people know
that liberal, labour, nationals, greens,
climate policies, and renewable subsidies
are costing households,
$13 billion per year.
That's $1,300
per household
every year.
39% of electricity bills, household bills
are due to climate policies
that are driven $8
billion in private sector,
mal investment it is now destroying
and destabilising base load power.
These costs are the work
of respected economists
Dr. Allen Moran.
Who use the government's data and thus
they cannot be sensibly refuted.
Energy intensive industries
and value adding food processing
and minerals processing are moving
to countries with cheap energy.
China, India, and Asia
use our high quality clean coal
to generate cheap power
while the same power from our clean coal
under Australian climate policies,
has a price three times as high.
In China, India, 8
cents, per kilowatt hour,
in Australia, 25 cents per kilowatt hour.
Australia once had world's
cheapest electricity,
yet now prices are among
the world's highest.
As a result manufacturing
has dropped from 17%
of our national economy in the 1990's,
to now be just 6%
and many hundreds of
thousands of blue collar jobs
have been packed off overseas.
As a kid, I went to school
in Kurri Kurri High School.
I lived in the bush
and cycled to school every day.
Every morning we rode past
and every afternoon we rode past
the Kurri Kurri Aluminium Smelter.
That was built because of cheap, reliable,
stable, secure,
environmentally responsible
coal-fired power in the Hunter Valley.
It's now shut,
due to climate policies
driving power prices
to double what they
were just 10 years ago.
Kaput, gone,
and with it,
hundreds of jobs,
thousands of jobs in the community.
Climate policies are ravaging agriculture,
after stealing farmers rights
to use their own land
in compliance with the Kyoto Protocol.
This is destroying food security
and increasing food prices
for every Australian.
High electricity prices
are gutting manufacturing,
gutting agriculture,
gutting small and large businesses.
Our nations productive capacity,
economic sovereignty,
economic resilience,
are being decimated
and turning our country
from being independent
to dependence on other nations.
Climate alarmists are pushing policies
aimed at fundamentally
decarbonizing the economy
from 2050 onwards.
Such a radical change
with severe consequences
on lifestyle and livelihoods and lives,
should be based on extraordinary evidence.
Empirical data from solid measurement,
and with specified quantified impacts,
must first justify such
fundamental change.
High cost policies
such as the climate policies
and renewable subsidies
need solid scientific evidence
as justification for the policies,
whose impacts must be
specified before implementation
and measure during implementation.
Now I'll discuss this next week,
but for now I'll discuss
the Moran's reports
into insights into electricity prices.
As I said, the cost of climate policies
and renewable subsidies
cost Australian households
via their electricity bills,
$13 billion every year.
That's $1,300 per household.
The government, claims
it's just $90
per year.
Dr. Moran using the government's own data,
calculates the direct costs
at $536 per household
per year.
The total cost
of $1,300
per year per household.
The additional cost of climate policies
on our power bills is a staggering 39%,
not the 6.5% as the government claims.
The 6.5% covers cost of federal
and state mandatory requirements,
such as the Renewable Energy Target.
And excludes the cost of
additional transmission lines,
snowy too, which is going
for about $14 billion now,
direct support from
federal and state budgets
and the cost of climate policies
on coal-generation price.
The true cost of electricity,
Madam acting deputy president,
would be $13 billion per year less,
if cheap, affordable,
reliable coal production,
was not lumbered with policies
that distort the market toward expensive
and unreliable, wind, and solar.
Those wind and solar jobs...
wind and solar power destroy jobs,
kill productive capacity
and wasted investment
as I'll show in a minute.
Now I commissioned this report
from the respected
economist Dr. Allen Moran.
His is the first comprehensive
independent analysis
of full costs of climate
policies on energy.
And it's difficult for the
layman to find the cost
because the government
no longer puts this data
in a consolidated form.
But Moran uses the government's own data
and thus his report cannot
be sensibly refuted.
He's also been conservative
to ensure credibility.
And the government has
stopped releasing it
in the comprehensive form
because it's hiding
what the policy is doing
to everyday Australians
and their nation,
high costs and future unreliability.
Incrementally and deceitfully
deliberately hiding
these rising costs.
Artificial high cost
electricity and energy prices,
savage our highest living standards
and undermine economic resilience
and competitiveness.
And this is particularly important now
with COVID recovery.
Humans in the civilised world,
the Western world,
the developed world,
have become independent
of climate.
Independent of wind
independent of the sun.
We now don't have the
famines we used to have.
And all of a sudden now we're going back
to being dependent on climate,
dependent on weather,
depending on wind and solar
at a cost to taxpayers
of $8 billion per year
in private investment.
And that's still going
on after two decades,
they're still continuing
to receive subsidies.
These parasitic infants
will never develop,
It's impossible,
And I'll explain why in a minute.
But the renewables distort
the low cost coal-based power,
and more than double,
more than double the
wholesale electricity price
from $45.50
to $92.50,
and we're all paying for it.
And after 20 years
renewables remain unviable
without subsidies and
a parasitic investment,
a mal investment on our energy systems.
For every subsidised green-energy jobs,
so-called green-energy job,
There are 2.2 to three jobs
that could have been created elsewhere
in the economy with the same subsidy
or investment.
And they're lost in the economy.
Intermittent energies like wind and solar
are parasitic and they're
killing their hosts,
just like parasites do.
And their host is the people of Australia
and Australia itself.
Issue beyond that though,
is integrity, the lack of integrity
and governance that has
stopped serving the people
and is milking the people
for it's mates investing
in so-called renewable energy.
There's been a study in Australia
called the Fisher Study,
and it estimated the costs
and the impacts of labor's
50% Renewable Energy Target policy.
They estimate it will
lose Australian income
of $1.2 trillion
in the 10 years to 2030.
That's more than half,
this year's Gross Domestic Product,
we're working for half the year
to blow it all in the next 10 years.
It will require labor's policy will drive
and require an electricity price
of $157 per megawatt-hour.
That's more than double what it was
in 2016 before COVID hit,
and reduce prices.
COVID reduced prices.
So this will double what
it was before COVID.
Plus, and this is something very important
for labour to understand,
it's policies Will cut wages 23% below
what they would have been,
and there will be 568,000
fewer jobs.
The biggest falls in
employment will be in coal,
oil, and gas
and in energy-intensive industries.
And that's to the liberals,
they would increase intermittent 40% above
the current intermittent
level to about 28%.
That would be devastating.
One nation alone says zero intermittence,
no subsidies get back to basics.
So green energy
is now more likely
to create additional
employment and income levels,
than it would be if workers
with shovels and wheelbarrows,
replaced workers with heavy machinery
and trucks in road building.
Productivity is what enables higher wages
and more jobs.
It's easy to understand.
It takes 39 solar workers
in the United States
to produce the same electricity
as one natural gas worker.
Choosing to employ 39 people
to do what one person can do,
means 38 people cannot help elsewhere
in the economy providing elderly care,
education, better infrastructure,
and thousands of other jobs and services.
It cuts solar and wind,
cut investment in real economy
because their investments
in wind and solar
are wasted in tax
and reduce spending.
It destroys their
competitiveness in the future,
and it's not happening in
China, India, Indonesia,
and growing economies,
which account for the vast majority
of the carbon dioxide production.
What we need to do then
Madam acting deputy president,
is end all regulations and policies
including subsidies
that uniquely reward renewable energy.
Remove weather dependency,
a key achievement for the last 170 years
that has now reversed.
We need to get back to being independent
of wind and solar,
weather,
and above all,
we need to be honest and to
make policies based on facts
and to share the data.
Thank you, Madame acting deputy president.
