Senator ROBERTS (Queensland) (17:42): Trust, trust, trust. As servants to the people of Queensland and Australia, we listen to the people of Queensland and across Australia, and people repeatedly tell us they can't trust the tired old parties. Think about this, senators from the Labor Party: you had an opportunity today to decrease energy prices by removing the GST on energy, and what did you do? You voted against reducing energy prices. Before we go into that further, let me just remind people of the fundamental importance of energy. Since 1850 and the industrial revolution, we have seen energy prices decrease in real terms. That has led to increasing productivity, and with increasing productivity there is increasing prosperity. That has enabled us to have human progress. Human civilisation has progressed dramatically, not just because we are a creative species and a caring species—contrary to what the Greens would have us believe—but because we also apply that creativity to reducing energy prices. That has increased human progress dramatically. Energy is what drives the implementation of our creative talents. Kevin Rudd's initiatives, joined by Penny Wong, Peter Garrett and Julia Gillard—and Christine Milne; how could we forget her!—are reversing human progress. They are denying the people of the Third World cheap energy, or they are trying to. They are denying people jobs in this country and, in fact, they are exporting jobs from this country. A false statement in this Labor Party motion is that the clean energy target will reduce energy prices. We have seen prices go up by more than double the CPI to an outstanding high—eight times what they were in 1980. That is an explosion in energy prices. As a result of the Finkel report, I commissioned, at my own cost, a review by a well-known energy economist, Alan Moran. He points out that, if we adopt the Finkel report, consumers will not be paying less for energy; they will be paying around $800 a year more. He also points out that energy prices have increased from around $40 per megawatt hour during the first 15 years of the present century to currently in excess of $80 per megawatt hour and that futures prices are now over $100 per megawatt hour. There is more to come in the future, and with the clean energy target there will be even more beyond that. So we are seeing a degradation of our energy market. In fact, this is really an energy racket, because it is polluted by subsidies, vested interests and regulations. This is a fundamental thing in what we see the Labor Party advocating. They are advocating the Finkel report and the clean energy target when, fundamentally, the driver of energy prices is the overregulation of energy. We no longer have an energy market; we have an energy racket. That energy racket is now laced with subsidies, vested interests, regulations and politicisation. We don't have an energy market now; we have an energy racket. What is more, that racket is distorting prices; it is increasing prices dramatically. We are seeing more of it and it will continue, as the Moran report shows. Let's look at the Finkel report and see what it is based on. Finkel does his projections based on the economic modelling of Jacobs. We see that, in recent years, literally within the last few years, the Jacobs modelling has contradicted itself several times. It raises serious questions about Dr Finkel's report. We have to question now the purpose and the nature of the modelling. It looks to me like it was rigged to produce the result that government wanted. Is that what Alan Finkel was paid to do? We will see something else now. As Dr Moran has pointed out, if we continue to do what the government is doing now, we will see export industries hurt. The trade-exposed energy-intensive industries that are really suffering will suffer body blows, and we could lose them as well. So it won't just be small business that falls prey to the tired old parties; it won't just be employees. It will be big businesses and our highly competitive businesses that will be destroyed in this country. We need to end the renewable energy target, not bring in a worse replacement. I must give credit to Senator Macdonald. I have developed enormous trust in him as a result of his work in recent months. Let's have a look at what has happened in South Australia. We have seen a Labor government destroy its own state, gleefully blow up a power station and celebrate it. Isn't that what terrorists do? They destroy the power stations. That is what Jay Weatherill's government has done. Why have they done that? Because the Greens have pushed them into it. They have lulled the Labor Party into it. The Labor Party needs the preferences; the Labor Party then falls for the trick. The Greens are actually running South Australia, to the detriment of all South Australians. We have seen the Greens in their home state—it is basically their home state, apart from Tasmania, the state where they were most popular—lose one of their two senators, and Senator Sarah Hanson-Young is now on her own. That is not all we see in South Australia. We see the madness that the Xenophon team has been plying the alliance of the Greens and the Labor Party. Those three have colluded to drive up energy prices in that state. But, sadly, we've also seen a dysfunctional Liberal Party in South Australia that has been gutlessly silent—cowed into submission and cowed into not having the guts to stand up and call the alliance of the Labor Party, the Greens and the Nick Xenophon Team for what it is. They're all hurting energy prices. How can we have trust in those tired old parties, especially the Greens and the Nick Xenophon Team? Why is there inaction, supposedly, from the Prime Minister, according to Senator Gallagher's motion? It's very simple: the economic reality is biting. We now see the legacy of driving up energy prices. People are now feeling it in the hip pocket. Businesses are now sacking employees. Steggles have gone under—a household name. They're gone. What we've seen is economic reality coming home to roost, but it's going to get far worse. As for action, part (b) of Senator Gallagher's motion talks about action. Look at the action that her own Labor Party is taking in the state of Queensland, where the major coal-fired power stations are owned and operated by the Labor Party government. Senator O'Sullivan: Profiteering! Senator ROBERTS: It is exceptionally high profiteering. It's, essentially, a tax. It is a tax—nothing else. It's a tax that's destroying jobs, a tax that's destroying people's futures, a tax that's destroying industries and a tax that's destroying exports and making us uncompetitive. Then, as South Australia is on 47 per cent for its renewable energy target, what does the Labor government want to do in Queensland? It wants to bring on a 50 per cent target. Then it has the dishonesty to claim that it won't cost jobs. If we bring in a 50 per cent renewable energy target, that means that that will either displace or be an addition to the coal-fired power stations, which will mean that they will have to shut. They will not have the subsidies that intermittent energies now have. When they shut, that will put coal operators, coal employers and power-station workers out of their jobs. They will watch these imported windmills and imported solar farms working with subsidies passed on by state governments through taxation and higher energy prices. What we have from the Greens and the Labor Party—can you believe it—is a highly regressive and destructive tax. That's because energy is an essential commodity today. It's no longer a luxury, I say to the Labor Party. Energy is now essential, a significant part of people's expenditure and highly regressive on the poor. Who is subsidising the wealthy to install subsidised solar panels? The poor, because they can't afford solar panels. So we now have a Queensland government that is stealing taxation—they're exorbitant rates, and it's nothing more than a tax—destroying the future of the state with a renewable energy target that is even beyond South Australia's imagination and using subsidies to kill the futures of people on lower incomes. That's not all. We see the Nicholls opposition in Queensland—the LNP—passing a Labor Party budget that includes a 50 per cent renewable energy target. We also see that they want a target of around 23 per cent. How can anybody trust any of the tired old parties—the Greens and the Nick Xenophon Team? Then we have hydro. Hydro is the only power source that's cheaper than coal-fired power stations, but we can't build dams in this country, despite having massive water flows and water reservoirs up in North Queensland. We cannot build dams because of the Greens. Let's look at the cause for energy prices being so high and increasing. First of all, we have the Renewable Energy Target, which kicked in in 2007. That Renewable Energy Target coincides exactly with the dramatic increase in prices for electricity. The Renewable Energy Target, with its massive subsidies to solar and wind, has driven up the price of electricity. We've seen subsidies for the intermittent energies and we've seen gold-plated networks that are abnormally high and intolerably high because they're not being managed because the sector is too highly regulated. We also see something else, and that is what the Howard government brought in. Prime Minister John Howard proudly said that he wouldn't sign the Kyoto Protocol, and that was good. But he also said that we would comply with it, and that we did. To be able to do that, the Howard government had to stop land clearing or stop industry. So what did it choose to do? It chose to stop land clearing. If he'd implemented that then, as a result, the government would have had to pay compensation to farmers in New South Wales, Queensland and the other states, but that's in fact not what happened, because to get around that compensation, Prime Minister Howard colluded with the then Premier, Peter Beattie, and the then environment minister in New South Wales, Bob Carr. They put in place native vegetation protection legislation, which stole farmers' property rights, and Bob Carr is on YouTube gloating and laughing at doing it in a way that would mean farmers would not be entitled to compensation. We've also seen jobs destroyed by the Renewable Energy Target that the Howard government put in place. A question for everyone: who was the leader of the major political party in this country that first brought in an emissions trading scheme? It wasn't Kevin Rudd; it was John Howard. Howard had the trifecta: the first emissions trading scheme as policy, the Renewable Energy Target and the stealing of farmers' property rights. How can we trust anyone in this debate? Following Kevin Rudd's mad, lunatic and disastrous quest for UN favours in his 2007 campaign, when the Labor Party brought out Al Gore to spread his lies, instead of countering it with facts, John Howard actually endorsed it by timidly falling for the ploy and reinforcing the claims about climate. Just a couple of months ago John Howard said, by the way, that the two per cent Renewable Energy Target was all it should've been. He is the man who brought in what we see now: around 23 to 28 per cent. In 2011, four years after he left the prime ministership, John Howard was delivering the Global Warming Policy Foundation's annual lecture in Britain in London. After wreaking all of this havoc and doing all of this damage, John Howard admitted that he is agnostic on climate change. He hasn't seen the evidence, and that's why he's agnostic. The reason is that there is no evidence. What we see from the Liberal Party and the National Party is gutlessness, but what we see from the Labor Party and the Greens is dishonesty and deceit. We see that from the former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. Then we move onto the mad rantings we heard from the Greens this morning. We heard about hurricanes—the North American equivalent of cyclones—increasing. Let's have a look at that. We saw one cyclone last week, and then we see evidence that another cyclone is building and about to head towards North America. We then look at the records from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in North America, and we see that in the last 10 years North America has had 10 cyclones. If we go back to the 1850s, 1851 to 1860, the first years of the records, we see 19. That's double. If we then look at 1880 to 1889, we see 27, almost three times the number of cyclones we've had in the last decade. Senator Whish-Wilson this morning was speaking rubbish, absolute nonsense. There are no trends that indicate any changes in rainfall patterns; no trends that indicate any changes in drought severity, frequency or duration; no trends that indicate any changes in snowfall; and no trends that indicate any changes in cyclone severity, intensity or frequency. In fact, cyclones and hurricanes lately are unusually low in the last 10 years. We see no changes in ocean pH. What some people call acidity is actually alkalinity, because the pH is around 8.3. That makes it alkaline, not acidic. How can we trust the mad rantings of the Greens when they distort the facts? Instead of data, what do the Greens they rely on? They rely on pictures of cute, cuddly animals and colourful fish, instead of data. That is not science. Then we look at the Labor Party—and I see Senator McAllister in the chamber right now. She has mentioned things like a 97 per cent consensus. When people don't have the scientific data, they put in a red herring like 'a 97 per cent consensus'. Well, I am here to say that the 97 per cent consensus has been proven to be a 0.3 per cent fudging, and none of those scientists have any proof— The PRESIDENT: The time for the debate has now expired.