Senator ROBERTS (Queensland) (13:33): As a servant of the people of Queensland and Australia, I want to discuss some of the core concepts behind the Governor-General's speech. The Governor-General spoke about the need for government to provide the environment in which people can produce and thrive. What I will do today is present basic facts and let the people decide themselves, let the people make their verdict. I want to focus, in particular, on our country's productive capacity. That is what will keep us going in the future, unless we continue to destroy it, which has been the case for the last 20 years. There are three issues that I really focus on. The first is cost of living, and included in that are energy costs. We went from having the lowest electricity prices in the world to the world's highest. The second aspect of cost of living is taxation, and the third aspect is economic mismanagement, which is paid for by every person in this country. My second topic is security, and in relation to that I want to talk about immigration. The third point I want to talk about is future-building: the productive capacity of the future of our country that our children and grandchildren will inherit. In addition to cost of living, security and future-building, there is a fundamental need to address governance—to restore governance in this country and to restore sovereignty. I will quote from a former, well-regarded Liberal premier on that. And underneath it all I want to discuss freedom and rights. First, I will make some basic comments. Listening to the government, one would think they did well at the last election. They didn't do well; Bill Shorten did poorly. The Senate is elected directly, and therefore there is no House of Representatives mandate standing over us. There is an arrogance in the government, which think they have a mandate. They have a mandate in the House of Representatives, but this is the house of review and this house is known for standing up for the people. We represent the people of our states. Every one of us in here should be representing the people of our states. And yet, the people of the states do not trust Liberal or Labor. Let's have a look at the last election. In Queensland, the Liberal Party got 38.9 per cent of the vote in the Senate and 43.7 per cent in the House of Representatives. Across Australia, the Liberal Party got 41.4 per cent. It was actually one per cent lower than the election result in 2016, under Malcolm Turnbull's leadership. People don't know that: the Liberal Party went backwards in terms of total vote across the country. The Labor Party—and this is where some real shocks are coming—got 22.6 per cent in the Senate for Queensland, 26.7 per cent in the House of Representatives in Queensland; and 33 per cent across Australia. One Nation got 10.3 per cent in the Senate, or almost half what Labor got, 8.9 per cent in the House of Representatives, and 3.1 per cent across Australia. The United Australia Party, despite spending tens of millions of dollars, managed 3.4 per cent. Liberal and Labor combined won 61.5 per cent of the vote in the Senate for Queensland. That's under two-thirds of the vote. They won 70.4 per cent in the House of Representatives. Across Australia, 74.7 per cent voted for the Liberal or Labor parties: one-quarter didn't. But in the Senate, almost 40 per cent of voters in Queensland voted for someone other than the Liberal-Labor duopoly, and almost one in three voted for someone other than the Liberal-Labor duopoly in the House of Representatives. And here's why: it's because the productive capacity of our country is being decimated by the Liberal-Labor duopoly. The government, under the Liberal and Labor parties, has inflicted disasters in energy policies and in agriculture. That is directly affecting the cost of living. And I'm talking about both state and federal Labor and Liberal, not just federal. Are people aware of this? Yes, they are. Are people in this parliament aware of this? I don't think so. Let's have a look at some of the things that have driven farmers to despair—and I do mean despair—from Queensland, through the Murray-Darling Basin and into Victoria, across all the eastern states. Let's have a look at No. 1: property rights. They were stolen under the leadership of the John Howard government in 1996, in a deal done with the Rob Borbidge National Party government to steal farmers' property rights to comply with the United Nations Kyoto protocol. There was no data underpinning that protocol to justify its existence and to justify the Howard government's stealing of private property rights. What's more, those property rights were stolen in direct contravention of the Constitution by going around the Constitution; instead of giving just-terms compensation to farmers, they stole farmers' property rights by getting the state governments to do it. Peter Beattie is on record admitting that. Bob Carr is on record publicly admitting that. The Liberal Party and the Labor Party colluded at the state and federal levels to steal farmers property rights. Right now, up in Charleville, there is a man, Dan McDonald, who is fighting through the courts because he has been branded a criminal for feeding his cattle as a result of legislation that has been enabled by the Liberal-Labor duopoly. That is destroying the productive capacity. We call for restoration of those property rights or for compensation. It is not only Dan McDonald: Sharon Lohse, another farmer, is being decimated by state government extrapolation of that property rights theft. Peter Spencer: who knows about that man who almost died protesting the Liberal Party's stealing of property rights? The second topic affecting agriculture is water, or, should I say, the lack of water, driven by the UN's Rio declaration, again foreign imposed. It was signed up to by Paul Keating's Labor government on this occasion—again, the UN; again, no data backing it up; again, Liberal and Labor continue to implement the policy, destroying our productive capacity. We know of people such as Louise Burge, Chris Brooks and Graham Pyle in southern New South Wales whose livelihoods have been threatened because of a lack of water that is due to the mismanagement and, dare I say it, corruption that is across the Murray-Darling Basin as a result of policies driven by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. Turning to energy, there is nothing more important to modern society than energy. Since the 1850s we've seen a relentless decrease in the price of energy, thanks to technology, until about 10 or 15 years ago, and now we've seen a doubling of electricity prices. The thing that's given us our material wellbeing, our standard of living and our ever-increasing wealth until recently has been ever-cheaper energy. Now the UN has a deliberate policy of increasing electricity prices, increasing fuel prices and increasing gas prices, and Liberal and Labor are doing it, based on the UN's Kyoto protocol, with no data to justify it. We now have a situation where farmers in Queensland—southern Queensland, central Queensland and Northern Queensland—are not growing fodder in a serious drought, because they can't afford to pump the water, because of electricity prices. I can think of someone up north, Debbie Gibson, who told me of her problems when I was listening to farmers in Townsville just two weeks ago. Then we have the ridiculous situation of carbon farming, of tying up land and making it possible to become the habitat of feral animals and noxious weeds. That means extra costs for neighbouring farmers because of the extra management required because of those feral animals and noxious weeds. Carbon farming is based on the UN's Kyoto protocol and Paris Agreement, but, again, there is no data; again, it is being pushed by the Liberal and Labor parties; and, again, it is destroying the productive capacity of our vital industries. Kate Stewart and others are being hurt by this. Now in Queensland we are seeing soil and chemical run-off laws that are not based on data but are, again, complying with the UN's Kyoto protocol and Rio de Janeiro declaration. Liberal and Labor have been pushing this. This is a Labor extension of it that is destroying productive capacity. I think of the member for Mirani, Steve Andrew, who has been doing wonderful work with canegrowers to offset this and trying to come up with a far better solution, but no-one in the government is listening. Many canegrowers have recycle pits to catch and re-use the water. It doesn't run off their property. Why would they want it to run off their property when it's so valuable? But the bureaucrats and the Labor Party assume that all land from Cairns to Bundaberg to the Tweed is the same and uses the same quantity of fertiliser. Who's paying for this? The people in the supermarkets are paying for this and the farmers' families are paying for this. Turning to fishing, the UN's Rio de Janeiro declaration of 1992, signed, as I said, by Paul Keating's government, is backed by no data, but the Liberal and Labor parties are pushing it, destroying productive capacity. We now have the world's largest continental shelf fishing zone, yet we import three-quarters of the seafood our people in Australia consume. I'm thinking of people like Timsey, who have to deal with the bureaucrats, deal with faulty electronics imposed upon them by the government and deal with faulty regulations that are trapping them needlessly and for no benefit to the Barrier Reef. Then I think about forestry and listening to forestry workers and associated people at Maryborough recently, where they had a big, very well-attended protest. This is all, again, based upon the UN's Rio declaration, based on no data, pushed by the Liberal and Labor parties and destroying our destructive capacity. Think of families like Brett and his wife. And then I raise the issue of trigger mapping. This is bureaucracy gone mad. Lang Park, a stadium in Brisbane, is now, according to the government's trigger mapping, a site for valuable species threatened with extinction. This is all done to control land. Bruce Wagner has been doing this voluntarily for years. He has gone out and got the government's data and exposed it. I will quote next from a book called Rebuilding the Federation by former Premier of Western Australia Richard Court, who wrote this book in 1994: 'The driving feature of Commonwealth-state financial relations is the states' heavy reliance on Commonwealth funding to supplement their own source revenue. Currently'—remember, this is 1994—'the states receive approximately 50 per cent of their total revenue from the Commonwealth, and with that funding comes strings, restrictions.' So who is running the states? In many ways, it is now the federal government. Whether it's Liberal or Labor, it doesn't seem to matter in many areas, because there is so little accountability in the federal arena. We also see Richard Court go on, and this is the point I want to make, 'This is what is destroying our country's productive capacity, and our children and their grandchildren will be paying for this.' Quoting again from Richard Court: 'The Commonwealth is using the external affairs power to govern Australian citizens, often rushing to sign international covenants which trample on their existing rights. These agreements are made primarily by people outside Australia. The terms and conditions are set by officials from other countries. While Australia takes part in the negotiations, it does not exercise a dominant influence. The foreign countries do. We never see them, we never meet them and we cannot question them.' He then goes on to discuss the process. Let me also quote from Maurice Strong, the founder and the first Secretary-General of the United Nations' Environmental Programme, a corrupt and destructive political force masquerading as an environmental force. He signed off in his introduction, the forward to the Earth Summit's Agenda 21, the United Nations program of action from Rio: There is much to be done. And I look to the new United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development to be the focal point for the massive effort needed to create the new era of international cooperation, the new global partnership, that will make this shift possible. In the introduction, Maurice Strong said: Agenda 21 stands as a comprehensive blueprint for action to be taken globally—from now into the twenty-first century— that's what 'Agenda 21' stands for— by Governments, United Nations organizations, development agencies, non-governmental organizations and independent-sector groups, in every area in which human activity impacts on the environment. The Agenda should be studied in conjunction with both the Rio Declaration—which provides a context for its specific proposals—and the statement of forest principles. That is the blueprint right there. Then we've seen Canada evaluate the United Nations Agenda 21. They said: The reasons for undertaking this analysis of Agenda 21 were threefold. First, because the document is so lengthy, complex, and complicated, there was a need to understand the contents of Agenda 21, the interrelationships between the different themes and sectors, and the types of programs or activities which were advocated and agreed to by the negotiators of Agenda 21 … What I'm saying to that is that even the Canadians, who drove a lot of it, can see that Agenda 21 is so complex that people don't understand. Many people in this house and many people in the House of Representatives do not even know of Agenda 21, yet are pushing regulations through that are enabling Agenda 21. Maurice Strong said he had two objectives, and they were to deindustrialise Western civilisation and to put in place an unelected socialist global governance. Let's continue to the topic of energy. I talked a minute ago about the primacy of energy. John Howard's government made three massive changes. First of all, he brought in the Renewable Energy Target at two per cent. It's now at 14 per cent. The Liberal-National party want to take it to 28 per cent. It's already crippling our electricity prices, and they want to double it. The Labor Party want to quadruple it, and the Greens—as Lenin said, 'the useful idiots for the United Nations'—want to make it 100 per cent renewable energy, and it can't be done without subsidies. It's already destroying our electricity prices and making them the highest in the world. The second thing with regard to electricity prices is that we have the gold-plating of the networks, poles and wires because they've now been turned into corporations, not state government departments. Corporations are there to make profits and provide a return, which is simply a tax on the state government. We have the retailers' guaranteed returns. And what do they do? They just clip the ticket as it goes through so that the public can pay even more for their electricity. Then we have the National Electricity Market, put in place by Liberal and Labor, which is open to gaming and is being gamed, and is open to gouging and is being gouged, or rather the taxpayers are being gouged. We now have subsidies to some of the world's largest companies for installing solar panels in our country and installing wind turbines in our country—subsidies that we pay in higher electricity prices. So we export our natural gas and export our other energy and coal, and we send it to China and other countries. They send it back as wind turbines and send it back as solar panels, and then we pay Chinese companies—for example, in the case of Goldwind—to install these things and to take up valuable farming land in doing so. We're destroying our productive capacity. High-productivity agricultural land is being destroyed and turned into a wasteland, and we're now putting in place low energy density solar panels and low energy density wind complexes, and that is raising the price of electricity. It is unavoidable; it will continue to raise the price of electricity. What's more, we're paying the Chinese to do this. I've got nothing against the Chinese for trying to do that; we're the stupid ones doing it. In 1942, the Japanese bombed Darwin. The Prime Minister at the time, John Curtin, did not send a cheque to the Japanese saying, 'Thanks for destroying our productive capacity; let's help you pay for the bombs.' But that is what we're doing to the Chinese companies here destroying our capacity. What we will do as One Nation is make sure that the public continues to hear about the destruction of our productive capacity under the Liberal-Labor duopoly. We will continue to take the action that's needed to protect that capacity. We will say the things that need to be said and do the things that need to be done. We will speak up and serve Australia because we love our country. We love Australia and we love the people here, and One Nation will work to bring back Australia's productive capacity.