The “Climate Crisis” was started by a criminal!

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. 

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Would you eat “meat” grown in a lab petrie dish?

There is an application being looked at right now for humans to be sold laboratory grown meat.

I want to know, if all of these plant meat, lab meat, beyond meat products are so good, why do they want to be called “meat”?

Unfortunately, the Senate voted down my motion to have this issue referred to an inquiry.

Transcript

As a servant to the many amazing people who make up our One Queensland community, I move:

That the following matters be referred to the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee for inquiry and report by 1 September2023:

(a) the suitability for human consumption of in vitro protein, also known as lab-grown meat; and

(b) any other related matters.

Food Standards Australia New Zealand are processing an application right now to approve laboratory grown meat, known in Australia as in-vitro meat. It’s called cultured meat, although I can see nothing cultured about it; it’s slop. I’m horrified that bureaucrats, university academics and representatives of the business sector that will make bank out of this move could decide this once-in-a-century shift in agricultural production—conflicts of interest!

Today One Nation is moving to refer in-vitro meat to the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee for inquiry. This reflects that FSANZ, Food Standards Australia New Zealand, reports to the minister for agriculture.

There are 450,000 people employed in the red meat industry in Australia, working in 63,000 businesses, who collectively are the lifeblood of the bush, the lifeblood of our country. This does not include the poultry industry, which is the subject of this first fake meat application. The poultry industry produces 1.3 million tonnes annually of high-quality, affordable meat—white meat. This contributes $7.9 billion to our economy, employing another 58,000 Australians.

Seafood is another industry where in-vitro technology is being concocted. Seafood contributes $3.1 billion to the Australian economy, employing another 17,000 people. Australia exports beautiful natural produce which is in strong demand worldwide because of its high quality and reasonable price. The livelihoods of half a million Australians, and their families, rest on the outcome of this inquiry. The economic welfare of rural Australia rests on the outcome of this inquiry.

In-vitro meat has many issues that do need an inquiry. The cells that are cultured—yes, cultured—in an intensive near-urban-area industrial production facility are obtained using a painful muscle biopsy on a live animal. Every year, thousands of biopsies will be required to get the muscle cells needed to grow enough fake meat for projected production. At the same time, the Red Meat 2030 plan provides for a doubling of the price of red meat, pricing natural meat out of the reach of everyday Australians. This is an attempt to force the consumption of fake meat, like it or not.

In-vitro meat is a seismic shift in health, nutrition and culture. We don’t know what issues will arise on the production line for these products, or what diseases, what fungi or what bacteria will creep into a facility like this. Most likely, meat will still need antibiotics and chemicals to control such contamination. With in-vitro meat, the cancer risk is high, as cells are replicated over and over, increasing the chances of a cancerous mutation being packaged for sale. Real animals have a self-healing system, though, that hunts down and kills cancerous and precancerous cells every minute of every day. In-vitro cells do not.

An alternative technique to in-vitro replication of muscle cells is to use a bioreactor to use cornstarch, plant skeletons, fungi and gelatine to engineer fake meat in an immortal cell line. What a name—an immortal cell line. The final product has all the nutrition contained in whatever nutrient supplements or additives can be added to this slop before it is formed into fake meat. It is slop with nutrients.

The environmental credentials of in-vitro meat are suspect. In-vitro meat still needs food, hormones and growth factors to grow. The equation is still ‘energy in, stored energy out’. The faster the growth, the more profit is generated. And there will be a lot of profit. The billionaires who are lining up to bring in-vitro meat to the market are the same billionaires who are telling us how much damage cows are supposedly doing to the environment. Nobody is apparently concerned about the obvious conflict of interest.

Livestock production is not bad for the environment. Livestock farts, burps and belches are part of the biogenic carbon cycle, which works like this: plants absorb carbon dioxide and, through the process of photosynthesis, harness the energy of the sun to produce carbohydrates such as cellulose. Cattle are able to break down cellulose for food, releasing methane into the atmosphere. Methane is CH4. Note the ‘C’ for the carbon atom.

Over a 12-year period, the methane is converted back into carbon dioxide through hydroxyl oxidation, a naturally occurring process in our atmosphere. The carbon released in that process is the same carbon that was in the air prior to being stored in a plant and then released when the plant consumed it. It’s a cycle. For a constant herd size, the cattle industry is adding no additional methane to the atmosphere—none. Insect-based fake meats and lab-grown in-vitro fake meats are a solution to a problem that does not exist.

I know why this is happening. Fake meats offer a scalable production system in a controlled environment located right next to major markets, offering high profits on a predictable, stable cash flow, independent of weather conditions—natural weather conditions.

No wonder the billionaire predators that run the world are lining up for their slice of this new multibillion dollar market. All they have to do is get their mates, their underlings, in government and the bureaucracy to persecute farmers out of existence, and the market for fake meats will present itself. Look at Holland and New Zealand, and now look at America, Britain, Canada and, with this application, Australia.

Why should we even let them call this rubbish ‘meat’? Meat is a natural product brimming with goodness. Fake meat is a chemistry experiment that has more in common with pet food than human food. It is flavourless cells cultivated in a test tube, with additives for taste and additives for so-called ‘nutrition’. It’s fake. As Senator McDonald’s inquiry into the definitions of meat and other animal products recommended, this stuff should not be labelled or sold as meat.

Clarkson’s Farm, on Prime Video, has been, I’m sure, an eye-opener for city dwellers who have no clue how bad the persecution of farmers who grow our food has become. After watching the very entertaining Jeremy Clarkson teach himself farming, contending with the rules, the paperwork, the long hours, the lawyers, the activists, the heartbreak and the never-ending expense, one has to ask, ‘Why would farmers do it?’ That is the idea. If billionaire predators can get decent, hardworking, salt-of-the-earth farmers to walk off their land, walk away from the love of providing the public with nature’s bounty, they can sell their Frankenstein food from their factories and make out like bandits while wrecking the health of everyday citizens.

I hear people say that fake meat will be dearer than natural meat, yet the billionaires promoting this putrid slop are not spending all this money just to make a product that is less tasty, less nutritious, less safe and dearer than the competition. Production volumes will soon ramp up, and quality and safety checks will be compromised to ensure the product is cheaper. The war on farmers will keep ramping up until room in the market has been conjured for their fake meat.

I understand that Labor, the Greens and teal Senator Pocock will oppose this motion, How can the Labor Party possibly still consider themselves the party of the people when over and over they sell out the people? The further left the teals, Greens and Labor Party march, the less relevant they become to the lives of everyday Australians and, worse, the more harm they do to the lives of everyday Australians.

I thank Senator McDonald for her comments and ask the Senate for its support for this motion. As long as we have amazing farmers bringing us natural, safe, nutritious protein, the world will never need dangerous food grown in a laboratory.

One Nation is now the party of the people.

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Let Women Speak!

I remember the feminist protests of the seventies, when women marched behind banners that read, ‘If you see my gender, you do not see me.’

Now the gender radical trans-activists have transformed that slogan to read, ‘You will see my gender, or else!’

This is not progress; this is division wrapped in a multicoloured bow.

Transcript

As a servant to the many different people who make up our one amazing Queensland community, I’m a representative for all Australians, including those with an XY chromosome and those with an XX chromosome—a servant of men and women and those adults who choose to live as something other than their chromosome provides.

Today, this Parliament House saw an exercise in democracy of which I’m very proud. The Let Women Speak rally on the lawn outside was conducted with a restraint that was sadly lacking in Belfield. I applaud the commitment to decent behaviour from those who attended to protest in favour of women’s rights and those who attended to redefine women’s rights, and I thank the AFP for their calm presence.

As senators, we have an obligation to pour oil on troubled waters, not pour kerosene on a fire. Yesterday, Senator McKim described our fellow Australians who choose to protest in favour of women’s rights as ‘trans-exclusionary, right-wing dropkicks—T-E-R-D-S’. It is not a defence for the senator that this actually spells t-e-r-w-d. Just because he can, that does not mean we should address constituents in such terms.

I remember the feminist protests of the seventies, when women marched behind banners that read, ‘If you see my gender, you do not see me.’ Gay rights campaigners, back when there was something to campaign for, marched behind banners that read, ‘If you see my sexuality, you don’t see me.’ In 2023, one group within our community has transformed that slogan to read, ‘You will see my gender, or else!’ This is not progress; this is division wrapped in a multicoloured bow.

In the years ahead, our society will be greeted with many challenges, social, economic and defence. We must face these challenges together, accepting our differences. The one thing that forces trying to reshape Australia fear the most is our unity: Australians facing our challenges united behind one flag, as one community and one nation.

Let women speak!

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The price of everything goes up while Labor focuses on virtue signalling

The scariest words in the English language: “I’m from Labor and I’m here to help with the cost of living”.

Inflation, mortgages, fuel prices, power bills: Everything’s going up and Labor are going to make it worse.

Transcript

Senator ROBERTS: President Ronald Reagan once said, ‘The top nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”‘ The words ‘I’m from Labor and I’m here to help with your cost of living’ are even more terrifying. Labor lied and promised the world to get elected to government on less than a measly third of the votes. Instead of a Labor utopia with rainbows and unicorns, Australia is waking up nearly a year later with the mother of all hangovers.

Inflation is roaring out of control. Mortgage payments have skyrocketed. Fuel is still $2 a litre—we’ve just grown to expect it. Electricity bills are positively shocking, driven higher by climate policies pushed by both major parties. We said it wouldn’t be easy under Albanese. I don’t think anyone thought it would get this bad this fast or be this arrogant this fast.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT (Senator Fawcett): Senator Roberts, remember you need to address members of the other chamber by their correct title.

Senator ROBERTS: One Nation advocates getting back to basics on energy, taxes, manufacturing, food production and value-added mining. We are the richest country in the world. Let’s use the resources for the people. (Time expired)

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The left hate real Women

Women’s rights have come full circle. Women are back to being insulted and minimised with terms like chest-feeder and uterus-owner. Men identifying as women have more rights than women have. One Nation will not stand for this attack on women.

Transcript

Last month we welcomed our first grandchild, a boy, and I thank the Senate for that leave of absence. Observing the world that my grandson has been born into, I know he will need to fight the same battle for female equality that his grandparents fought two generations ago. The world has turned full circle, seeking now to limit and erase the concept of biological women, with the perverse argument that this is gender equality. It is not. In 2021 the Senate passed my motion banning the use of anti-woman hate speech, including ‘chest feeder’ and ‘uterus owner’. The Public Service blatantly ignored the Senate’s will and kept using hate speech anyway—no surprise.

The ongoing robodebt royal commission shows how bureaucrats are now a Soviet-style nomenklatura—the self-appointed former Soviet-era elites, self-interested, unaccountable and wilfully ignorant of the cruelty they dispense. Last November bioethicist Anna Smajdor of the University of Oslo proposed in the journal Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics to keep women alive who are medically brain dead and use them as baby incubators for women who choose not to carry their own child. Columbian politician Jennifer Pedraza responded: ‘Women are not utensils to be thrown away after use. Women have human rights.’

Why do we have to remind the Left that biological women have human rights? This is the second time that university academics have raised this idea. Sick minds in academia are now degrading women from ‘uterus owner’ to ‘uterus custodian’. The Australian’s list of the top 25 LGBTQ influencers include 12 biological men, six biological men who are now something else, and only seven biological females—18 to seven. Scotland allowed biological men identifying as women to be housed in women’s prisons. Biological women identifying as men were not given the same right. Women have fewer rights today than do men identifying as women.

One Nation will continue working to stop biological women from being erased. We are one community, one nation of two equal genders. (Time expired)

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One Nation introduces Bill to improve access to medicinal cannabis

I was very proud to introduce the Improving Access to Medicinal Cannabis Bill 2023. It has been too hard and too expensive for patients with severe conditions to access this drug.

One Nation’s will fix that for those in need of this amazing plant.

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Big consulting companies are draining taxpayer funds for nothing

The Government spends millions of dollars every year on consulting companies that overcharge to give the Government an opinion they want to hear.

Last week in the Senate I supported a motion creating an inquiry into the use of consulting companies so we can cut the waste.

Transcript

One Nation will be supporting Senator Barbara Pocock’s motion because we believe that the big consulting companies are basically guns for hire. They’re opinions for hire. They give the government what the government wants, at a million dollars a gig. Some of these big firms are multinationals out of Japan.

So we will be supporting this.

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SVB Collapse, Credit Suisse, Australian Bank bail-IN?

After the SVB and Credit Suisse crisis a bail-in, which is where the banks take their depositors’ money to save themselves in a collapse, is still possible in Australia.

I call on the government to categorically rule out a bail-in and properly fund the bank guarantee scheme.

Transcript

As a servant to the many amazing people who make up our one Queensland community I note that in the last few weeks we have seen with the failure of Silvergate Bank and Silicon Valley Bank what is in aggregate the largest banking collapse in US history. Australia is not America and it is not Europe. If everyone keeps their heads, we will be fine. Our big four banks are bastards, yet they are well capitalised. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to not take this opportunity to revisit how to save a failing bank.  

I remind you that there are two choices: bailing out, with a large injection of taxpayer money, increasing debt for everyone, or bailing in, which is where the banks take their depositors’ money to save themselves. A bail-in still requires the bank to close for days or weeks, preventing customers accessing any money left in their accounts. Business are left without money to pay staff or suppliers. The effect on the economy is catastrophic.

Everyday Australians trying to pay for their shopping would find their account empty or their card suspended. Travellers may be stranded. 

One Nation introduced a bill to prevent bank bail-ins and to protect the people. Labor and the Liberal-Nationals defeated our bill in 2020. One Nation did lead a successful campaign against the cash ban bill that the Liberals, Nationals and Labor proposed in 2021, so Australians can still use cash in an emergency. This is relevant again because President Biden initially chose to seize half of Silicon Valley Bank depositors’ funds and freeze the rest for up to three years. That’s a bail-in. What followed was a run on all banks, forcing the president to backflip and instead initiate a bailout. 

Australia has a bank guarantee scheme, a bailout, but it’s a con trick. There’s no funding and no requirement to use it. It covers only $20 billion per bank—$80 billion total. This is supposed to protect $1 trillion in depositors’ funds. It’s eight per cent. I call on the government to categorically rule out a bail-in and properly fund the bank guarantee scheme. 

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Treasurer’s “Jimbonomics” Australia’s road to ruin

Treasurer Jim Chalmers, with no real-world business experience, no firsthand knowledge of free markets and no life outside the machine of politics has decided to tear down Australia’s economic system and rebuild it—hammer in one hand and sickle in the other.

The Treasurers, “Jimbonomics”, form of command and control will only benefit Labor’s billionaire masters.

Transcript

I speak as a servant to the many different people who make up our amazing one Queensland community. I have not yet had a chance to make fun of Treasurer Jim Chalmers’s ode to soviet glory titled ‘Capitalism after the crisis’, so let me start there. A Treasurer with no real-world business experience, no firsthand knowledge of free markets and no life outside the machine of politics has decided to tear down Australia’s economic system and rebuild it—hammer in one hand and sickle in the other. Reinventing capitalism is not visionary, as Jim Chalmers hopes; it’s a cliche.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT (Senator Cox):

Senator Roberts, can I just remind you to address people in the other place by their correct titles.

Senator ROBERTS: Mr Jim Chalmers?

Senator ROBERTS: Worse, it confuses political theory with economics. The Treasurer has studied only one of those, and it’s not economics. Mr Jim Chalmers has studied political science and now sees every problem as a political one. The Treasurer knows nothing about economics and clearly dismisses the need for it. How ironic that Mr Jim Chalmers’s now legendary article opens with a quote from the Greek philosopher Heraclitis, when he says:

No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.

What? It’s not without merit that Heraclitis is known as the ‘obscure philosopher’. This nonsense may make the Treasurer sound smart at a dinner party for pseudo-intellectual lefties, yet, to everyday Australians struggling with the rising cost of living, falling real wages and a housing shortage, it’s nothing more than intellectual masturbation.

When you hear ‘command capitalism’ from the Treasurer, what he’s really saying to the Australian people is this: ‘I don’t trust you. I don’t respect your choices. I don’t recognise your freedom. Everything you have belongs to the state, and you will do as we command.’

Commentators refer to this fantasy as Jimbonomics. That’s their view. In reality, it’s about threat, force and regulation designed to herd businesses into supporting fringe activism that rewards the elites at the expense of everyday people. It’s about control over ‘we the people’. Rather than the state owning everything directly, all the wealth in the Treasurer’s economy will be owned by the billionaires that own the UN and the World Economic Forum.

Already, woke politics has engineered a rapid descent of employee privacy, with governments ranking businesses based upon the race, religion, sexual preference, gender and disability of their staff. Human beings have become commodities in the implementation phase of the great reset, the new world order.

The recent Workplace Health and Safety Amendment Bill 2023 from this government actually requires an employer to know the vaccine status of their employees and to bar those people from the workplace if they are not vaccinated—inhuman. Pfizer says, ‘Cheers for that bill. Thank you.’ Treasurer Chalmers has lit a fire at the heart of parliament that seeks to destroy everything good and prosperous that everyday Australians, across the 235 years of Western settlement in Australia, have built.

As many have said in criticism of the Treasurer’s treatise on communism, there can be no democracy without capitalism, and there is no capitalism without the free market. It’s time we started asking if Labor is planning on reimagining democracy itself. Is it? The Albanese government have introduced legislation that clearly shows this is their intention, so at least the Treasurer has been honest about his intentions.

Listen to this. The Treasury Laws Amendment (Energy Price Relief Plan) Bill 2022 was nationalising the gas industry. The National Reconstruction Fund Corporation Bill 2023 represents the government distorting the free market, taking it upon themselves to direct investment in manufacturing, using government money, and to stop key investments in our future.

The Safeguard Mechanism (Crediting) Amendment Bill 2022 imposes egregious controls on industry, with ministerial direction to provide all of the details in the future—unfettered power. I’m sick of these bills that are all shopping bag and no shopping.

It’s not the purpose of the state to give the government of the day a bill with nothing actually in it so the government can fill in all the important bits later, as it wants. Shame on the Greens and the teals for going along with this insult to the Westminster system of government. It must now be clear that George Carlin was absolutely correct: it’s a club, and everyday people, everyday Australians, are not in it. Australians have never wanted the economy to be subservient to its political leaders. We have never wanted that.

Command capitalism is anticompetitive. It allows the Albanese government to decide which Australian businesses get to succeed and which fail. Why does Mr Jim Chalmers feel the need to reinvent capitalism? Why does he feel that he is the first Treasurer in Australian history that must take this step off the cliff into the abyss? I’ll tell you why. The free market doesn’t like what Labor is selling. The Australian people do not want to spend their money on inferior eco-products and self-serving CEOs who, so long as they achieve their carbon dioxide footprint, would happily see Australian families starve or freeze.

Net zero policies are all fun and games until the lights go off and the bugs are served cold because, well, gas is now selfish and the power has gone off again—so cold it is. Why is it that the only environments the Labor Party doesn’t want to help are the investment environment and the human environment? If the market doesn’t want Labor’s globalist vision, then the Prime Minister and his Treasurer must accept that. They have no right, and they were not voted into power, to dismantle capitalism, reimagine it or duct tape it to a chair in the basement.

It took Mr Jim Chalmers 6,000 words to explain that values based capitalism means, ‘You will do as we say.’ The Soviet Union fell 30 years ago, but Treasurer Chalmers is doing his best to drape its banners all over our parliament. Treasurer, give it up. Russia has. ‘Jimbonomics’, as some call it, will harm small and medium-sized businesses and transfer wealth to the people at the big end of town whose market power allows them to comply with the Treasurer’s demands. To comply is easy for them: pass the cost on to the consumer. That’s all. From the perspective of everyday Australians, green is the new red. From the perspective of the billionaires who shadow-wrote the Treasurer’s opus, green is the new gold.

The only part of the Treasurer’s opus that was not lifted from the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset was the part that was deliberately left out: you will own nothing and you will be happy. Who will own what everyday Australians are no longer allowed to own—the houses, cars, furniture and electronics? Why, it’ll be the predatory billionaires for whom Jim Chalmers is just a mouthpiece.

Commanding the market during COVID has wrecked the market. Wages are falling, inflation is out of control and economic activity is down. Exports have grown in countries that ran their economies better than we did. They have the demand and the economic strength. Now Jim Chalmers wants to use more command economics to get us out of the hole in which command economics has buried us.

Australia will not survive a second round of abuse from a treasurer who is handsy with other people’s money. Markets do not belong to Mr Jim Chalmers. They do not belong to the Labor Party. Markets belong to the people and their private businesses. They belong to Australians. The big business investors in whose pockets the Treasurer so often resides, bankers in particular, would like nothing more than to kill off their market competition and to bury the small and medium-sized businesses in a new mountain of controls and regulatory bondage.

Their deaths will be celebrated in the name of saving the planet. Make no mistake: destroying small and medium-sized businesses is the goal, not the unintended consequence, of green politics.

For Labor, dealing with a handful of powerful CEOs is easier than dealing with 10 million small directors. But those directors are the ones keeping Australia back from the brink of ruin. The safest economies in history have been the nimble free markets. It has been repeatedly proven. They adapt to disasters, bounce back after injury and seek out the best solutions for the future. Free markets are far smarter than Jim Chalmers.

The beauty of free markets is that they are smarter by far than any individual or group, and sensible, honest people know this. Competent people know this. Jim Chalmers and his Soviet counterparts are too arrogant, or maybe too fearful, to understand that basic truth. The secret to being a truly great treasurer is to step back, relinquish power, cut regulation, lower taxes and let Australians do what Australians do best: lift themselves up through their own hard work and enterprise.

Businesses are not ideological vessels to carry Labor’s election slogans, tied to the Greens and the teals. Businesses are not fodder in the insatiable thirst for more money, more power and more influence from the billionaires at the World Economic Forum. It is about control.

Shame on the Treasurer for reaching well beyond his mandate. Put your greedy paws back in your pockets. It’s time for the Treasurer and the Prime Minister to tell their billionaire masters, ‘No.’ We have one flag, we are one community and we are one nation, founded as a penal colony.

I’ll be damned if the One Nation party will let you take us back there again.

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Iraq invasion was based on WMD lies

20 years ago Australia joined the USA in an illegal invasion of Iraq.

We were told Saddam Hussein had yellow cake and weapons of mass destruction, this was an outright lie.

Transcript

I commend the Greens for the intent behind their speech. We need scrutiny when we deploy people overseas. I commend our armed services for their work overseas and in this country. They have sacrificed a lot, and they have covered themselves with honour. 

But I remind the Senate of Mr Alexander Downer’s interview on the 7.30 program, on the last day before he retired, where he said that John Howard came from America and strode into cabinet and said, ‘We’re off to Iraq.’ That’s not good enough. Now is not the time to do this.

I want to refer to a new book recently released by Clinton Fernandes titled Sub-imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena. Clinton Fernandes is a Canberra man who works for the University of New South Wales and lectures at ADFA. He has the guts to tell it as it is. It reads: ‘We are a sub-imperial power of the United States. We are making a mess of things by following the United States blindly into conflicts.’ 

Look at the Afghanistan withdrawal. Look at the mess that was created. Look at the weapons of mass destruction and the lies that were told to justify our invasion of Iraq. Then, quite openly and blatantly, we were told, ‘Oh, there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; we lied to you.’ The United States did that. Australia did that. Britain did that. Tony Blair admitted it. Where is the accountability?

Yet, on the other hand, I’m conflicted. I had a haircut on Friday, and the barber was from Iraq. He said that Iraq is better off in certain areas. So I can’t speak with knowledge. 

There are two parts to the Greens motion in part (b): 

(i) urges the Australian Parliament and government to learn the lessons of the past and to never again be dragged into another country’s unjust war of aggression … 

I support that. We need to learn from this. The only way to get accountability is to ask questions about it.

The second part reads: 

(ii)  calls for the withdrawal of ADF personnel still deployed to Iraq today under Operation Okra and Operation Accordion. 

I can’t vote for that because I don’t know the background. I don’t know what the consequences will be, so I’m not going to open my mouth one way or the other on that, but I want to echo the words of Senator Watt: we need an inquiry into that deployment. I think the Greens are on the right track in opening that issue up, but I cannot support the suspension of standing orders to do that.

I do support the intent, which is to have an inquiry and to develop accountability for these decisions of wantonly invading other countries in support of the United States.

So I commend the Greens, but I won’t be supporting their motion for the suspension of standing orders.

I thank you for raising it. 

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