Australia’s Wake-Up Call: No Defence, No Homes, No Future?

Is the true cost of Net Zero our national security? “We’re becoming a third-world country in the blink of an eye – and no one seems to care! It’s very simple, if we want Australia to win – we ditch Net Zero.

SPECTATOR TV AUSTRALIA | @SpectatorOz

Transcript

Because if a country can’t defend itself, it doesn’t matter what its policies are. It doesn’t matter at all. You know, our coal, our oil, natural gas and our uranium reserve are probably the largest in the world – certainly per capita. We are the richest nation in the world – the UN has said so itself.

Excluding tourists, there are two and a half million migrants in the country on temporary visas. That’s around about one and a half million houses that we need just for them. And that’s far too many people for our roads, our hospitals and the number of houses we have – far too many. And what’s happening is that good people, working families, because working families – I’ve visited them in every major city in this state – working families, mothers and fathers, are going home to their children, seeing if they’re still in the car where they’ll sleep tonight.

Alexandra Marshall (Host): Hello and welcome to SPECTATOR TV Australia. I’m your host, online editor Alexandra Marshall. And today we are joined by Queensland Senator Malcolm Roberts. Senator, welcome to the show.

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you very much, and congratulations on being back on air with SPECTATOR TV.

Alexandra Marshall: Thank you so much, Senator. And also a big congratulations to you, because you have just been re-elected to the Senate. Are you excited about being the de facto opposition this time around?

Senator ROBERTS: Well, first of all, thank you to the many people who supported me and thanks for the vote of confidence, because it’s actually the third time I’ve been elected to the Senate and the second time I’ve been re-elected. So I’m very, very pleased with that. We are the de facto opposition because Liberal and Labor have basically introduced the same policies over the last – since 1975, particularly since John Howard, who started the Liberal-Labor Uni party. What’s happening Alexandra is that the Liberal Party introduces every major climate energy policy, for example, and the most destructive housing and immigration policies – they’re the ones who put in big Australia and the Labor Party has just come in and ramped it up. So One Nation is the only elected party that’s capable of dealing with reality. You know, we focus on the data, the hard facts and the cruel facts. We don’t run away from them and and we keep reminding them. We’re the only party that will stick up and stay say the truth. And in that sense, we’ve always been the true opposition.

Alexandra Marshall: Well, I’ve been hearing a lot of chatter about the endless silence from the Coalition. The election was a while ago and yet we hear nothing from them when major world events happen. So I’m guessing One Nation is looking forward to having policies as well as opinions.

Senator ROBERTS: Well, we’ve had the best policies. I can honestly say most of them came out of my office thanks to the staff in our office. But we’ve had the best policies I have ever seen of any political party at any time in Australian history.

Alexandra Marshall: Well Senator, the world did change over the weekend with President Donald Trump taking a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Now regardless of what anybody thinks about this or what will happen next, has home defence of Australia become a critical policy for when you return to Canberra?

Senator ROBERTS: It has been since we’ve been in Canberra, Alexandra. And yes, it will be when we return to Canberra, because if a country can’t defend itself, it doesn’t matter what its policies are, it doesn’t matter at all – the Chinese Communist Party just sent warships down here. They circled our country. We didn’t have one of our own warships tailing them when they were starting to to do firing, firing practise. You know, we are exporting our coal to China to build steel for, for arming itself and making weapons. We can’t use the coal here as steel industry is shutting down because of the high energy costs. We are crippling ourselves and people are just laughing at us.

Alexandra Marshall: Well, Senator, there’s been a lot of criticism of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and indeed our Foreign Minister Penny Wong regarding what’s going on in the global stage now, particularly Anthony Anthony Albanese’s performance at the G7. But when we talk about what’s going on there, has Australia’s position on the world stage been damaged by the way Labour has approached our situation in the world and let’s face it, one of our strongest allies, which is the United States?

Senator ROBERTS: Yes, unquestionably every country, including Australia, benefits when we have a good reputation. Everyone, after all, is usually happy to meet an Aussie overseas travelling. And you know, I know that when I was working and studying and travelling across the United States for a total of about five years and two visits, people love to hear Australians. Oh, I love your accent. But then they love the way we are so similar to Americans in our lifestyle and their values. They love to meet Australians. They’re laughing at us. When they look closely, when people overseas look closely, what we’re doing, they just laugh and ask if we’re serious about what what’s going on in this country. We’re crippling our manufacturing, crippling our energy sector and countries are saying, haven’t you learned anything from Spain? Haven’t you learned anything from from Germany? Haven’t you learned anything from the Europeans destroying? Haven’t you learned anything about Britain destroying itself? Haven’t you learned anything from Donald Trump saying no more solar and wind? I mean, these, you know, our coal, our oil, natural gas and our uranium reserves are probably the largest in the world. Certainly per capita we are the richest nation in the world. The UN has said so itself. And you know, I accuse them of lying, but that’s they’ve still got that fact right. Yet our power costs are sky high because we only export it. We can’t use it here.

Alexandra Marshall: Well, why the while there is a silence from most of our elected officials, which is kind of concerning given the state of the world. One Nation leader Pauline Hanson did release a statement. Now in that statement, she says, and I’m going to quote and read from this. This is directed toward our Anthony Albanese. Your government’s position continues to be inadequate against the danger of radical Islam in Australia, which puts the lives of citizens at risk. Now that is what Pauline Hanson has said and she is saying this in relation to Australia’s immigration policy and calling for there to be no more visas issued to Iranians at this point in time when there is a risk of a regime change and more extreme ideological views coming into the country. As Senator, there’s also a mass migration disaster taking place in the cities around Australia right now. Would you like to see migration and immigration, the Prime Minister put a tighter hold and control on that, particularly given the geopolitical climate we are in right now?

Senator ROBERTS: Yes, that’s a very simple answer to give. Yes. What’s more, Alexandra, we have asked him for that and he’s given us given us that, that response, but he broke it and he lied about it straight afterwards. We asked him after his first year in office, he imported 518,000 new immigrants, net migration 518,000 over half a million. And then when we exposed that and told him how much damage he was doing. We’ve got people homeless from every, every provincial city in this, this state of ours. We should be the richest in the world. We’ve got 10s of thousands of people homeless. You don’t have to go far to see it. And when we raised that, he said, OK, well, we’ll make sure immigration is lower the following year – it was bloody higher. Now we’ve always discussed issues, Alexandra, with the quality and quantity of immigration, the number of people and the type and quality of people in terms of their ability to contribute. Straight away he’s, he’s bringing in people that. What are the figures now – 0.6% have construction experience and will go into housing. They’re supposed to build houses for the other 99.4%, you know, excluding tourists, there are two and a half million migrants in the country on temporary visas. That’s around about one and a half million houses that we need just for them. And that’s far too many people for our roads, our hospitals and the number of houses we have far too many. And what’s happening is that good people, working families, I should calm down because working families, I’ve visited them in every major provincial city in this this state, working families, mothers and fathers are going home to their children, seeing if they’re still in the car, where they’ll sleep tonight. Where do they go to the toilet? Where do they shower? This is this is a barn. Good working families.

Alexandra Marshall: And even in city suburbs, we would not expect to see it. Senator, I myself have personally stood in line at house inspections with over 60 people. And you know, there’s there’s so little hope for people trying to find somewhere to live. And everywhere you do find is ridiculously expensive for what is essentially a shoebox. But Senator, I want to talk.

Senator ROBERTS: Alexandra. It’s also another fact that that the reason immigration is so high is to hide the fact that we are in a per capita recession, which is the real measure of a recession. So we are in a per capita recession, which is a recession. But the definition of a recession, as you know just as well as I do, is two terms, two quarters of negative growth overall in the economy. And they’ve stayed out of that by inflating the economy with people, inflating demand, raising our gross domestic product. So it’s barely over 0. And that way they stay out of officially being called a recession. That’s what they’re doing. They don’t care how many people are homeless, how many people are living in misery, how many people are living with with threats of violence over their heads in our country because they just want to make sure that they’re not officially classified as the treasurer and Prime Minister who brought upon us the recession. And Scott Morrison needs to be held partly accountable for that, too.

Alexandra Marshall: So strange that socialists are lacking empathy, Senator, but that does appear to be the case. Now, look, domestic security and national security are intrinsically linked with energy security and mineral security. That is how we protect a grid, how we create energy and how we manage our natural resources, which are of course finite. Now, under the previous governments of both Coalition and Labour, Australia has been outsourcing not only all of our coal and oil and gas, which we sell off into other countries, particularly China, but our energy grid which is becoming increasingly reliant on foreign powers to function. And not only that, it’s becoming more and more fragile. If you were given the absolute power, senator in Canberra and you can make a change to Australia’s energy condition, what would you like to see happen as soon as possible?

Senator ROBERTS: First of all, the message that you just said needs to be articulated across the country. We need to have energy. Energy has been on a relentless downward trend. Energy price has been on the relentless downward trend in real terms from about 1850 to now and sorry until about 1996 and the start of the Howard government when that was artificially increased. The important point is that decreasing costs of energy in real terms are the the powerhouse that drives human progress. So what happened with John Howard coming in with his renewable energy targets, stealing farmers property rights, National Electricity Market putting in in place first policy for carbon dioxide tax. Yes, Liberal were the first to have that policy. What he did was he reversed human progress and made it more expensive to for for energy. Now the important thing in that is that manufacturing over the last few decades, the number one cost factor in manufacturing is energy prices. The lower your energy price, the lower your manufacturing costs. What we have done is artificially inflated, raised the cost of energy. We’ve destroyed our manufacturing and guess where it’s going? It’s going to China. First of all, we’re we’re subsidising the Chinese to make solar and wind solar panels and wind turbines. We’re subsidising them to import them, we’re subsidising to transport them. We’re subsidising them to erect them. We’re subsidising to run them. We’re subsidising after 15 years for them to replace the damn things when a coal fired power station lasts 60 years at least. And So what we’re doing, taking that subsidy under our electricity costs, is driving the cost of electricity to make it unaffordable for manufacturing. So our manufacturers go to China and manufacturing jobs go to China. Our electricity becomes much more expensive. We’re becoming a third world country in the blink of an eye and nobody seems to be caring about it. So it’s very simple if we want Australia to win – we ditch net zero. We use the coal, the oil, the gas and the uranium reserves in Australia for Australians. China is using our coal to cheaply power its manufacturing industry. It’ll cripple our manufacturing. It’s crippling our farmers. During a drought, The last drought we had farmers in North Queensland, they personally told me farmers in central QLD and farmers in southern Queensland did not plant hot fodder crops because the cost of pumping water was too high. In a drought, no fodder crops. This is insane.

Alexandra Marshall: It’s often difficult to explain to the younger generation exactly what the rising price of energy is impacting in their lives. One great way that I’ve found is to turn the lights off or turn the power off and see how many things would no longer work. In a society a lmost nothing work with our energy and that’s everything which this green tax is being added to. But you know, the Nationals are being sent down a little rabbit hole about trying to workout how much net zero will cost. Personally, I think they’ve been sent on a bit of busy work by the Liberals who don’t really want to talk about net zero. But as you indicated, I think AI has done a few calculations and it thinks that net 0 cost Australia 9 trillion or something in that order to fully maintain and change our grid. But that does not include losses to businesses. It does not include replacing the grid every 15 years when everything breaks. That’s a a conservative estimate, but my question is could the real cost of net 0 senator be our national security.

Senator ROBERTS: Definitely is. Undoubtedly it is. And by the way, on the cost estimates for for net zero, Peter Dutton, Dutton said the Coalition has estimated the cost of $1.3 trillion. An independent study from three universities in this country estimated 1.5 trillion, Bloomberg 1.9 trillion. And as as you said, when you include the cost of jobs, businesses, replacing the grid every 15 years, it’s 9 trillion. That was developed by AI, which is just taking some of the facts that are freely available. The cost to Australia though, is national security, $9 trillion is how much capital will be needed in the next 35 years. According to Net 0, the most comprehensive start. Sorry, according to Net 0 Australia, the most comprehensive study to date by the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland and Princeton IN America, that’s $260 billion a year, Alexandra, that gets tacked onto our electricity costs and our taxation. Australia’s entire military budget is 56 billion. That’s 0.6% of the of the costs of, of Net 0. And part of net 0 is that we can’t use coal and make steel in Australia. You can’t make, you can’t make steel using the coal that we have. The best cooking coal, the best steel grade coal, coal in the world. And Australia is shipping that to China where they’re building warships with it and munitions with it. We can’t use it here. I mean, people know that. That’s an absolute insanity. The true cost to our country and our way of life, Australia’s way of life, standard of living, cost of living, affordability, lifestyle, safety, security, our children’s future. Everything is being decimated, jobs, lifestyle out the door because Liberal in which Liberal Nationals which introduced this and Labor Party which ramped it up in each occasion are crippling this country and the Nationals. I believe that some of the Nationals are genuinely afraid of net 0. Some of them who are afraid of net zero and wanted to stop actually advocated for us to cut carbon dioxide. So they’re culpable in in in some instances, but they’ve woken up because because One Nation has put the pressure to them. We’re the only party that’s calling out net zero as insanity, the only party that’s saying it’s it’s detrimental to our to our health of our country, but we’re the only ones actually opposed to it and what they’re trying to do is deceptive, but we’ll call them out on it.

Alexandra Marshall: It’s quite extraordinary that Jim Chalmers and Chris Bowen and Anthony Albanese and the whole Labour Kit and Gaboodle are going to war against carbon, which is the fundamental building block of life and they have a defence budget to match which is of course the spending on renewable energy. It is an extraordinary amount of money being wasted on a wall that does not exist anywhere except in their own UN driven fantasy world. But you did touch on a topic there before, Senator, which was about the resources that Australia has, these precious resources. Now, we often hear that Australia’s economy runs on the back of the mining industry. Now that is true, But when the world enters a dangerous geopolitical footing, the basic resources that a country possesses are worth more than what they can be exported as. Now, given this, should Australia be more careful about how much of our limited resources we are shipping to places like China on the cheap instead of getting the maximum value out of this of this resources? Do we need to be more careful about how we manage lithium, iron, silicon, coal, oil, gas, gold, everything.

Senator ROBERTS: Copper, silver, zinc, lead? Yes, we should be more careful. Number one, we should get more money for it that we, we are the world’s third largest exporter of natural gas. Qatar is the second largest I believe and the United States is the largest. We get ****** all for it. Our coal, we get ****** all for that, except in Queensland now we get, we get massive royalties, but we’re still not not using them properly. We’re still allowing the export of valuable cooking coal and and that’s fine, but we need to make sure we have access to it here and have a steel industry that can be supported. That’s why we pushed Capricorn Steel building a transcontinental railway line in the north north of Australia just above the Cap Tropic of Capricorn to have steel mills in the iron ore and have steel mills in the West and have steel mills in the cooking coal mines in in the east and ship the the coal West and the iron ore East, we need to build an iron ore. We need to think strategically and rebuild our on our industry. We can be and they’re hard, the customers for this and hard investors looking at this, including Australian investors. We need to be the world’s largest producers of steel and iron and the best quality and that is easily and easily achieved with the proposals we are saying. We have got so much coal, so much iron ore, so much gas, so much uranium and we look like we could be the one of the world’s largest producers of rare earth metals. But these and other metals we need to be considering strategically and to think long term for our country. You know, we have enough resources to last our country for thousands of years, but not if we let other countries plunder it while getting none of the benefit. We need to export. We need to identify the best resources for ourselves and we need to get a fair price for our export exports. You know, why would Australia want to invade? Why would China want to invade Australia when they already own airports, mines, houses and water and some of our electricity networks? What’s left for them to take? They’ve been buying it. We should use our resources for ourselves first and export what’s what’s what remains.

Alexandra Marshall: And finally, Senator, the One Nation has been making recommendations about defence honours and the Awards Appeals Tribunal. And it says he would like to review all nominations for Distinguished Service Crosses and medals to senior officers between 1991 and 2012, among a whole other raft of recommendations. This is a very interesting series of ideas that One Nation has. What is the purpose and significance behind One Nation’s recommendations in this field?

Senator ROBERTS: Well, it’s really simple when it comes to defence the critical foundation of our defence strategy is the quality of our people and that has been driven by mateship – that is being eroded Alexandra. We have a we had a proud Defence Force who no longer have the high morale they had and that has been crippled by the lack of accountability in the top brass. They have been flagrantly abusing their privileges, their titles, the honours and award system and their positions. We have the the the head of the Australian Defence Force, the Chief of the Defence forces. He is now paid 3 times what the American equivalent is paid. The American equivalent has 10s of thousands of many times more servicemen and women, has nuclear capable ships, planes. He has so many weapons and he can do so much damage and yet he’s paid 1/3 what our chief of defence forces is. This is ridiculous. We are overpaying our senior officers. We’re giving them far too much leniency. They’re not being held accountable. They are destroying the morale. And you know, we plan the well, the government plans to pay hundreds of billions of dollars for equipment like orcas submarines, the Hunter class frigates, combat reconnaissance vehicles, F35 jets. What the hell can they do without good morale in amongst the people who fly them and ship them and pilot them and, and arm them? The retention crisis now is from low morale. So we don’t have people to drive that fancy equipment. We’ve got a contractor on over a billion dollars income payment that we are outsourcing to recruit. Why the hell should we do that? Under them the recruit retention has gone down. Under them the recruit intake has gone down. We won’t have anyone to drive that fancy equipment. And when we do put people in that equipment, how the hell can we have ensure they have high morale when they’re being gutted by the inconsistencies, the hypocrisy and the deceit of of of the top brass. The ADF people are leaving because they don’t feel valued and that’s what my medals inquiry looked at. There’s a two tier system in the Defence Force at this moment and that needs to be addressed if we want people to win. The overarching thing about Australian leadership is that people in Australia will follow good leaders. If they’re not good leaders they will crucify them. And what we’re heading for here is, is real embarrassment for Australia’s Defence Force because we are not keeping up with the standards in the Australian military. And that is due solely and entirely to two groups of people, the top brass in our country and the and the Liberal and Labour Uni Party, defence ministers and bureaucrats that are just ******** on basically the soldiers. And we need to stop that. The soldiers, the airmen and the and the Navy sailors, we need to stop that. Need to call it call, call a spade a spade and get on with fixing the Defence Force morale and the Defence Force strategy.

Alexandra Marshall: Well, Senator, there has never been a more important time in our modern history for Australia’s defence forces to feel as if they are being looked after, particularly the young men and women who are on the ground defending Australia’s interests here at home and abroad. So I’d like to thank you very much, Senator Malcolm Roberts for joining us here today on Spectator TV.

Senator ROBERTS: You’re welcome. Keep up the good work, Alexandra.