Incomplete Data Leads to Incompetent Governance

I expressed my disgust at the lack of data and the contradictions in the policy objectives of various legislation the Albanese Labor government is producing.

This parliament stopped making decisions long ago on issues relating to health, the environment and climate based on data. It now actually contradicts the data. Yet no one has the self-awareness to notice let alone care.

Thanks to the Albanese government, we’re now sending millions of dollars to the people of Tuvalu because their sea levels are rising when the data shows that in fact their island is growing in size and the sea levels are not rising. At a time when Australians are doing it hard from the rising cost-of-living, the PM wants to send millions of dollars to the Pacific over fear the people ‘might’ lose their homes based on flawed climate theories with no data. This is costing our country its future. We’re already feeling the pain as a result of this flawed process and it will hurt our grandchildren even more.

We urgently need responsible governance with policies based on real data for the good of all Australians.

Transcript

Senator Hanson has already outlined our party’s response to this, so I won’t go into that. I want to make it very clear that Pacific islanders, in my experience, are wonderful people. They’re very friendly. Fiji is the friendliest country on Earth, so I’m told. We have many Pacific islanders in the south of Brisbane. I’ve come across them in the regions, like when I worked in Kalgoorlie. They’re stars in the NRL. They’re wonderful people. I’ve got no issue with the people of the Pacific islands. 

What I have got an issue with are the people in this chamber, not just those who are here now. The people in the Senate are largely responsible for destroying this country. I’m going to talk briefly on how. For five days last week and for a half a day today, we discussed a bill about sea dumping, all based on the stuff that comes out of the south end of a northbound bull. It’s complete rubbish. In COVID, tens of thousands of people died needlessly to something that was supposedly based on the science. It’s now coming out that the injections were not safe and not effective. We were told the science was there. What a lie. We are spending trillions of dollars in forgone income—heaven knows how much our children and grandchildren will spend and how many opportunities they will lose—on climate. I’ll come to that in a minute. There’s not one shred of evidence that has ever been given in this parliament.  

We talk about the environment. All kinds of things are done in the name of the environment, without any evidence: the Murray-Darling Basin, no evidence; the Coorong lakes in South Australia at the Murray mouth, no evidence. In fact, these are contradicting the evidence, and everyone here is asleep. This parliament stopped making decisions on data long ago, and now it actually contradicts the data, and no-one is awake enough to even care. Trillions of dollars being spent and contradictions of the actual real-world data characterise decisions made in this parliament, characterise policies made by the major parties in this parliament and characterise legislation. In my previous work as an engineer and as an executive, if we ignored the data, people died—they died—just like they did because of COVID injections. Science is often touted in this chamber as justification for various policies, yet it’s never presented. Science is wonderful. It gave us objectivity. It gave us freedom from the days when, prior to science, the biggest muscle, the strongest financial warrior, the strongest religion prevailed. Then suddenly science emerged and gave us objectivity, and suddenly freedom emerged. Let me tell you briefly what science is. The first thing is that it relies on empirical, scientific data. It’s based on objective data, objective observations. And no-one in this chamber does that on climate, COVID or the environment. 

But the data is not enough. When I first came into the chamber, back in 2016, I used that term, ’empirical data’ and all the journalists and some of the politicians scurried off to find out what ’empirical’ means. It means objective, measured data. But that by itself is not enough. It needs to be presented with a logical scientific framework that proves cause and effect. No-one has presented the logical scientific points that show that carbon dioxide from human activity affects climate and needs to be changed. We now have Pacific Islanders supported to come here on that basis. Yet it’s never been done. A third part of science is that it’s backed up with hard references, scientific references—and not just peer reviewed, because peer reviewed can be done by anyone, but actually based upon assessing the papers objectively. They’re the three criteria: empirical scientific data, logical scientific points that prove cause and effect. 

With the whole climate scam, the climate fraud, no-one anywhere in the world has pointed out the specific quantified effect of carbon dioxide from human activity on any aspect of climate: not temperatures, not snowfall, not droughts, not storm frequency or severity or duration—nothing. There’s not one shred of basis for policy, because that is the basis for policy. There’s not one shred of evidence. I’ve even heard a list of scientists who are afraid of the climate—but no science. We even have a minister, who’s sitting in the chair now, who I asked for evidence. She gave me 25-plus papers, and not one shred of evidence. Some of them even said there is no warming going on. It’s amazing, yet she listed them as evidence. 

And we hear things like ‘the science says’, and not one person has distinguished themselves by characterising any of that above natural variability, as Senator Hanson said earlier today. Natural variability is cyclical, inherent, natural variation. That’s all we see in the climate signal. And the Greens won’t debate me. I first asked Senator Larissa Waters on Thursday 7 October 2010, at a public forum at New Farm, where we both shared the dais, along with three other people. I challenged her to a debate. She jumped to her feet faster than I have ever seen her move and said, ‘I will not debate you!’ She came up to me after the forum and said, ‘I will not debate you.’ I challenged her again, along with Mark Butler, Labor’s climate spokesman at the time, on Tuesday 14 June 2016 at the Solar Council Forum, where I was not a participant, and I challenged him to a debate. Both ran from the challenge. Monday 9 September 2019 was the first day I challenged the Greens officially in the Senate—Senator Di Natale and Senator Larissa Waters. Never have they debated with me. They will not present the science. They won’t treat the Senate with the respect of presenting empirical scientific data and logical scientific point—never; I’m still waiting. 

And why won’t they debate? Because they know they haven’t got the science. Yet we’re now sending, thanks to the government, millions of dollars to the people of Tuvalu because their sea levels are rising, when the data shows that that is not happening anywhere near that extent, and it’s all natural. 

One of the two biggest problems we have in this country is shoddy governance, driven by a lack of data and a lack of objectivity, reinforced by denial. The second thing is ceding our sovereignty. That doesn’t apply in this debate, but we are ceding the future of our children and the future of our country by not using objective empirical scientific data within logical scientific points.