While I agree that protecting our natural environment is a duty of government, I completely disagree with Senator Pocock’s definition of “protection.” The rush toward net zero is not saving our environment; it’s state-sponsored vandalism.
Here is the reality of what net zero is doing to Australia:
✖️ Creating unmanaged havens for pests that will devastate native flora and fauna while destroying food production because of “carbon-dioxide farming.”
✖️ 205,000 hectares of farmland and native forests will be required to be cleared for wind turbines, 1.25 billion solar panels installed and the carving out of 20,000 kilometres of 75-metre-wide transmission easements through national forests.
✖️ Transmission line costs have blown out from an initial $8.5 billion estimate to upwards of $120 billion, and likely over $200 billion. When you add the generators, the total net zero cost sits at around $350 billion. Financed with high-cost loans over 35 years, this will ultimately burden taxpayers with a bill exceeding $1 trillion.
I have stood in these forests myself. I have seen developers blowing the tops off mountains to install massive concrete turbine bases. Offshore wind is no better. Data shows these marine turbines slow the wind, trap heat at the sea surface, disrupt marine life (including whales) with sediment and noise, shed microplastics and kill birds.
It’s not possible for anyone to look at Australia’s beautiful landscapes scarred with wind turbines, solar panels, access roads and transmission lines and think: no damage here; this is beautiful? No, it’s not. It’s vandalism.
We cannot put the tops back on the mountains that have been destroyed by this insanity.
This is literally killing the environment to save it.
One Nation will protect our beautiful landscapes from net zero vandalism.
One Nation is the true party of the environment.
Transcript
One Nation agrees with Senator Pocock that protection of the natural environment is a fundamental duty of any government. I do, though, disagree with Senator Pocock on the definition of environmental protection. ABARES executive director Dr Jared Greenville said last December that research indicates that projected land-based carbon sequestration goals for our net zero transition will require sequestration projects across 18 million hectares by 2050. While some of this land is co-used, agricultural land locked up for carbon credits is not environmental land. Inevitably it becomes a refuge for pests which infect local farms and devastate native fauna and flora. Carbon dioxide farming is the enemy of the natural environment and the enemy of food production.
Add to this total the 205,000 hectares of farmland and native forests which are being clear felled for the construction of wind turbines and access roads, plus the land for the 1.25 billion solar panels needed to reach net zero—that’s billion with a ‘b’. Then add the 20,000 kilometres of new transmission lines necessary to take power from where it is being generated to where it is needed. Each transition line runs through an easement, usually 75 metres wide, of clear felled land. In 2020 the AEMO cost estimate for most of the transmission line projects was $8.5 billion. Now the transmission line cost is estimated to be at least $120 billion and is more likely to blow out beyond $200 billion. Add another $160 billion for wind and solar generators and we have a $350 billion net zero cost being financed with high-cost loans, which in turn blows out the total 35-year outlay to above $1 trillion.
For environmentally destructive projects like Snowy 2 and for most of the wind projects in North Queensland, those transmission easements run through forests of national significance. I’ve been there, in the very forests this motion is calling to protect. They’re the same projects in which so-called green environmentalists are installing wind turbines and blowing the tops off mountains to make space for the huge concrete bases of massive wind turbines.
Here’s what I don’t understand. Here’s a sensible motion about the need to protect our beautiful environment, yet the motion ignores the massive environmental damage from net zero measures. How can anyone look at one of Australia’s beautiful landscapes scarred with wind turbines, solar panels, access roads and transmission lines and think: no damage here; this is beautiful. No, it’s not. It’s vandalism. This is not just happening on land. Offshore wind turbines harm the environment. A new study in Science Advances shows that offshore wind turbines actually warm the sea surface. Turbines slow the wind. This weakens mixing, shuts down upwelling and in turn traps heat at the surface. This changes the microclimate for more than 10 kilometres behind and stirs up sediment which interferes with marine life, including whales. Add this to bird kills, underwater noise and microplastic shedding and the picture is clear: offshore wind isn’t solving an environmental problem; it’s creating one. This does not even take into account the environmental cost of manufacture, transport, insulation, maintenance, decommissioning, disposal and remediation of massive wind turbines.
One Nation will care for the natural environment. We will ensure that the land is in the hands of the best stewards: farmers. We will cancel the entire project and protect those beautiful landscapes from net zero vandalism, returning land, where possible, to its best use, be that farming or native forests. Unfortunately, we can’t put the tops back on mountains. That damage is there for eternity—a testament to hubris and the tragedy of the paradox of virtue. It’s the killing of the environment in the name of saving the environment. One Nation is now the party of the environment.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/14qDPVETo1U/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2026-05-29 14:55:132026-05-29 14:55:25Saving the Planet or Destroying It? The Ugly Truth
In our Budget Reply, we had so much to say about saving this country that Senator Hanson ran out of time to deliver it all.
One Nation is offering a fundamentally different direction for Australia — one rooted in proven, common-sense economic principles.
➡️ Cheap, Reliable Energy: Ditching the “green” agenda to invest in coal and nuclear.
➡️ Real Wealth: Backing the local industries that actually build this nation.
➡️ Lower Taxes: Putting money back into the pockets of hard-working Australian families.
➡️Less Bureaucracy: Listening to engineers and physicists, not climate bureaucrats.
Transcript
For all the talk about this budget, many issues are all too familiar. Revenue is up from $773 billion to $815 billion. Expenses are up from $812 billion to $833 billion. Gross interest payments are at $27 billion, rising to $40 billion over the forward estimates. Budget deficits are forecast to balloon by another $100 billion over the next four years. Interest-bearing debt will climb another $300 billion to $1.3 trillion. Businesses are collapsing at record rates—almost 50,000 insolvencies since Labor took office. Productivity is stuck at six-decade lows. Eight out of 10 new jobs are now created by government because the private sector has become so disillusioned. Business confidence and domestic investment have fallen to 1990s recession lows. Our inflation remains the highest in the developed world.
Australian families have endured 15 interest rate hikes, pushing more than one million households into extreme mortgage stress. GDP per capita has fallen in 10 of the last 13 quarters, and 337,000 households can no longer pay their energy bills—double the level of five years ago—as power prices continue to surge.
Labor will introduce the working Australians tax offset. It’s less than $5 a week in relief and doesn’t kick in until next year, an election year. The government wants you to be grateful for 68c a day off your tax. That tax offset will be completely rubbed out by bracket creep. Bracket creep means working Australians will pay more in tax because of inflation. The government profits from higher inflation. It’s a stealth tax, a trap for the next election and an advertising slogan for 2028. They used the same trap in their election advertising in 2022. If anyone dares to refuse passing a useless, less than $5 tax cut, they will be accused of not supporting tax cuts. While Australians will receive just $2.6 billion back in the one-off WATO, they’ll pay tens of billions more in taxes because of bracket creep.
One Nation tried to end bracket creep by indexing income tax thresholds to inflation, ending the stealthy tax increases. Labor, the Liberals, the Nationals and the Greens refused to support it. Instead of the measly $250, ending bracket creep would put thousands of dollars a year back in working Australians’ pockets. We don’t need Labor to protect Australians; we need to protect Australians from Labor.
The tax changes in this budget, including on discretionary trusts, will suppress investor appetite and speculative capital, forcing these businesses to set up in jurisdictions with no impediments. Capital will always, always follow to where it is most loved.
This budget reveals a political culture that relies evermore heavily on centralised bureaucracy, dependency on the state and short-term intervention. That is the Labor way. Forget the spin about intergenerational equity; it’s being used as an excuse to break election promises. True equity does not punish those who worked hard, took risks, built businesses and paid their taxes. It does not resent aspiration or success. Real intergenerational equity means giving young Australians the same opportunities their parents had—the chance to own a home, raise a family, start a business and get ahead through hard work. Young people are not struggling because older generations succeeded. They are falling behind because governments have chosen subsidies and wealth redistribution over allowing free enterprise to flourish.
On the forward estimates, our total liabilities will exceed $1.9 trillion—a burden to be repaid by our children and grandchildren. That is not equity. That is hypocrisy. Changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax will further dampen economic activity, push rents higher and reduce housing supply. As a self-proclaimed scholar of Paul Keating, the Treasurer might have reflected on what happened in 1985 when these same policies were tried and had to be reversed two years later.
Housing is a national crisis only since Labor took office, and I say ‘crisis’. More than 40 per cent of the cost of building a new home is government taxes and unnecessary compliance costs. One Nation will take a different approach. We will slash the GST to zero on building materials for homes up to a value of $1 million for the next five years. Rapid population growth without matching supply is a recipe for declining living standards. This is not about blaming migrants. It’s about recognising limits. But this government has no interest in reducing migration, for all the talk. It expects to increase visa application fees from $4.7 billion today to $7.1 billion by 2029-30. Elevated migration is a money spinner. Canada cut migration sharply from 2024 and has now enjoyed 18 straight months of falling rents and easing house prices, something we have strongly advocated for.
We will introduce income splitting for every family with at least one dependent child. A single earner on $120,000 with a stay-at-home partner would be around $9½ thousand a year better off. We will exempt insurance from the GST, and we urge the states to drop stamp duty on it as well. Affordable insurance ultimately reduces burdens on taxpayers. We will allow aged pensioners and veterans to work as much as they want without losing any of their pensions or health card benefits.
For more than a decade, One Nation has consistently argued that Australia must strengthen domestic resilience, including strategic fuel reserves, reliable energy systems, food and water security, and sovereign industrial capabilities supported by true nation-building infrastructure. The current liquid fuel crisis has not only exposed our domestic unpreparedness but signalled to adversaries how vulnerable we would be in a conflict. Building a strategic reserve is a step in the right direction, but it is still not enough to build resilience and liquid fuel independence. The total cost of not having sufficient supplies will always outweigh the net cost of having them in a crisis.
One Nation will cut the red, green and black tape that is strangling projects and fast-track major approvals, especially energy, to a maximum of six months. We will ditch net zero, exit the Paris Agreement and axe the climate change department, saving $30 billion in the process. We will back coal and gas and support bringing nuclear power to bring down prices, restore reliability and guarantee national energy security. Next week, I will introduce a bold new gas policy that underwrites our vast sovereign resource assets for decades to come. It will provide real equity investment and genuine skin in the game, where our healthy dividend will help pay down the debt racked up by successive governments.
We have listened extensively, and we will work with industry, not against it, in genuine partnership. We will bring back our mining and resources industries, the bedrock that funds schools, hospitals, roads and defence. A strong nation leverages its natural advantages. It does not demonise them. One Nation will swiftly move to get rid of impediments in an increasingly competitive global environment and restore our status as a nation that rolls out the red carpet in resources rather than roll it up. We are backing the Capricorn steel project, to connect coal in Queensland’s Bowen Basin to iron ore in Western Australia’s Pilbara region with a rail line that will open northern Australia to development. The project is strongly backed by Australian investors and is aimed at making Australia a major global supplier of high-quality steel. It will require the Inland Rail project, now abandoned by Labor, to be completed and extended to the more suitable Port of Gladstone, in Queensland. It will be the foundation for a national rail circuit that effectively circumnavigates the Australian continent, providing freight efficiencies and improved defence logistics. These are no longer abstract debates. They are national security imperatives.
In agriculture, we will ban the further sale of controlling interests in freehold farmland to foreign investors and limit the sale of leasehold farmland to a maximum of 25 years. We will ban foreign ownership of water and return balance to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. One Nation strongly supports the modern hybrid Bradfield scheme to improve water security, open new areas to farming and improve food security and exports. We will build new dams and water infrastructure, reintroduce drought payments and re-establish a federal government backed rural lending fund to protect farmers through other natural disasters.
Importantly, we will restore accountability. Australians work hard for their money, and they deserve a government that shows the same discipline. Successive governments have failed to tackle a culture where people in charge of creating multiple white elephants pay no price for their commercial illiteracy. Snowy 2.0, which has blown out 21 times—to $42 billion—is but one egregious example. One Nation will ensure past, present and emerging failures will no longer be transaction free for those responsible.
We will abolish divisive cultural departments and race based programs that divide Australians by skin colour or ancestry. Every Australian will be treated as equal under one flag and one culture. Help will be given on the basis of genuine need, not race. No more special privileges—equal rights for all, and special rights for none. There will be no more taxpayer-funded welcome to country rituals. Unity builds strength; division destroys it.
Our Defence Force must focus on operational readiness, capability and deterrence, not morale-sapping identity politics. One Nation will restore pride in wearing the uniform and give them the latest equipment to carry out their duties. We won’t sell off our historic sites of symbolic significance to cover irresponsible spending.
Australians are not asking for miracles. They are simply asking for a country that works again. One Nation continues to attract practical Australians with real world experience—people from finance, investment, trade, engineering, farming, small business, building, energy, manufacturing and defence. These are men and women who have built things, employed people and delivered results outside the Canberra bubble. Australia does not need more career politicians serving vested interests. One Nation believes the government is there to serve you. This budget only goes to prove yet again that this government believes you are there to serve it.
In closing, Australia stands at a crossroads. For too long, Labor’s failed experiment of reckless spending, crippling regulation, net zero ideology and wealth redistribution has driven businesses to the wall. It’s crushed living standards, saddled our children with debt and stolen the Australian dream from an entire generation. A nation loses hope when it loses vision. Australia now has near a trillion dollars in debt and nothing to show for it. One Nation will break the green, red and black tape that has tied us down. We will work with the natural strengths of the assets on our balance sheet. We have iron ore, coal, gas, cattle, rain, cotton, gold, copper, oil and so much more. Australia should be a powerhouse, but the major parties lack the management skills for us reach our potential. It is perverse that a government and an opposition believe they can change the weather, and are prepared to waste ultimately hundreds of billions to do it, while they mock the idea of a version of the Bradfield scheme that would open the massive potential for irrigation of the rich but dry soils of the western districts. It is perverse that a government and an opposition that came up with the biggest construction fiasco on earth, the $42 billion Snowy Hydro 2.0, cannot complete the Inland Rail from Melbourne to Brisbane, which would open up the intermodal efficiencies and commercial potential of the inland corridor.
We are covering the land with windmills and solar panels and, in turn, delivering— (Time expired)
The DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator Hanson, are you seeking the call?
Senator Hanson: I seek leave to finish my speech.
The DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Is leave granted? Leave has not been granted, Senator Hanson.
Senator Hanson: I seek leave to table my speech.
Leave granted.
“We are covering our land with windmills and solar panels and in turn delivering the dearest and most precarious electricity grid our nation has ever had, when we had the cheapest coal fired power and sitting on one of the greatest coal resources in the globe.
One Nation does not care about major party sneers. We care about handing our children a better opportunity than was handed to us by our parents, currently it is the other way around.
One Nation will reallocate the resources from the fool’s errand of Australia changing the weather to invest in coal fired power, nuclear, irrigation, freight, rail, ports and roads. We will work with businesses as partners in these projects.
One Nation will listen to civil engineers, nuclear physicists, and research scientists in medicine instead of climate change bureaucrats. These assets on our nations balance sheet allows us to pay for expenses on the Profit and Loss. These assets build a nation that can repay its debts. One Nation is offering a fundamentally different direction -one rooted in proven, common sense economic principles. We’ll lower taxes on working families, slash regulation that strangles enterprise, deliver abundant and affordable energy, and back the industries that actually create real wealth and opportunity.
We will never pretend we know better than you how to run your own lives. That is why we are determined to hand power back to the Australian people where it belongs.
We will reward hard work and aspiration, restore fiscal discipline, and put Australian families and businesses first once again.
One Nation’s word is our bond – and we have three decades of unwavering policy consistency to prove it.
We hope to earn your trust to implement the bold change Australia desperately needs.
https://i0.wp.com/www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-21-215100.jpg?fit=676%2C336&ssl=1336676Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2026-05-22 05:32:242026-05-22 05:32:36Budget Reply: One Nation’s Blueprint to Put Australians First
Labor and the Liberals have abandoned their founding visions.
Today’s modern Labor Party has traded its commitment to the working class and the family for radical gender ideology, social engineering and control over children, undermining parental rights and effectively claiming ownership of our children.
And the Liberal Party has abandoned the middle class to serve wealthy corporate “puppet-masters” and big-money interests.
There is a stark divide between corporate success and the struggle of everyday Australians.
Data shows corporate profits have soared while the share of GDP going to wages has plummeted.
Real wages have stagnated since 1980, while the costs of education, healthcare, and housing have increased by 300% to 400%.
The “net zero” transition is causing skyrocketing power bills and economic suicide.
One Nation is the only party capable of restoring Australia’s prosperity.
Our plan includes: ▶️ Slashing government spending by at least $90 billion a year. ▶️ Putting $30 billion back into the pockets of Australians. ▶️ Investing $20 billion annually in wealth-growing projects.
One Nation calls for a return to patriotism, family values and economic fairness for the often “forgotten” middle and working class Aussies.
Transcript
Tonight I deliver One Nation’s eulogy for the status quo that had dominated Australian politics since 1949 and that passed away during the break. 1949 was the year Labor prime minister Ben Chifley delivered the famous ‘Light on the hill’ speech and Robert Menzies was elected as the first Liberal Party prime minister. Both were men of vision, both had the courage of their convictions and both were driven by a deep love for our beautiful country. This may cause offence amongst the 2026 rabble pretending to still be Labor, yet I must point out the ‘light on the hill’ metaphor Ben Chifley used as a regular churchgoer is almost a direct quote from the Gospel of Matthew 5:13-16. This is the famous ‘salt and light’ passage from Jesus’s ‘Sermon on the mount’, where he said inter alia: ‘You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Men do not light a candle and put it under a bushel but on a candlestick, and it gives light to all that are in the house.’ And it’s true that Chifley’s speech was rooted in the trauma of the Great Depression, with this line: If the movement can make someone more comfortable, give to some father or mother a greater feeling of security for their children, a feeling that if a depression comes there will be work, that the government is striving its hardest to do its best, then the Labor movement will be completely justified.
How times have changed. The Labor Party now refuses to even say ‘mother’ or ‘father’, let alone build them into their policies. Indeed, Labor ministers refuse to define what a woman is. Today’s Labor Party uses gender ideology to subvert the concept of man and woman. It refuses to back families as the fundamental building block of society. It undermines family. To those on the government benches, ‘uterus owners’ and ‘prostate owners’ now stand as references to women and men, with ‘birthing parents’ and ‘ejaculators’ serving as references to mothers and fathers.
The Labor Party has used transgenderism to establish the principle that the state owns your child, and refusing the state’s instruction to transition your child will result in the termination of parental rights. Parents should understand that children are no longer, as Ben Chifley said, theirs; rather, they are the state’s. Last week Jacinta Allan, the Premier of Victoria, confirmed this new Labor principle in the extraordinary defence of child castration, which she still insists on calling ‘gender-affirming care’.
Mass immigration eliminated job security for most unionists and forced unions to become more and more militant in response to the cost of economic growth. We stopped building wealth. Instead, the fight is over a greater share of the same pie, an inevitably futile task. It’s a game the wealthy have won and the working class have lost, because the Labor Party falsely pretends that it’s in the worker’s corner when it’s not. Corporate profits as a share of gross domestic product have risen from 17 per cent in 1975 to 65 per cent in 2020. The share of gross domestic product for wages and salaries has fallen from 25 per cent in 1975 to 17 per cent today. Corporate profits keep going up. The income share of the middle class, who are still paying everyone’s social security, just keeps going down.
It’s impossible to look at this data and see a pattern which apportions blame only to the Liberal Party’s periods in office. Both parties are to blame and equally so. The status quo has done over Australian workers, and the polling for One Nation clearly shows workers, tradies and small business are sick of it. Ben Chifley spoke of comfort as a core Labor Party value, and I ask Australia’s working class: where’s your comfort? You’re not only being attacked as colonisers and being degendered and disrespected in Labor’s social policy; your financial position has gone backwards.
The cronyism and corruption inherent in the net zero transition—the lie—designed as it is to subvert energy generation to the weather, has run riot and rampant through the economy. Business insolvencies are at a record high. Householders are terrified of opening their power bills, and bills are set to rise at five times the inflation rate this financial year, as the cynical energy subsidies the Albanese Labor Government uses to bribe voters and cover up the problem are removed to reduce Labor’s growing budget deficit. Inflation is out of control because of that deficit. And yet you’re responsible for the deficit and the inflation which has resulted from your bribes, dishonesty and pathetic financial mismanagement. It’s taken 75 years for the inspirational vision reflected in the ‘Light on the hill’—a vision of family, comfort and, yes, happiness—to degenerate into an imbroglio of self-interest, moral degeneracy, cronyism, cynicism and, in places, outright corruption. The status quo died because it failed Australia’s working class. It’s no accident that, in the latest polls, people earning over $100,000 a year still support Labor ahead of anyone else. Labor’s new culture of social engineering and division on ethnic grounds has support from those whose incomes insulate them from the damage these policies are doing. Indeed, this moral virtue signalling has replaced the light on the hill. Sit tibi terra levis: may the earth be light to you.
The Liberal Party is as culpable in this attack on the middle class. In Menzies’s speech—which, to give it its correct title, was the ‘Forgotten people’ speech—he spoke of ‘salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on’. He said: These are, in the political and economic sense, the middle class. They are for the most part unorganized and unselfconscious. They are envied by those whose social benefits are largely obtained by taxing them. They are not rich enough to have individual power. They are taken for granted by each political party in turn. Menzies’s success was to put the middle class at the fore, recognising that a strong middle class would power the economy and provide a tax base for those who were not able to provide for themselves. His words in 1944 took him into government in 1949, and he went on to become Australia’s longest-serving prime minister for 18 years.
That was then. The year is not 1949; it’s now 2026, and the modern Liberals no longer owe their allegiance to the middle class. Instead, they owe their allegiance to the wealthy interests who pay the bills and set the agenda. Those rivers of gold have enabled the Liberals to outspend the Labor Party during every election cycle since 2007. The Liberal Party puppetmasters are prepared to surrender the country to the Labor Party rather than see opposition leader Peter Dutton—someone who was asking for a modicum of independence and was eliminated. Those same forces are now defending their latest marionette, an opposition leader who’s so weak that one has to ask: just how much are these people paying?
One Nation has no puppetmasters. We offer government decision-making based on facts and data, applying principles of fairness and patriotism. I will return to One Nation’s plan for the post-status quo Australia in a moment. Menzies was again correct when he said: The communist has always hated what he calls the “bourgeoisie”, because he sees clearly the existence of one has kept British countries from revolution, while the substantial absence of one in feudal France at the end of the eighteenth century and in Tsarist Russia at the end of the last war made revolution easy and indeed inevitable. What he did not realise is that the modern Liberal Party and the modern Labor Party are acting in unison to destroy the middle class, albeit for different reasons.
The Liberals want more money for their corporate owners, who do not understand the meaning of a fair share for all. Labor wants to bring about a revolution in society to mirror their Prime Minister’s communist ideology, which is destroying the pillars of Australian society: family and the middle class. Not surprisingly, then, the middle class is shrinking, even as the overall share of wages and salaries in the economy is shrinking. Australia’s median wage has gone backwards by eight per cent under this Labor government, although this is not just on them. Since 1980, the median Australian wage in real terms, adjusted for inflation, has not increased. Nothing. Zero. In that same time, education expenses have gone up 300 per cent, health care up 300 per cent and housing up 400 per cent. If it feels like you’re working harder and going backwards, it’s because you are. The Liberal-Labor status quo has screwed Australia rotten.
One Nation support has grown rapidly in the last eight months, which is proof that courage is contagious. For 30 years, One Nation has been confined to a cage built to contain our threat to the status quo, a cage that was plastered with a huge sign falsely declaring the contents racist. And, for 30 years, the narrative was successfully maintained because a host of dishonest, self-interested politicians, media and talking heads all benefited financially from maintaining the status quo.
One Nation will return $30 billion a year into the pockets of everyday Australians. We will shrink the government to fit the Constitution, reducing government spending by $90 billion a year and putting the budget into surplus in our first year. We will invest $20 billion a year in infrastructure, which the private sector will legally match, to build projects that grow wealth for everyday Australians, not foreign corporate profits. We’ve showcased these. These fully costed plans were taken to the electorate last May. We have the details. We know how we will do this, and we know that it can be done. The Australian people have clearly decided it’s time to ignore the insults and instead vote with their heads and with their hearts. Australians want our country back. One Nation is the only party that can achieve that and, indeed, the only party that wants to achieve that.
During this Estimates session with the Clean Energy Regulator (CER), I questioned them on the government’s setup with the Clean Energy Council (CEC). The CEC is a private lobby group, yet they appear to act as the “gatekeeper” as to which solar panels can be sold under the renewable energy schemes.
WHY has a private industry group, which exists to advocate for its members’ commercial interests, been given the power to decide which products qualify for government incentives?
I was told the Clean Energy Council (CEC) was originally “named” in the legislation effectively as a co-regulator and have been “tested” against competitors. The Regulator admitted that they worked back-and-forth with the CEC to help their application meet the required standards.
I asked if this process was open and transparent to the public. Their response? Happy to take it on notice and of course, they used the “commercial-in-confidence” excuses.
When questioned on how they manage any bias, the Regulator pointed to “regular cadences of meetings” and “reporting.” To me, this sounds like a “soft” approach to overseeing a group that serves its own members.
The Regulator claims they now have “greater control” and that the CEC is merely a “service provider,” however the reality is that a private lobby group still appears to hold a lot of sway. They are monitoring themselves through an action plan and reporting back to the government.
I am deeply concerned about the conflict of interest here. How can a lobbying body be impartial?
Australian taxpayers should not be sold out by a system where the foxes are guarding the henhouse.
Transcript
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for appearing again. Why did the Clean Energy Regulator appoint the Clean Energy Council, a private industry lobby group, as the product listing body for solar panels and inverters under the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme?
Mr Parker: Thank you, Senator. I well understand the question. I will flip the question to Mr Williamson in a minute, lest he not get asked a question today, which would be unfortunate in his final appearance! The appointment of the CEC was done through a process under the law which involved a competitive bidding arrangement, and CEC won that process.
Senator ROBERTS: Were government ministers involved at the time?
Mr Parker: Ministers set the legal framework. I don’t think it was actually a decision from [inaudible]. We’ll give it to Mark.
Mr Williamson: Senator, to help you with the context, originally in the legislation, the Clean Energy Council had been nominated as the body both to accredit installers and also to list approved components. In the original regulations, they were named, and they were effectively a co-regulator. Minister Taylor, a number of years ago, asked us to do a review with the department of the integrity of the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme. Out of that review, there was a recommendation that it be competitively tested, as Mr Parker says, for both the accrediting of installers and the listing of components. We went through a process of going to the market. The Clean Energy Council did not put in an application to continue being the accreditation body, and a new accreditation body was nominated out of that process. As Mr Parker says, for the listing of components, there were a small number of applications, and the Clean Energy Council was determined to be the best of those. The new system, though, is—we have greater control of both the accreditation body and the listing process. They were a co-regulator in the past. Now they are providing a service that we’ve nominated them to do.
Senator ROBERTS: They provide a service to you?
Mr Williamson: Yes. We’re the regulator now. We’re the single regulator, so that co-regulatory model that existed before went with that process. Solar Accreditation Australia, SAA, is the accreditation body, and that has nothing to do with the Clean Energy Council. The CEC is, in fact, still the listing body, but they’re doing that for us, as is SAA for the accreditation of installers.
Senator ROBERTS: What probity checks were undertaken before granting this role to an organisation that actively advocates for its members’ commercial interest?
Mr Williamson: There was an extensive process, and I can pass to Mr Binning, who was involved in that. There was a very lengthy process where a lot of questions were asked of the small number of bodies that applied. Mr Binning was actually the decision-maker, and he did not make that decision until we had done a range of checks of the applications and asked a lot of questions and made a lot of requests for further information. I might throw to you, Carl, to add anything else to that.
Senator ROBERTS: Before you elaborate, what was your role at the time? Who was your employer?
Mr Binning: The Clean Energy Regulator. I was the delegate for the final decision. As I recall, it was a very thorough process run through our procurement. There was probity advice along the way. A preliminary decision was made. Under the act, we were required to publish that decision. A range of submissions were made in relation to the proposed decision. Those comments were than taken into account, and a final decision was made against the criteria that were established for the process.
Senator ROBERTS: That’s fairly loose, but it was a long time ago. How does the Clean Energy Regulator manage the inherent conflict of interest in allowing an industry lobby group to control product eligibility for government incentives?
Mr Binning: We do that through the ongoing governance of our arrangements. We have a regular cadence of meetings and reporting to us. In that reporting, what we’ve really sought to do over the last 18 months—there are two issues that really run intention through that product-listing process, if you like. On the one hand, we are looking for those assessments to of course be comprehensive and rigorous, and that requires that new products, as they come into the country, are compliant with the standards that have been established for those products, whether it is solar panels, inverters, batteries, solar water heaters et cetera. Most of the feedback we got from industry was associated with long wait times for the processing of applications. We’ve had less concerns, relatively speaking, with the rigour of the process and greater concerns with ensuring that the assessments are processed in a prompt and efficient manner. We’ve been working quite closely with the CEC to ensure that there is no compromising of the integrity of the process but that their ability to process applications has been improved.
Senator ROBERTS: Is the process open to inspection from the public?
Mr Binning: I’d have to take the detail of that on notice. I wouldn’t say there’s anything that overtly precludes that, but there would be the usual commercial in confidence and those sorts of arrangements. I’m happy to take it on notice and provide advice.
Senator ROBERTS: I’d appreciate that, and if you could provide the specifics around that on notice. Has the Clean Energy Regulator assessed whether this arrangement complies with Commonwealth probity standards for regulatory functions? I assume there are some.
Mr Binning: As I said, we have a procurement team at the Clean Energy Regulator. They closely observe the process, and the decisions were made consistent with the requirements that are set out in the act. If my recollection is correct—and I think it is—this process is largely governed by the requirements that are set out in the regulations and in the act. Mr Williamson can probably add to this.
Mr Williamson: The government and the minister at the time wanted to work within amendments within regulations.
Senator ROBERTS: That was Mr Taylor.
Mr Williamson: Correct. To work within the regulations and amend the regulations to give effect—and not to have to go back and amend the act—limited the way in which this could be set up. It wasn’t set up strictly as a procurement but rather as a nomination that required us to go through a set of statutory steps to go out to the market on a number of occasions. Then, as Mr Binning said, with decisions both on the product listing and the accreditation of installers, we had to say that this was our proposed decision and invite further comments. It was a statutory nomination process, but we did actually follow Commonwealth procurement and probity arrangements.
While it wasn’t strictly a procurement, we did follow such arrangements in arriving at the decision on the nomination process. It took a very long time. The reason it took a long time was to make sure that the applicants were bringing their applications up to a standard where we could make a decision and get a body for each process over the line. It wasn’t fast because those initial applications weren’t adequate to make a nomination. There was a very iterative process with those who applied to make sure that, ultimately, they had put in a satisfactory bid where Mr Binning could make a decision and say, ‘That passes muster.’
Senator ROBERTS: What governance framework exists to ensure that decisions made by the Clean Energy Council in its regulatory capacity are impartial and not influenced by its lobbying activities?
Mr Binning: As I indicated, after awarding the role to the Clean Energy Council, an action plan around the service that they are providing has been established. There is a regular reporting arrangement which ensures, as I said, that they’re meeting the various performance targets that have been established.
Senator ROBERTS: Does the Clean Energy Regulator audit or review the CEC’s product listing decisions? If so, how frequently and what were the findings? Or do you just have meetings?
Mr Binning: I would say that we certainly closely scrutinise their performance under the requirements of the agreement that we have in place with them. In addition, we closely observe, monitor and interact with the Clean Energy Council around issues that arise or any industry intelligence that we receive. We will regularly be in contact with the CEC team to check and verify the processes that they are undertaking.
Mr Williamson: I can add to that. We have also taken samples ourselves. Through separate arrangements with others, we’ve arranged to actually grab samples of products that have been listed and get them tested ourselves. That was both pre and post the nomination of the Clean Energy Council.
Senator ROBERTS: That still happens.
Mr Williamson: I believe that happens in batches every now and again. There are limits to the funds we have for this, but we have sampled it because some have claimed that companies may have had a golden sample taken and production runs may subsequently be of a lower quality. We have done that, and, as part of the listing process, the CEC also does more real world sampling.
The Liberal-National coalition and Labor are playing a desperate game of catch-up.
For years, they’ve ignored the real issues — energy, housing and mass immigration crisis, which started under John Howard and has exploded under the Albanese government. Now, they’re copying One Nation’s homework.
They drop the right buzzwords and borrow our rhetoric because they’re terrified of the polls, yet they still lack the data and the backbone to actually do good instead of just trying to look good.
People see through the “fluffy and vague” policies of other parties.
One Nation aren’t here to play status quo politics; we’re here to put Australia First.
It’s time to hold these politicians accountable and return the power to where it belongs: with the people.
For over 15 years, I have warned that the climate scam is a direct assault on the Australian way of life.
And it’s not just our hip pockets being hit — it’s our humanity.
Labor and Chris Bowen are selling you a “renewable revolution,” yet they aren’t telling you who’s paying the real price.
While Australian families struggle with soaring power bills, children in the Congo are forced into medieval conditions, digging for the minerals that fuel our “green” future.
Women are working in toxic, open-cut mines controlled by the Chinese Communist Party – all so we can pretend we’re “saving the planet.”
Our environment is being destroyed, our wildlife killed off, our economy smashed – and everyday Australians are getting poorer.
It’s not a revolution. It’s a scam!
Note: The data for 2026 confirms that our energy security has been sold off to foreign interests, with the vast majority of these large-scale wind and solar projects owned by overseas entities.
We need to stop this madness and put Australian families and human decency above the “renewable at all costs” cult. There is nothing virtuous about “renewable” energy.
This discussion with Matt Kean, Chair of the Climate Change Authority (CCA) and former Liberal NSW Energy Minister, focuses on the accuracy of his advice regarding energy prices, the reliability of renewable transitions, and the global commitment to Net Zero.
I challenged Mr. Kean on a 2020 claim that Australia could become an “energy superpower” with low-cost power. I argued that power prices have actually “increased astronomically” since then.
Mr. Kean maintained that wholesale prices are currently trending downward due to increased renewable penetration. He cited ABS data showing a recent 10.2% monthly drop in prices and AEMO reports showing a 38% quarterly decrease in wholesale costs. He attributed high bills to network charges and the unreliability of ageing coal plants rather than the renewable transition itself.
I questioned the $1 billion expenditure on the Waratah Super Battery, calling it a “wasted” stopgap for the Eraring coal plant, which has not yet closed. I asked how a short-duration battery could replace a 24/7 coal station.
Matt Kean said that the Waratah project is a “systems battery” (SIPS), not a standard storage battery. He said its purpose is to act as a “shock absorber” for the grid, allowing existing transmission lines to operate at higher capacities and “sweat” existing coal assets harder while integrating renewables.
Mr. Kean and Senator Ayres argued that the primary driver of cost and instability in the grid is the extreme age of Australian coal plants (averaging 38 years).
Senator Ayres noted that there had been daily unplanned outages from major coal plants (like Bayswater and Loy Yang) over the preceding three weeks, totalling 2.5 gigawatts of lost capacity, which spikes market prices.
Matt Kean corrected his previous figure (53% of global GDP), stating it is now much higher. He claimed that 165 countries representing 79% of global GDP and 87% of the world population have now committed to Net Zero targets, with many (including Australia) enshrining them in law.
This insane transition to renewables is a threat to our economic stability and industrial capacity. A One Nation government will dismantle Australia’s climate bureaucracy by abolishing the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, along with advisory bodies like the Climate Change Authority and the Net Zero Economy Authority.
Further, we will withdraw Australia from the Paris Agreement, repeal the Climate Change Act 2022, and eliminate the Renewable Energy Target.
Scrapping agencies such as ARENA and the CEFC, One Nation will end all subsidies for renewables, shifting the nation’s regulatory and administrative focus toward lowering electricity prices through the expansion of coal-fired power and the introduction of nuclear energy.
— Senate Estimates | December 2025
Transcript
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for appearing again today. Mr Kean, my questions go to you. Your responsibility is to give the government correct advice. Is that correct?
Mr Kean: Frank and fearless correct advice—that’s right.
Senator ROBERTS: That advice could steer the direction of our entire country and potentially affect every one of the 28 million people in Australia. Is that correct?
Mr Kean: We provide advice that’s frank and fearless to the government of the day. It’s up to the government of the day as to whether or not they’ll accept that advice.
Senator ROBERTS: So you’d agree that it’s vital for the country that your advice is accurate and correct?
Mr Kean: We provide the best advice based on evidence and science to the government. As you well know, Senator, it goes through the cabinet process, the party room process and the parliamentary process. It’s up to the government and the parliament as to whether or not they accept the CCA’s advice.
Senator ROBERTS: I’d like to go to your track record and some forecasts. I’m going to quote you from the Energy Insiders podcast in 2020 with Renew Economy. You said: ‘If they’re looking for a global competitive advantage when it comes to low-cost energy, we can provide it. But we’ve got to move quickly and we’ve got to move now. That is an opportunity for us to be an economic superpower—not just an energy superpower but an economic superpower. It’s too big an opportunity not to grab.’ Since you said that you can provide low-cost energy in 2020, power prices have increased astronomically. When are Australians going to get the cheap power you promised?
Mr Kean: According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, they are already seeing those power prices coming down as a result of renewables. Look at power prices in October. They were 10.2 per cent lower than in the previous month. We know that they bounce around, particularly as state and Commonwealth rebates come into force or conclude, as it just happened to be. I, as a former energy minister in New South Wales, and we, as the Climate Change Authority, are acutely aware that some households and businesses are doing it tough and are looking at what costs they can contain. In the energy and climate war that we seem to be mired in yet again, perspective can be the first casualty. In the present consumer price index basket of goods and services that the Australian Bureau of Statistics uses to track inflation in the economy, electricity prices have a 1.84 per cent weighting. That’s not nothing, but I think it’s an important bit of context for you. Going back to those price trends that you talked about and that I stand by, no doubt you will have noted that wholesale prices have largely been in retreat of late, and that’s because renewable energy’s share of the grid is increasing. Check out AEMO’s Quarterly energy dynamics report for the September quarter. If you need the facts, they’re right there available to you. You’ll see that wholesale power prices across the national electricity market were on average 38 per cent below those of the June quarter this year. Compared with the September quarter last year, the fall was 27 per cent. That’s not because more fossil fuels have entered the market; that’s because renewable energy is pushing down wholesale prices. The more cheap energy we get into the market, the better off consumers and businesses will be.
Senator ROBERTS: Are wholesale prices going to be cheaper or more expensive than they were five or 10 years ago? Are they cheaper or more expensive than they were?
Mr Kean: As I said, just look at the Quarterly energy dynamics report that AEMO has just put out. It is clearly showing that wholesale prices are only heading in one direction. They make up about a third of a typical household’s—
Senator ROBERTS: Are they cheaper than they were five or 10 years ago?
Mr Kean: I’m not referring to the wholesale dynamics report comparing them to 10 years ago. I’m referring to the most recent one, which shows that wholesale prices are coming down.
Senator ROBERTS: My question was: are they cheaper or more expensive than they were five or 10 years ago?
Mr Kean: I don’t have that data in front of me, but I’m very happy to table that data for you.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. Wholesale prices are only one part of someone’s bill. There will be many people watching here—small businesses, large businesses, families—who will have taken issue with what you said. An increasing part is the network charges, especially for transmission. Are the network charges going down as well?
Mr Kean: As I said, wholesale prices make up about a third of the typical household bill, and we know that the cheapest form of new generation is renewables. We know that ageing coal-fired and even gas-fired power plants will shut in the coming decade or so. So, to unlock that cheap wholesale energy produced by renewables, you will need more networks built. That’s for sure. Certainly I can talk to the situation in New South Wales, and perhaps some of these questions can be directed to the energy minister, which I am no longer. But what I will say, as the former energy minister in New South Wales, is that, when we legislated the roadmap, we looked at the net impact on consumer bills of transitioning towards a firmed renewables-based grid, including transmission line upgrades. What we were able to clearly demonstrate is that net, on average, consumers would be much better off as a result of the transition.
Senator ROBERTS: In your role as New South Wales energy minister you commissioned the $1 billion Waratah battery, which recently suffered a catastrophic failure. You commissioned and designated as a top priority project this huge expenditure as a stopgap for the closure of Eraring this year. It was forecast to close this year. Eraring didn’t close this year. Experts are saying it might not close before 2030. So the $1 billion shock absorber you put in place as New South Wales energy minister isn’t needed anymore as a stopgap. If you wasted $1 billion on a battery that wasn’t needed, why should we trust that you can provide good advice to the federal government? Can you explain exactly how a 0.7 gigawatt battery that lasts for two hours is meant to replace a coal-fired power station that can run at 2.8 gigawatts for 23 hours a day.
Mr Kean: I’m very happy to explain what we did when it came to considering the exit of Eraring. It’s a matter of public record that Origin Energy suggested they would bring forward the closure of that coal-fired power station seven years earlier than we anticipated. As the former minister for energy, I can say we conducted an arms-length process headed up by a number of experts, including Kerry Schott, the former chair of the Energy Security Board. We ran a competitive tender process for different technologies to fill that gap. We had input from AEMO, the Australian Energy Market Operator, the engineers who the run the system, and we compared the cost of extending Eraring for 18 months with a number of other options to fill that capacity gap. In terms of the work that was done by independent expert advice, we were advised that the best option for the total New South Wales power grid was to build a systems battery, a SIPS battery, that would unlock greater capacity in the transmission networks to be able to sweat the other coal-fired power stations harder and would open up the ability to bring more renewable energy into the system. You’re characterising the battery as a storage battery. It’s not a storage battery; it’s a systems battery that unlocks more capacity and new transmission networks. That means you can run your existing coal-fired power stations harder—think Vales Point and Bayswater—and you can get more renewable capacity stored. That was the basis from which we went down that path, and anyone suggesting otherwise is being dishonest.
Senator ROBERTS: On New South Wales election night, when your government was defeated in 2023, I distinctly remember the incoming Labor energy minister flagging the need to keep Eraring open. She was quite clear about it. She was on a panel and on the night of the election she said, ‘We’re going to have to do something about keeping Eraring.’ They weren’t her words, but that was basically what she said. Why would she have that point there? Many people think that New South Wales cannot operate as an industrial economy without Eraring continuing, and now there are talks of Eraring continuing. What did she know as opposition energy minister and spokesman that you didn’t?
Mr Kean: Maybe I could refer you to the evidence of Deputy Secretary Duggan who just appeared before the inquiry. He made the point that the average age of our coal-fired power stations in the national energy market is 38 years and the average end closure date of coal-fired power stations is 42 years. We can’t keep putting bandaids or temporary solutions in place. We need to plan for the future. What you need are clear targets and good policies to get new capacity installed. Just because you say you’re going to extend an aged, clapped-out coal-fired power station doesn’t mean it’s going to work. We need to build new capacity before the old capacity closes. That’s the responsible thing to do. Whether it be in my role as the former New South Wales energy minister or in my current role as the independent chair of the Climate Change Authority, I will always act on the best evidence and advice of experts. I’m advising you to do likewise.
Senator ROBERTS: You’re hiding behind averages. A lot of damage can be done doing that.
Mr Kean: No. I’m just making the point.
Senator ROBERTS: I asked you a question about Eraring. Why did the incoming Labor energy minister want to keep Eraring open?
Mr Kean: It’s another question for—
Senator Ayres: I think it’s outside of—it’s pretty hard for Mr Kean to put—
Senator ROBERTS: It goes to the accuracy of forecasts.
Senator Ayres: himself into the mind of the current New South Wales energy minister. I think that’s a very difficult thing for him to do. But Mr Kean’s right—the biggest driver of cost in the electricity system at the moment is our ageing coal generators and the incessant, regular outages. There has not been a single day over the last three weeks where there hasn’t been an unplanned outage. A couple of days ago we had Bayswater, Gladstone, Loy Yang, Vales Point and Yallourn—a total of 2½ gigawatts of unplanned outage. That drives cost in the system. Mr Kean’s point is right. The way to deal with that is to build more renewables, build more storage and build more transmission. Nobody from Cape York to Bruny Island or from Sydney to Perth is going to build a coal-fired power station, because it’s a dumb idea. It’s a dumb idea economically.
Senator ROBERTS: Has the national electricity market been tested?
Senator Ayres: It’s a dumb idea in commercial terms. It’s a bad idea for the grid. It builds additional cost into the system. At the moment we are dealing with the reality of the fact that it’s coal that’s driving cost. A decade of disinvestment is compounding that. That’s the truth of it. If you want to keep prosecuting the imported culture wars, go for your life.
Senator ROBERTS: Last question?
CHAIR: Yes.
Senator ROBERTS: Okay. The minister seems to be unaware of the electricity rules and the national electricity market, which favour solar and wind and destroy coal. We’ll leave that aside. You say: ‘The world is moving in this direction. Fifty-three per cent of the world’s GDP has signed up to achieve zero net emissions by 2050, so it’s only going in one direction.’ Yet we’ve seen the USA China and India—we’ve seen massive numbers of countries—walk away from net zero, and others don’t bother complying. Do you still stand by your figure that 53 per cent are committed to achieving net zero by 2050?
Mr Kean: No, I don’t. I’d like to revise that number. It’s now 165 countries that have announced a net zero target. These countries account for 78 per cent of global emissions, 79 per cent of GDP and 87 per cent of the global population. That was in 2022. That’s a vast increase since I cited those figures a few years ago. So 149 countries have announced a net zero target by 2050 or sooner and around 50 countries have enshrined their net zero target in domestic legislation—including Australia—with more planning to do so. That’s 37 out of 38 OECD member countries having a net zero target. So, no, I don’t stand by those previous comments. They’ve been exceeded since then, and people denying the reality of the momentum behind the need to reduce our emissions are not acting in Australia’s interests.
During Estimates, I tabled a graph from the ABS, showing that electricity prices surged by 23% over two years. While the Government used temporary subsidies to mask the pain, those subsidies have now ended, leaving millions of Australians to face the brutal reality of a 16% “catch-up” spike in their bills.
During our exchange, I pointed out that while subsidies briefly brought headline inflation down to 7%, the underlying cost of power never actually fell and that once the relief stopped, the inflationary shock would be incredible.
The RBA admitted that headline inflation would rise as rebates expired, yet they continue to “look through” these costs to focus on their own definitions of underlying inflation.
I discussed with Governor Bullock on how these soaring energy costs are gutting our national productivity. While the Treasurer talks about “strong real wages,” everyday Australians know the truth when they see their grocery bills and insurance premiums.
The RBA believes inflation expectations are “anchored,” yet you can’t anchor a household budget when the lights cost 23% more to keep on.
You cannot subsidise your way out of an energy crisis. You only delay the pain.
During this session, I also asked some questions on Central Bank Digital Currency, quantitative easing, credit creation and funding the deficits., and I thank Governor Bullock for her well informed and honest answers.
– Senate Estimates | October 2025
Transcript
Senator ROBERTS: I have circulated a graph from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Ms Bullock, I certainly appreciate your direct and concise answers. I think you have talked quite a bit about how the RBA is looking through the energy bill subsidies and impact on headline inflation. What are you seeing in the underlying increases in the price of electricity? As I show in that graph, it has increased 23 per cent in two years. That seems like an incredible shock to the economy. How do you think about that? What is the impact of your management of inflation?
Ms Bullock: So there are two aspects to that. What you will see from this graph that you have pointed out is that it rises in June 2023. That was the delayed energy price shock that many other countries saw following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Basically, then, it’s a new price level. The price level has risen, but you haven’t seen inflation because the level has just been the same.
Senator ROBERTS: Flat?
Ms Bullock: So there is a step up in the level. There has been a more recent increase, as we’ve seen the default market offers rates come out. Basically, the way we would think about it is that, in a direct sense, if you’ve got a supply shock, you’ve got a new price level. That doesn’t necessarily lead to ongoing inflation and an impact on inflationary expectations. We can afford to say that’s a level shift and we will look through it. The extent to which it has indirect impacts through cost impacts on businesses, that’s where we would watch to see that it wasn’t feeding through into consistent and persistent inflation. So far, it doesn’t seem to be driving persistent inflation, the increase in the price level for energy.
Senator ROBERTS: What are your thoughts about when the energy bill relief stops?
Ms Bullock: Well, the energy bill relief, obviously, is government policy. They put it in place to address the cost of living. Your graph shows why—because energy prices rose quite a lot. It has moved the inflation figures around quite a bit. As I’ve discussed in many other contexts, we’ve therefore looked at the underlying inflation to get an idea of the underlying pulse of inflation. That is what we have been focusing on in order to base our interest rate decisions.
Senator ROBERTS: We saw the government’s economic roundtable was supposedly focused on productivity. What do rising energy costs do to productivity? What is the impact, then, on the standard of living?
Ms Bullock: I don’t know if there’s a very direct impact of rising energy costs on productivity. There’s a much more fundamental thing about productivity, and that’s dynamism in the economy and dynamism among businesses. What we have been observing for decades is that productivity growth has been declining not only here but overseas. To some extent, at least, the evidence suggests that lack of dynamism in business is part of the reason for that.
Senator ROBERTS: So the underlying inflation on the electricity index is at 23 per cent. Including subsidies, it has been brought back to seven per cent. Many consumers still have about a 16 per cent increase to catch up with. What will that do to inflation numbers in the future?
Ms Bullock: Well, headline inflation, as you’ll see from our forecasts, will rise as the energy rebates come off. But the more important thing is what is happening to the underlying pulse of inflation. We are continuing to see that decline.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. I understand that household inflation expectations have a big impact on inflation itself. At the economic roundtable, Treasurer Chalmers said: Real wages are growing at their strongest rate in five years, inflation has a two in front of it and interest rates have been cut three times in the last six months. People are still talking about high grocery bills and inflation in insurance premiums and all kinds of insurance. What does that do to people’s expectations of inflation?
Ms Bullock: Well, all the evidence we have is that inflationary expectations have remained reasonably anchored at around 2½ per cent. That’s what has made it possible, I think, to bring inflation back down toward the target range so that we’re now under three per cent and heading towards 2½ per cent and to maintain a relatively healthy labour market. You couldn’t achieve that without anchored inflation expectations.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. I have a quick question before I go to a separate topic. What does having 4.5 million visa holders, non-citizens, in the country do to demand for houses and to the price of houses?
Ms Bullock: Well, certainly the more population you have, the more demand for housing you have.
Senator ROBERTS: It has been six months since the new board arrangements started. How is that working so far?
Ms Bullock: I think it is working well. The monetary policy board now has more time to focus on monetary policy decisions. The governance board, I think, is adding significant value in helping me. I was the sole accountable authority for the institution. Now the governance board is the accountable authority. My own view is that the people on that board are adding significant value.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. Is there going to be a review of these changes?
Ms Bullock: The governance board is going to do a report, I think, by the end of the year. It is going to talk about all of the recommendations from the review, where we’re at with meeting them and what our plans are to meet those that we haven’t yet.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. You actually have three boards—the monetary board, the governance board and the payment system board. Have there been any developments coming from the work the Reserve Bank is doing on electronic payment systems, whether that’s some form of central bank digital currency, which I think your predecessor acknowledged was done, or a unified digital currency the banks have been talking about? Is anything happening there in either the domestic market or international settlements?
Ms Bullock: A few things. We have done some experimentation. Back in 2023—we might have talked about this before—we did a pilot of a central bank digital currency. We asked people to come with use cases and so on. The main headline out of that was that the predominant use cases were not what I would call retail CBDCs. It wasn’t about putting central bank digital currencies in the hands of you and me and using them at shops. It wasn’t about that. It was about wholesale digital currencies—how you can potentially use central bank digital currencies in markets for wholesale assets. We’ve got another experiment going on now which is looking specifically at that issue. If you tokenise assets—you put them on a chain, a ledger—how can you use not only central bank digital currencies but stable coins, tokenised bank deposits and standard payment systems to settle tokenised asset sales. That is the current experiment that is going on. We are working with a number of organisations to do that. That will give us a bit more information about the sorts of issues that might arise in moving towards tokenised asset ledgers.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. During COVID, the Reserve Bank pursued a policy which had the effect of creating money through electronic journal entries and using that to buy securitised mortgages from Australian banks. How many securitised mortgages originating in the Australian property market is the Reserve Bank now holding?
Dr Kent: We have to take this on notice. I suspect it’s close to none. We don’t accept them as part of our regular operations. Most of them we would have held would have been a result of the term funding facility, which has now rolled off and completed.
The “Green” agenda is bulldozing our forests, blasting our mountains, disrupting whale migration and clubbing koalas – all to “save” the planet from “climate change”.
Labor, the Greens, and the Coalition are sacrificing endangered species for subsidised industrial “renewable” energy projects.
Only One Nation is consistent. We will always protect our environment against the multinational corporations pocketing billions in subsidies while destroying our natural environment.
Transcript
The Australian Greens have abandoned nature, bulldozing forests, blasting mountain ridges, disrupting whale migration, clubbing koalas so that subsidised parasitic billionaires can cover our country in solar panels, wind turbines and transmission lines. Senator McKim says of Tasmania’s Robbins Island industrial project:
Its habitats, landscapes and sea scapes should be protected under international conventions – not exploited for profit by a multinational corporation.
Senator Whish-Wilson says:
… it would be a cruel irony if Australia’s renewable energy projects come at the expense of our threatened and iconic species.
They’ve done plenty to oppose this project, only for Greens leader Senator Waters to say on national TV:
I don’t very know much about that …
Despite endangered species, the project was approved because of claimed climate change.
Labor, the Greens, the Liberals, the Nationals and the teals are killing the environment and endangered species, supposedly to save the planet. Only One Nation is united and consistent on protecting our beautiful natural environment against multinationals ripping billions off Australians.
Why is the Albanese Labor government making it easier for their corporate mates with every piece of legislation?
This Bill – the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Australian Energy Regulator Separation) Bill 2025 – is another step toward letting powerful corporations, including foreign multinationals, continue to gouge Australians. By removing the regulator from the ACCC’s oversight, Labor is effectively hiding the energy market from competition and consumer protections.
This isn’t a market; it’s a bureaucratic racket designed to transfer wealth from hardworking Australians to parasitic billionaires under the cover of the “Net Zero” scam.
Worst of all, regulators will no longer be required to disclose their personal financial interests. This is a green light for cronyism.
We know over 80% of Australians are paying too much for electricity, yet Labor protects the profits of their wind and solar mates over the welfare of Australian families.
I will always put everyday Australians before corporations and will continue to fight for lower power bills for every Australian.
Acknowledgements
I acknowledge the over 300 community groups across Australia fighting the rollout of industrial-sized wind and solar projects — the so-called “renewable” energy projects. The only thing renewable about them is that they have to be replaced every 15 years.
Among the many Australians standing up across our country, I recognise:
Katy McCallum, Steven Nowakowski (what a man!), Grant Piper, and Emma Bowman.
Bill Stinson, Sandra Burke, Steven Tripp, Andrew Weidemann, and Katherine Meyers.
These people are for Australia, for the regions, and for every citizen.
I also recognise a list of true champions for Australia: Colin Boyce, Llew O’Brien, Ben Abbott, Alex O’Brien, Michaela Humble, Michelle Hunt, Lynette LaBlack, and Rafe Champion.
Finally, my thanks to:
Neil Kilion, Sasha McNaughton, Caroline Emms, Nikki Kelly, Alex Nichol, Martine Shepherd, and Scott Baxter.
The Bob Brown Foundation (thank you, Bob!), the IPA, Rainforest Reserves, and the Centre for Independent Studies.
Ben Beattie and Aidan Morrison, two giants of the energy sector.
Transcript
Why is the Albanese Labor government making it easier for their corporate mates with every piece of legislation? This bill before us, the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Australian Energy Regulator Separation) Bill 2025, will likely pass without a whimper. You won’t hear much about it from either side of politics. Yet it’s another step towards a handful of powerful corporations, including foreign-owned multinationals, continuing to gouge Australians at every turn. This legislation separates the Australian Energy Regulator to establish them as fully independent and separate. The Energy Regulator currently lives in the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s house, the ACCC. The ACCC supplies staffing and resources to the Energy Regulator to help it discharge its functions. While the bill frames the ACCC’s oversight as a problem, having the competition regulator ultimately responsible for energy market oversight is a very good thing.
Ending energy market oversight is terrible. The energy market so-called ‘market’ is one of the most prescriptive and rigid areas of bureaucratic government. It’s not a market; it’s a racket—a bureaucratic racket. The risk for corruption and monopolisation is extreme. The Australian Energy Market Operator, AEMO, operates our entire electricity grid. It sounds like a government agency, yet somehow it’s a private body. No-one’s allowed to lodge a freedom of information request with them. They don’t turn up to parliamentary hearings for Senate estimates. They hide from scrutiny. That’s the key word for net zero with this government and the previous Liberal-National government—’hide’; hide the cost, hide the lack of policy basis, hide the damage, hide the lack of a plan.
Now look at the AEMO board. Employees of for-profit energy and transmission companies dominate the AEMO board. We’re supposed to just trust they’re effectively prescribing rules and directing billions of dollars in taxpayer money purely for the public good, not for energy company profits—bloody ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. This is setting up government as a vehicle for wealth transfer from us, the people, to parasites—parasites not working in Australia’s national interest, hurting Australia and hurting Australians.
With this bill, the government is taking the Energy Regulator out of the competition regulator. The ACCC’s role in energy markets is in the context of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010, which aims to—listen to this—’enhance the welfare of Australians through the promotion of competition and fair trading and provision of consumer protections’. That’s a great goal. Why would we want to make the Energy Regulator more independent of that and put it beyond scrutiny and put it in hiding? If we’re trying to figure out if that’s a good thing to do, the first question to ask should be this: are there any competition problems in the energy market? If the answer is yes, maybe the competition regulator should have final oversight, like it does right now.
So let’s look at the ACCC’s work on the electricity market. The first shot across the bow was the ACCC’s 2017 preliminary report eight years ago. In that report, the ACCC said:
The ACCC has published a preliminary report into the electricity market highlighting significant concerns about the operation of the National Electricity Market, which is leading to serious problems with affordability for consumers and businesses.
What? That’s what they said eight years ago. The ACCC thought prices were ‘putting Australian businesses and consumers under unacceptable pressure’. Since then, prices have become much, much worse. One can only wonder why. Market participants harp on about pulling the Energy Regulator out of the competition regulator while the ACCC highlights ‘significant concerns’ about how energy corporations are actually acting, behaving.
Another headline from the ACCC, in December 2024 in the Financial Review, said, ‘More than 80 per cent of Aussies paying too much for their electricity.’ There was another story in May this year, ‘”Super complaint” filed with ACCC over misleading energy plans’. I’ll quote it: ‘CHOICE’—that’s CHOICE magazine, the consumer group—’has sent its first-ever super complaint to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the ACCC, over allegations that retailers in the Australian energy market have engaged in dodgy and misleading pricing tactics that leave customers paying $65 million more than they should.’
So, returning to our overall question, are there any competition issues in the energy market? Should the competition regulator be involved in monitoring every aspect of those issues? The answer to both is a resounding yes.
The ACCC will wrap up its ongoing reports into the electricity market in August. After that, there’s a real risk that competition in the electricity market will continue to deteriorate and deteriorate and deteriorate even further. What will that mean? It will mean higher prices and poorer service for Australians. Less competition means bigger profits for Labor’s big corporate mates in the energy sector, who are often foreign owned multinationals or parasitic billionaires. That’s what this bill represents—wealth transferred to the wealthy; a step towards higher profits for multinational corporations who want to gouge Australians even more under the cover of the renewables scam.
Indeed, under the new Australian Energy Regulator, workers will no longer be required to make disclosures of their personal interests, as everyone in the ACCC is obliged to. This is as good as a green light for everyone with a conflict of interest to get involved in the new Energy Regulator—and you, the government, are doing this. The risk of corruption, cronyism and favouritism will be so big it will make the director of the National Anti-Corruption Commission blush. The Albanese Labor government has long signalled its intention to put the profits of its corporate wind and solar mates above and beyond competition—and above Australian workers and above Australian families and above Australian small businesses and employers and above Australia.
Why doesn’t today’s Labor realise that its official, registered name is the a-l-p—Australian Labor Party? It seems to have forgotten and ditched Australia. Why do they continue to ditch Australia? And there’s no ‘u’ in Labor, because the l-a-b-o-r party does not represent you.
Upon coming to government in 2022, Labor almost immediately transferred the energy regulator part of the Competition and Consumer Act out of Treasury and away from the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury to the Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Minister Bowen. Can you believe that? It happened—the fox guarding the henhouse; the fox destroying the energy sector and making it a racket for Labor’s private mates to gouge Australians. If there’s a battle between lower prices and profits for wind and solar, everyone in this chamber knows where Minister Chris Bowen’s loyalties lie. Can Australia trust that Minister Bowen will choose competition and lower prices over net zero and the profits of parasitic renewables grifter-billionaires? Absolutely not. Based on his behaviour to date, every day of the week Minister Bowen will choose the profits of these renewables scammers over Australians and over Australia.
The net zero dream is that you’ll pay $8,000 for a home battery and $60,000 for an electric vehicle and the grid will pay you nothing to drain it overnight to stabilise their dodgy market, their racket. That’s called ‘consumer energy resources’ and ‘virtual power plants’. Without them, the net zero pipedream just collapses.
Competition doesn’t even come into consideration. This corrupted state control and abuse of consumer rights is a built-in feature of the net zero scam from the Liberal-Nationals and the Labor-Greens—citizens directly paying 70 per cent of the cost of the transition to net zero. You pay; they control and they use. In other areas, some people reliably estimate taxpayers and electricity consumers are paying 100 per cent of the $1.9 trillion transition to the UN-World Economic Forum net zero. The ACCC would have a heart attack at the anticompetitive proposals being rushed into the energy racket. That’s the real reason this bill seeks to take the Australian Energy Regulator out of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Australians’ power bills will continue to go up, as will the profits of foreign multinational companies involved in the net zero scam. That’s where your money is going. One Nation believes consumers should come before corporations. Ditch the net zero scam and its anticompetitive nonsense—its racket. What proportion of solar and wind complexes do Labor mates and industry super funds own, I wonder? We know it started pretty high with Greg Combet as minister. Labor, stop looking after your mates who own the industrial wind and solar complexes and stop handing over to them billions from taxpayers and electricity consumers. Put Australians first and lower power bills.
I now add two brief comments. Firstly, when states owned electricity generators, energy benefited from a key constitutional tenet that our founding fathers wisely built into our Commonwealth Constitution—competitive federalism, a marketplace in governance between the states. A marketplace in governance is vital for accountability, vital for states’ rights and vital for Australian sovereignty and independence. John Howard’s Liberal-National government destroyed this when it created the so-called national electricity market, which is really a central bureaucratic energy racket, destroying accountability and now lining it up for fleecing Australians to foreign multinationals.
Secondly, I acknowledge over 300 community groups across Australia fighting the rollout of industrial sized wind and solar projects, so-called renewable energy projects. The only thing renewable about them is that they have to be replaced every 15 years. Among many Australians across our country, I recognise Katy McCallum, Steven Nowakowski—what a man!—Grant Piper, Emma Bowman, Bill Stinson, Sandra Burke, Steven Tripp, Andrew Weidemann and Katherine Meyers. These people are for Australia and for the regions and for every Australian. I also recognise Colin Boyce, Llew O’Brien, Ben Abbott, Alex O’Brien, Michaela Humble, Michelle Hunt, Lynette LaBlack and Rafe Champion. This is a list of champions for Australia. I also recognise Neil Kilion, Sasha McNaughton, Caroline Emms, Nikki Kelly, Alex Nichol, Martine Shepherd, Scott Baxter, the Bob Brown Foundation—thank you, Bob!—the IPA, Rainforest Reserves, the Centre for Independent Studies, and Ben Beattie and Aidan Morrison, two giants of the energy sector.
I recognise every person involved in exposing the horrific damage from industrial solar panels and industrial wind turbines, from the growing spaghetti network of high-voltage transmission lines carpeting regional Australia, from the big battery energy storage systems and from hideous, uneconomic, exploitative, environmentally damaging pumped hydro, destroying the fabric of our nation, white-anting the five pillars of our Australian community, our society: productive farmland, the source of our food; rural landscapes; wildlife habitats, our precious natural environment being torn apart by solar and wind and transmission lines; our communities; and our Australian way of life.
To everyone involved, I say thank you. From Lakeland on Cape York to Chalumbin in North Queensland to Central Queensland, Wide Bay and Burnett, southern Queensland, New South Wales Central West, northern New South Wales, southern New South Wales, coastal New South Wales, across Victoria, Tasmania’s Robbins Island and so many more across our wide, beautiful regional Australia, I continue my admiration and continue to pledge my support for your honesty and integrity, your courage, your embracing of accurate data and your informed commitment to putting Australia and Australians first. Thank you very much. We support you as you continue your battle.
