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Letter to Premier: Repeal the Reef Regulations

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8 September 2020

Hon. Annastacia Palaszczuk

Premier of Queensland

PO Box 15185

CITY EAST  QLD  4002

Dear Premier

Re: Repeal of Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Regulations 2019

Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef is an immense treasure and multi-dimensional asset belonging to the people of Queensland.

Our beautiful reef is a spiritual asset connecting people with nature’s universal awe and wonder, an ecological asset and an enormous economic asset with vast unrealised potential value in tourism, fishing, research, healthcare, recreation and other activities.  It is a living part of Queensland, a renewable asset for generations to come.

I hope you agree that it is the duty of elected officials to work for the benefit of all citizens within their jurisdiction and that in our country governments have a duty to listen to, understand, work for, and serve the people.

On Monday 27 and Tuesday 28 July 2020 I took part in the Senate’s Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport (RRAT) inquiry into the identification of leading practices in ensuring evidence-based regulation of farm practices that impact water quality outcomes in the Great Barrier Reef, held here in Brisbane.  I was amazed yet not surprised with the answers to fundamental questions that senators asked on behalf of all Queenslanders.  Among many facts the academics presented to us about the reef, we learned that what some groups say about the reef is incorrect.  Specifically, that:

  • “Cloudy water” affects only the inner reefs being three per cent of the reef and is natural.  Indeed, the portion adjacent to farm runoff is only half that, being 1.5 per cent with the other 1.5 per cent being off Cape York whose coastline is largely agriculturally undeveloped.  The cloudy water effect is natural with no effect from modern farming methods.
  • Targets for pesticides near the reef and on the reef are not being exceeded and results shows there is no need for your Labor government’s most recent reef regulations.
  • Middle and outer reefs are pristine and show no impact from farming.
  • There is no direct evidence that dissolved nitrogen is having any effect on inshore coral reefs and certainly no effect on the middle and outer reefs;
  • There have been no measurements of coral growth rate since 2005. That’s fifteen years with no data and the question this raises is – what is the basis for the Labor government’s regulations?
  • Over recent decades farmers have made massive changes to farming practice, yet academics say there has been no impact from these changes and that leads logically to the conclusion that farming is having no discernible impact on the reef. Thus, there is no need for the Queensland Labor government’s reef regulations.
  • The cost of the Queensland Labor government’s regulations to each farmer is or will be tens of thousands of dollars per family farm.  There is no benefit to the reef, and it will increase the price of the food we buy.

Secondly, it became clear during the inquiry that the Labor government is not meeting farmers’ needs to be heard and that agriculture seems to be a dirty word to your government.  Neither is your government meeting farmers’ and communities’ needs to be treated with respect and consideration. Farmers are understandably frustrated and angry and have lost confidence in your government because they have never been presented with the empirical scientific evidence needed to justify the changes your Labor government is imposing.

Thirdly, farmers today are environmentalists and not criminals. Farmers know that their main asset is their farm soil and they protect it. Farmers today know that the future productivity and value of their farm depends on the quality of the surrounding natural environment. Farmers know that productive farming and the natural environment have a mutually beneficial relationship, not as you portray, as being mutually exclusive.  Productive farming depends on a healthy natural environment and in turn the natural environment depends on healthy, economically productive farming communities.

These days farming must be internationally competitive, and farmers cannot afford to waste money applying fertilisers if those fertilisers run-off their farm.  Technology today places fertilisers where they are needed and no more.

In giving evidence under questioning, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, AIMS, admitted:

  • “There is lots we don’t know about the Great Barrier Reef”;
  • The term “Consensus Statement” may be misleading;
  • “Climate change is not connected to farming”.

Your Labor government and senior public service bureaucrats seem to operate under the spell of ideologically driven activists including the notorious WWF, who are pushing their agenda to destroy Queenslanders’ rights to use their land and to destroy basic freedoms. These few activists and your government pandering to people who lack understanding of the source of their food are demonising farmers, farming and food production. You and they are doing so in contradiction of the science and in conflict with common sense.

The inquiry was told that the 30 per cent nitrogen reduction target has been modelled to cost $110 million annually for sugar cane farmers and sugar millers. Yet the science shows that this is and will be for no environmental benefit.  That means that all this pain is for no gain.

I hope that you will support my recent call for an Office of Scientific Integrity to ensure the validity of science in making policies that are claimed to be based on science.

I enclose a copy of my report titled Restoring Scientific Integrity, together with a copy of Dr Alan Moran’s report titled The Hidden Cost of Climate Policies and Renewables.  These show that your government’s destructive energy policies are costly mistakes for which the people of Queensland are paying heavily and for which you have no justifiable scientific basis.

I request that you reconsider your farming, climate and renewable energy policies.  Your Labor government’s reef regulations will destroy east coast farming and your energy policies will smash all industries across the state, destroy livelihoods, export jobs and place a frightful burden on all families and on people’s cost of living.

I look forward to your reply and request that your government holds an independent inquiry into the unfounded “science” underpinning its reef regulations, repeals the legislation and apologies to farmers across the state.

Yours sincerely

Senator Malcolm Roberts

Senator for Queensland

Photo by Daniel Pelaez Duque on Unsplash

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Palaszczuk forces 16 Hour Trip on pregnant woman – 2SM with Marcus Paul

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Transcript

[Marcus Paul]

Maybe we need people like Senator Malcolm Roberts in positions of greater power. Malcolm’s with us on the programme. Hello mate, how are you?

[Malcolm Roberts]

I’m well, thanks Marcus. How are you?

[Marcus Paul]

Pissed off.

[Malcolm Roberts]

I know, you’re cranky and frustrated, I just heard-

[Marcus Paul]

I’m really annoyed-

[Malcolm Roberts]

You should be too-

[Marcus Paul]

I’m really, really annoyed. Anyway, let’s get to some of the issues. I’m sorry, but did you just hear what Premier Annastacia Palaszcuk said today?

[Malcolm Roberts]

Yeah, I did, and what she’s doing is just playing the Queensland card. Queenslanders are very proud to be Queenslanders, but we’re also proud to be Australians. And Palaszcuk is running off the old trick, of just trying to isolate. And that’s what a desperate leader does.

They try and build a circle around themselves, and everyone outside is bad, and that’s what she’s doing. But she’s actually misrepresenting the situation. We’ve got two tertiary care hospitals in Queensland, we’ve got a couple in Brisbane, and we’ve got one centre in Townsville.

Now the Townsville looks after all the way from Townsville, right through to Papua New Guinea. It looks way out into the east, into the islands. It looks way west into the Northern territory, and south to about Central Queensland.

The hospitals around Brisbane, they take care of Central Queensland, north of the hospitals, and south of the hospitals into Northern and New South Wales. That’s our responsibility. We get paid federal money for doing that. And Anastasia Palaszcuk is misrepresenting the truth.

She has actually now, people are starting to wake up Marcus. She has stopped two twins in birth, in the womb, from coming to Brisbane for treatment. That mother would have had a helicopter flight in half an hour to the hospital. Instead she took 16 hours, to get on a royal flying doctor’s services plane-

[Marcus Paul]

Why is it you can say all of this Malcolm, but we’ve got a prime minister, who says stuff all! Does nothing, says nothing to call this woman out, says nothing about what’s going on with the border debacle.

[Malcolm Roberts]

Well, I believe we have a prime minister who’s doing a marketing job, and Scott Morrison is very much in favour of building facades and then selling them. Look, he’s caused a real problem with this cabinet, this so-called cabinet that he’s established.

I believe that one of the motives of that cabinet was to pull people together, that’s good. But the other motive was, if it went pear-shaped with their response, he would have had the cabinet to blame.

And so, what we’ve now got is we’ve got rampant premiers, and Dan Andrews not fulfilling his responsibilities, Anastasia Palaszczuk, not fulfilling her responsibilities to the country and to Queensland, and harming both those states, and who pays mate?

The prime minister pays, the taxpayer pays. So when Victoria has as a sloppy response, and has more cases of COVID, and has to shut down to a stage four, who pays the bill for the extra job keeper, the extra job seeker?

[Marcus Paul]

Well-

[Malcolm Roberts]

The federal government does. So, what we’ve got now is the complete reversal of our constitution which is based on competitive federalism, and we’ve got competitive welfarism. The more the Queensland, and New South, and Victorian Governments fail, the more money they’ll get. It’s ridiculous.

[Marcus Paul]

All right. Look, again, I don’t understand why they’re so quiet on this and look, and I know the way the system works, I get it, but I’m sorry, you’re right.

He’s just hiding behind marketing slogans. He thought he hit a home run yesterday with this announcement, this grandized announcement of vaccines, and then he tripped over the words when he went down the whole mandatory line.

[Malcolm Roberts]

This is just a repeat-

[Marcus Paul]

Then having to backtrack-

[Malcolm Roberts]

This is just a repeat of what happened with the COVID tracking app. You know, he came out, and three times he refused to rule out that it would be compulsory. So I jumped in on a radio station and said, “No, we are not gonna support it, if it’s compulsory.

“We’re just not, you can’t do that.” He was very quickly backtracking as soon as that happened. Now Pauline did the same with this declaration of compulsory vaccines. And she belted him and he quickly retreated. He doesn’t stand for anything, and that means he’ll fall for anything.

And that’s Scott Morrison summarised in a nutshell. But that’s typical of the Liberal and Labor parties these days. They don’t stand for anything and they fall for anything.

[Marcus Paul]

All right, what about compulsory superannuation? This 50-year experiment continues, we’re now 30 years into the super experiment, and without getting bogged down in any of the financial detail, is it working, and can we afford the increase the government has promised Malcolm?

[Malcolm Roberts]

Well, you know, the reserve bank governor has come out and said the rising super would reduce wage growth, and spending.

And he’s right, because what people fail to realise is this super has to be paid from somewhere. The extra super contribution has to come from somewhere, and it comes out of an employer’s revenue.

And so, the employer then has less opportunity, less affordability, to give wage increases in the future. So the money doesn’t come out of nowhere. It goes either into super, or it goes into increased wages.

Take your pick Marcus. And so the reserve bank governor is sensible in saying that. So I’m saying that we need to really consider this, and have a good look at it, because the contribution from super, the tax concessions on super fund earnings is now costing us 38 billion a year.

The cost in saved pensions is only $8 billion a year. That means there’s $30 billion being transferred somewhere else. And we know that it goes to the banks and the super funds and fees.

[Marcus Paul]

Of course it does.

[Malcolm Roberts]

So this means that what’s happening, is that the rate we’re going, the return to members would be below the projected return if it were not for taxation concessions.

So we really have to think about what we’re doing with super and we have to stop making it increasingly complex. Have to really look at it in a solid way, and then come back to having a solid strategy on super and stop changing it all the time.

[Marcus Paul]

Yeah, I mean if business is forced to increase super in order to survive, then unfortunately they may just take that out of wages.

We know that real wage growth has basically flat-lined over the years, and they can’t probably afford, given the fact that we’ll be in hopefully recovery phase by then with COVID-19, with all borders open and all economies chugging away.

So while business survives, perhaps individuals if you like, may be worse off. I mean it’s, I don’t know whether the economy can sustain a rise in compulsory superannuation.

[Malcolm Roberts]

Well, you’re absolutely correct. And it points to not only the confusion and the concern that people have with continual meddling with the super, but also it points to what we discussed last week and the week before Marcus.

And that is that our economy has been debilitated from about 1923 onwards, and then especially from 1944 onwards, with signing the Lima Agreement, the Paris Agreement, the Kyoto Protocol and all these things that have destroyed our economic sovereignty, our economic sustainability, so we’ve had a reduced economy now, and even before COVID, it was floundering.

So, as a result of COVID, it’s collapsed. What we need to do, when Morrison and Albanese are talking about lifting the economy back to where it was, we don’t need to think about February this year Marcus, we need to think about getting back to being number one in the world, which is where we were in the early part of last century, right through to 1920.

We had the number one income per capita in the world. And that’s what we need to get back to. And what’s happened is that the Liberal Labor policies of pushing UN policies has failed. And we need to get back to really aiming for being top of the world again.

We’ve got the people, we’ve got the resources, we’ve got the climate, we’ve got the opportunities and the potential, we’ve just got wombats running the show in Canberra. That’s what we need to change.

[Marcus Paul]

All right, good to have you on the programme as always Malcolm. Calling a shovel a bloody spade. Appreciate it, we’ll talk to you next week. Thank you.

[Malcolm Roberts]

Thanks Marcus.

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Letter to QLD Premier – Licensed Firearm Dealers Shutdown

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200402-Qld-Premier

Full text

Dear Premier 

I was alarmed to recently hear that licenced dealers and armourers across Queensland were notified by Queensland Health that they must cease trading by close of business on Saturday, 28 March 2020. 

I have been swamped with complaints from people who have lost their jobs and livelihoods because of this short sighted decision. 

Other businesses such as the retail stores are able to carry on business without onerous conditions. This would appear to be discrimination. 

A decision had been made by the Chief Health Officer, a public servant, in conjunction with you, to add all Licensed Firearm Dealers and Licensed Armourers to the list of non-essential business, with few exemptions. 

I am told that this was done on the basis of perceived health needs to reduce threats of domestic violence, on the presumption that licenced shooters are likely to commit domestic violence if they can go to a gun dealer’s shop. 

This is absolutely untrue and has no foundation in fact. 

Queensland already has some of the tightest gun management laws in the country. 

There is no evidence in Australia that draws a link between domestic violence and gun ownership, or attending gun shops. 

Why were the Weapons Licensing Branch and the police not consulted beforehand? 

Why were industry representatives not consulted?

It is not possible to buy a gun over the counter from a dealership and leave with it. 

I suggest that this response by the government goes well beyond the power of the State Government to make such a direction based on a health power and is clearly contrary to the National Firearm Agreement. 

This constitutes a major employment problem across the State and 22,000 jobs have now been lost unnecessarily. 

This has the potential to lead to mass bankruptcies of businesses with a total lost value to the Queensland economy of more than $1 billion. 

Many country outlets will have to close down and farmers, who constitute the main users of firearms and ammunition in the State, will be caught unable to deal with the needs of stock and feral management, necessary to be productive in a season of lush greenery. 

The most recent Closure Directive (No 4) from the Department of Health is so restrictive to farmers that many are unable to purchase vital ammunition because of the limited Condition Codes on their Weapons Licences. 

It will impact on an already overworked police service upon whose shoulders it will be to maintain some sort of security of firearms and fill the gap from the front counters of stations across the state. 

Gun shop owners who had ordered weapons and/or ammunition prior to your government’s capricious action would have originally been left in the position of either opening their shop and breaking your directive, or leaving weapons and ammunition in the hands of delivery companies or on their shop front door after delivery. Your government increased the security risk to the community and that risk was averted only through the advocacy of concerned gun shop owners and shooters representatives. 

This is an example of poorly thought through and opportunistic government decision making that should worry all voters about intrusive and unjustified governments who can invent a reason to shut down people’s livelihoods. 

A legal challenge is likely unless the Queensland Government reverses this dangerous decision that may lead to widespread job loss and the destruction of yet another industry through poor government decision making. 

To avoid all these negative outcomes I ask you to please reconsider this decision. 

Yours sincerely 

Senator Malcolm Roberts 

Senator for Queensland 

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