Carbon Credits and Other Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Transparency) Bill 2026

Mr JOYCE (New England) (10:58): I move: That the following words be added after paragraph (3): "(4) the Government must also repeal transitional capital gains tax discounts for foreign investors disposing of large renewable energy infrastructure assets". I want to run through a couple of places. Rushy Lagoon has been taken out of production, supported by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation against the wishes of an Australian buyer, to create a carbon sink.

That's thousands of head of cattle production that has been removed from the market. They used to produce food for the food stack. In a world where the population is racing through the roof, we are getting a greater and greater obligation to do our part, our very small part, in feeding those people.

I want to give a name of another place, Barry Station. Thousands of heads of cattle have been taken out of production now because they're going to create another carbon sink. That's another lot of food that's gone out of the food stack.

Cooplacurripa is another one where thousands of head of cattle have been taken out of production to create carbon units. You can't feed people carbon units. People will starve if you try to feed them carbon units.

Yet somehow we have moralised trumping our obligation to the global food stack by a vanity project of thinking that we will change the weather from Canberra. That is an absurdity. What we do here makes no difference whatsoever to the climate because of many things, including the lack of participation by the world—the majority of the economy.

We are creating hurt. We are bereft of our higher moral responsibility to be feeding people. When you take food out of the food stack, it's not the people you see that are ultimately hurt.

It's those at the very, very bottom in countries you can't see—in Sudan, in central Africa, in Central America, in the Pacific islands. These are the people who go without. We have an ever-increasing number of people in the world now who have been stated by the United Nations as starving.

It's growing. What we had that could be fed from the aspects of the green revolution has now been dealt with. Our population—the global population—has gone through that.

We have a greater obligation than carbon units, and that obligation is to feed people. Our capacity in this nation—I'm sure the member for Farrer will address this in a way soon—is such that even Australia is heading towards being a net food importer—not immediately but within decades on the trajectory we're on. What a disgrace.

What are we going to do then? Unless we evolve into a higher form of termite, there is not much we can do than say, 'What is our part in feeding people?' Yet that is the perverse nature of this parliament. We've somehow moralised that our greater obligation is not present.

The previous honourable member said he wanted to see what has been done. I'll tell you what's been done in our nation. We've lost our plastics industry, our urea industry and our glass industry.

Our aluminium industry is on its knees. Our steel industry is basically closing. Our concrete industry is on its knees or going.

There are record insolvencies in small business. Pensioners are being pushed into poverty at a greater rate than ever before. There's more homelessness.

We're taking farming out of farmers' production and reducing our obligation in the global food sector. That is what we're actually achieving. That is the vanity project that we're actually on.

That's the damage we're actually doing. We have to decide. This epiphany will come to us, because the other thing that's happening in the background is our economy is really in strife.

We are now rolling bills that we had from COVID. There were about half a per cent. Now they're going to roll around five per cent.

The Treasurer was speaking about it yesterday. One Nation started speaking about it two or three weeks ago. With that, our debt at the Australian Office of Financial Management as I speak is $1,010 billion—over $1 trillion.

As these bills roll and it goes up to five per cent, our interest bill is going to exponentially grow. It is exponentially growing now. It'll go through our defence budget.

It'll become one of the highest issues in our budget. We will be taxing people merely to pay interest—no other outcome. That also is a moral deficiency.

It's an ethical deficiency in what we are doing. We have got to get on top of that if we want to help pensioners in the future. We've got to get on top of that if we want to provide health services in the future.

We've got to get on top of that if we want to provide a defence force in the future. You have to have a fundamental—in fact, dynamic—change in behaviour to start getting on top of your debt, and we are not. It is getting worse and worse and worse at quicker and quicker and quicker rates.

If we are challenged in the future with another issue such as COVID, we do not have the headroom to be able to deal with it. It's just not there. You'll start being run not by the Treasurer but by the Department of the Treasury, which will just say: 'The money is not there, so forget it.

Stop saying it. You don't have the cash. If you continue on, you will go broke.' I remember being, basically, sacked as the shadow finance minister because I had the temerity to say that our debt would go, on the trajectory we were on, through half a trillion dollars.

They lined up the Secretary of the Treasury, the Governor of the Reserve Bank and the Treasurer to say what an outrageous proposition that was. Well, ladies and gentlemen, it's gone through a trillion. So I was wrong—I under underestimated where it was off to.

I'm going to give you another one. It's on its way to $2 trillion. It's on its way.

I can say that right now because if you add up our actual federal debt and our state debt, we're at about $1.5 trillion already. If you add on private debt—we have one of the highest private debt loads in the world apart from Switzerland, I think—we're on our way to $3 trillion. We're on our way, stuck into the interest market, and we're getting further and further into trouble.

So what are we going to do? Dynamic change! We have to get out of the Capacity Investment Scheme first of all.

We've got to knock this stuff out of the park. It's got to go. The Capacity Investment Scheme has got to go.

You must get out of net zero. You must get out of the Paris Agreement. You must remove the safeguard mechanism, which is actually shutting down your coalmines and the industries such as the steel industry, which you run around saying you're going to try and keep open.

You can't keep it open when you've got legislation there to shut it down. That's what it does. Go and talk to them.

They'll say: 'That's what you want. We're gone; we're finished.' You can't say you're going to support the aluminium industry when you've got legislation in place to get rid of the aluminium industry. You can't say you support the steel industry when you've got legislation in place to get rid of the steel industry.

You can't say you support mining and blue collar workers when you've got legislation in place to get rid of blue collar workers. That's what you're doing. You've got to get rid of carbon credits.

One Nation says quite clearly that we are getting rid of the climate change department and climate legislation. There you go. There's a dynamic change—a dynamic change that starts to address the fundamentals of where our economy is at.

The other day, they voted for a capital gains tax advantage for foreign intermittent power swindle factories. That's what they are. They are not renewable.

There is nothing renewable about them. If foreign intermittent power precincts, swindle factories, are sold to other foreign intermittent power precincts, swindle factories—it went through—they get a 50 per cent capital gains tax exemption at exactly the time we're removing the 50 per cent capital gains tax exemption for Australians. How perverse is that?

They snuck it in, in schedule 3. This amendment is about bringing it out and making you vote on it. Do you support the swindle factories getting a capital gains tax advantage?

You'll get the chance to vote on it, and then we can explain to the Australian people why swindle factories are more moral than selling your own investment house or more moral than selling shares in Australian companies and that you want to help out these swindle factories from China, Singapore and Europe more than you want to help out Australian people. You'll get to vote on it.

That's what the amendment is. This is really important, because if you support the capital gains tax preferential treatment for swindle factories, then you support VNI West. If you support this, then you support the New England renewable energy zones.

REZs, swindle factories, intermittent power precincts—you support them. If you support capital gains tax advantage for the intermittent power sector, you support the transmission lines. You support everything—Central-West Orana, the whole lot.

We have got to fundamentally change this not just for the people in regional Australia but for the economy of Australia. If you have another alternative to turn the show around, then tell us what it is, because we've heard nothing. All we've seen is the trajectory, and the only thing that's consistent about the trajectory into debt is that you keep on underestimating it.

The economy is being driven further and further into debt. There are record insolvencies in small business. It's incredible.

It is not just a 'sort of' record but a massive record. Who else are we hurting? Ultimately, there's another thing in this moral.

We're taking out of production food. We are reducing our obligation to the world to feed people who are ultimately at the bottom of the food stack, who you never see are starving, but they are starving. You haven't changed the weather, but there are people starving because you're not producing enough food.

That actually is happening. But you somehow think a moral quest, a moral vanity project to help overseas billionaires, domestic billionaires, and foreign companies, is more important than feeding people. They are the most amazing lobbyists who've got you to that position.

It's amazing that they've managed to connive the actual moral obligation of this nation into something that will actually have efficacy in being able to basically prostitute that into a form as you've created it: this sort of money-go-round, swindle industry carpetbagging for the benefit of those who are the least in need. That is the actual position you've got yourself into.

The other people that we're seeing a lot of are homeless people. We've never seen them before; people who can't afford their power bill any more. As I drive to the airport now, I see something I never thought I'd see in Tamworth.

There are people living in boxes or tarpaulins over them, people living under bridges and people living in cars—pensioners in cars in Australia. That's what happens when you drive the economy into the ground. That's what you actually do to people.

It's actually there. Do you know why you see them in Tamworth? It's a little bit warmer than some of the other areas.

They are people we have never seen before. It's also in Bundaberg—in country towns, under bridges. We're doing this to Australians.

And it doesn't matter what you do; if you want to support them, you've got to have an economy that pays to support them. They wouldn't be there if they had a job. They wouldn't be there if you hadn't destroyed their cost of living.

There would be some, but we have an exponential growth in that. Out of this virtue of wanting to help billionaires and the swindle industry, we are creating homelessness. Yet we moralise that it's the right thing to do because we're going to change the clouds, folks.

We're bringing back the frosts. We're going to make the great glaciers grow from Canberra. No you're not.

Whatever's happening to the climate, I'm not denying it. But you're not going to change it. That's the issue.

You're not changing it; you're just ripping people off and hurting people. This amendment is part of that. I know the Labor Party won't support it because they brought the legislation in.

But, my former colleagues in the coalition, you've got to make a stand. You've got to draw a line in the sand. You've got to be ready to fight.

You've got to bring about that dynamic change, if you're going to change what's happening to Australia, or you've got to accept responsibility. People will remind you of it in five to 10 years time when they say, 'Do you know why the nation is there in the dirt? It's because you put it there.

That's where you took it. That's what you did. Do you know why that person's under that bridge?

It's because you put them there. Do you know why that person doesn't have enough to eat—and you can't even see them because you're overseas? It's because you decided that you wanted to create carbon units.

You prioritised that. You were quite happy that you hurt that person. You moralised it.

You were part of a government that did it. You were part of an opposition that never stood up against it. You've got to wear it.' So I move this amendment.

I think you know I've been on this issue and I'll continue on this issue. I do this on behalf of Clarke Creek, Robbins Island, the Orana REZ, VNI West, the New England REZ, all the money wasted on green energy—I'll have to try and find out more about that—the people doing the transmission lines and the solar precincts, all of that, because of this ludicrous position that somehow it's all morally justified because you've got to help out foreign billionaires, foreign companies, domestic billionaires and the total calamity which is the swindle industry.