One Nation has burst onto mainstream Australian politics. But deep dive into One Nation’s policy platform reveals the extent to which the party is still rooted in conspiracy theories, incoherent scientific claims, and an extreme form of right-wing populism.
For Australian climate policy, the rise of One Nation is a particularly troubling development.
One Nation’s climate and energy policy platform is shallow on tangible commitments: it includes promises to withdraw Australia from the Paris Agreement, supporting the expansion of oil and gas production, and to build some of the most expensive forms of new power generation.
But it is what the policies reveal of One Nation’s underlying motivations that is more troubling.
The ‘net zero’ global conspiracy
One Nation’s embrace of populism - riding a bigger wave of right-wing populism that has disrupted the political landscape across much of the West – has propelled it to the point of threatening to displace the Liberal-National Coalition as Australia’s primary voice of the political right.
The man who most embodies this shift is former Deputy Prime Minister and Nationals leader, Barnaby Joyce, who has become One Nations de facto second-in-command. Joyce railed against renewable energy and climate policies, long before his defection to One Nation. For Joyce, renewables are a convenient scapegoat, blamed for rising energy prices, cost of living pressures and the challenges facing Australia’s farming sector. Never forget his Christmas Eve rant against carbon taxes.
For Pauline Hanson, painting climate policies as the domain of ‘elite’, out-of-touch, inner-city greenies serves much the same purpose. It’s a classic populist approach of stoking division and othering those who support climate action. These views are echoed throughout One Nation’s climate policies, which variously blame Australia’s climate targets for higher electricity prices, for imposing higher costs and transmission lines on farmers, and for ‘killing manufacturing’.
But One Nation’s climate policy also goes well beyond these populist tropes. It strays into conspiracy theory territory, describing net zero as “a vehicle for creating a socialist Australia in which citizens are forced under comprehensive government control.”
One Nation goes so far as to suggest that its motivation for opposing climate action is rooted in its belief that there’s a global conspiracy by some unnamed group to control the world’s population. It states:
“[Net Zero] is part of a global movement which aims to use the excuse of reducing emissions as a way of restricting and controlling people’s movement, diets, employment, housing, education and purchases.”
“One Nation has always opposed socialism as an anti-human economic and political system that is imposed rather than freely chosen, that restricts or eliminates basic human rights and freedoms, that impoverishes nations and has comprehensively failed in every country that has attempted it. It is also one of the main reasons we oppose ‘net zero’.”
This is an extreme form of populism, one that conveys a much more threatening tone against not only those who are advocating for climate action, but also the unspecified group that is seeking to ‘restrict and control people’.
This is not a new trope. As Clive Hamilton pointed out in The Conversation, it is the embrace of a fringe category of conspiracy theories that are rooted in antisemitism.
What do One Nation’s climate policies promise to do?
One Nation’s policies offer little in terms of tangible commitments.
In an ‘Embracing Australian coal’ policy, One Nation says it would build three new black coal ultra-supercritical power plants. This mirrors a plan of the former Coalition government, which was swiftly abandoned after being found to be too expensive.
In an ‘Embracing nuclear and hydro’ policy, One Nation says it will repeal the ban on nuclear energy developments in Australia, and “advocate for the construction of one advanced pressurised water nuclear reactor”. Again, another abandoned (and costly) Coalition policy.
One Nation would also support expanded hydroelectricity generation in Queensland and Tasmania – while opposing the Marinus Link between Tasmania and the mainland. Perplexingly, the policy states:
“Tasmania can cost-effectively meet its energy demands with an expanded hydro scheme, making renewables in the island state completely unnecessary.”
Apparently, according to One Nation, hydroelectricity isn’t a renewable energy source.
One Nation’s ‘Oil and Gas’ policy focuses on public ownership of new projects – proposing that the Australian Government could take up to 30% equity stakes in new oil and gas projects, in return for the government contributing funding for oil and gas exploration activities. One Nation would also repeal the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax.
But the party’s dedicated ‘climate’ statement is probably the most revealing. The only material policy position is delivered in the first sentence:
“One Nation believes Australia should withdraw from the United Nations Paris Agreement signed in 2016.”
What comes after is a sprawling tirade against climate science and scientists, suggesting that the evidence for climate change is flawed.
It starts off somewhat reasonably, with an insistence that science and policy must be based on “the evidence”:
“It is the evidence we should take regard of when making policy. The history of science is that it’s the evidence that counts.
We have confidence in evidence when the experiment can be repeated and the same results are achieved.”
Despite the repeated invocation of “the evidence” as being what “counts”, the policy then goes on to question the veracity of the global temperature record on the basis of flimsy evidence, including a cherry-picked reference to a single Australian weather station.
It makes the claim that:
“If there is global warming, then we say it should be reflected in a large number of places in different climate zones but in Australia that appears not to be the case.”
But, as evidence to support this claim, One Nation points to the temperature record of a single weather station, which also happens to be Australia’s oldest currently operating station: the Nobbys Signal Station in Newcastle, which dates back to 1862.
One Nation argues that the Nobbys temperature record shows that the highest recorded temperatures occurred around the 1890s. One Nation uses this as the basis for suggesting that there is no evidence of global warming in Australia.
There are clear problems with One Nation’s argument.
Firstly, it would be absurd to use a single temperature record as the basis of any assessment of the presence of global warming in Australia. The Bureau of Meteorology currently operates over 650 weather stations distributed across Australia.
Secondly, the Nobbys temperature record is known to have likely suffered from quality issues in its early years, as an AAP FactCheck, with input from the Bureau of Meteorology, has detailed.
For example, the station pre-dates the use in Australia of Stevenson screens – white boxes used to house and protect weather instrumentation, and which help improve the reliability and accuracy of their measurements – by almost 50 years.
Despite this, the One Nation policy is asking us to doubt the vast volume of evidence that has been collected globally and the conclusions of thousands of climate science experts - that indisputably point to a warming of the planet, including Australia – on the basis of a single temperature record.
The history of One Nation’s climate stance
Read on its own, One Nation’s climate policy is a bizarre document. It is more a rant against climate science and allegations of grand conspiracies than a statement of any plan that One Nation has for the Australian economy.
It is perhaps useful to understand the history behind One Nation’s views on climate.
Pauline Hanson’s more recent resurgence had its beginnings in 2016, when the double dissolution election called that year opened the door to One Nation re-entering the federal parliament for the first time since 2005.
This included Malcolm Roberts, who probably wasn’t expected to win election. He garnered a grand total of 77 personal votes, but rode the coat-tails of Pauline Hanson, who led One Nation’s Senate ticket in Queensland and secured enough votes to get them both elected with the help of preferences.
Despite professing an enthusiasm for “empirical evidence” and the scientific method, Roberts is a climate change denier. Prior to politics, Roberts ran a climate change denial group and appears to have been involved in the fringe ‘sovereign citizen’ movement.
It appears evident that One Nation’s climate policy has, at least in part, if not entirely, been authored by Roberts, given his history of engagement on climate while in Parliament.
Roberts has spent much of the last decade as a senator trying, unsuccessfully, to discredit Australia’s authoritative science institutions, including the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology.
Take this clip from 2016 as an example, where Roberts probes then Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel on his understanding of the scientific process and the evidence for climate change.
Over a decade later, Roberts appears to have made little progress in understanding how science and climate change work. Earlier this year, he asked almost the same set of questions to Dr Karl Kruszelnicki and suggested that scientific consensus is a “political tool”.
Roberts sees himself as a modern-day Galileo Galilei, a single man standing up to power and arguing that the established wisdom is wrong. It’s no coincidence that Roberts named the climate denial group he started pre-politics the “Galileo Movement”.
Galileo argued his scientific observations that pointed to the heliocentric nature of the solar system in the face of the very powerful yet very unscientific Catholic Church of the 1600s.
Roberts claims that policy should be based on science, and science should be based on logic and coherent observations – but fails to apply that very approach when he bases his denial of climate science in allegations of grand conspiracy theories, rather than in evidence.
But more worrying than Malcolm Roberts's self-contradictions is the prospect of his fringe views, which draw on antisemitic tropes, riding One Nation's newfound popularity into the mainstream. Worse still is their potential to shape future Australian climate policy.