Matt Canavan: I’m accused of misinformation for just stating the facts on net zero
When you point out that none of the promised benefits of net zero have happened, you get accused of misinformation, writes Matt Canavan.
There is an old story about a soccer coach who blamed biased newspaper coverage for his eventual sacking. In response to the accusation, the newspaper editor said, “I had to report the scores.”
Net-zero cheerleaders are engaging in the same sort of blame shifting.
Those pushing net zero promised lower power prices, lots of new jobs in green hydrogen and green metals, and they claimed the rest of the world was taking action to get to net zero too.
When you point out that none of these things have happened, when you play the role of the hapless newspaper editor just reporting the score, the net-zero zealots accuse you of spreading misinformation and disinformation.
This was on full display in the parliament this week.
At the behest of Labor and Greens senators, two days were wasted on an inquiry which seems to have been established to let climate activists accuse others of all sorts of bad motives for just pointing out the facts.
For example, the radio presenter Ben Fordham was accused of spreading disinformation for simply posting on X that the cost of a renewable energy zone had blown out by billions.
Ben was referring to the Central Orana renewable energy zone, which has blown out from $650m to $5.5bn.
The same group accused me of disinformation for simply pointing out that six transmission line projects (to support renewables) had blown out from $28bn to $41bn.
When I asked them, “where is the lie?”, in my posts or Ben’s, the UK-based representative of this climate activist group had no evidence to back up their serious allegations.
They had to “take it on notice”.
I did not get time to ask them why, in their written submission and testimony, they accused me of spreading a “deliberate and false either/or paradigm designed to justify local inaction” for just stating that China is not taking any action to reduce its emissions.
This foreign activist group also accused Australian politicians (they mentioned senators Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts) of being “superspreaders” through their social media accounts. They recommended that “targeting these accounts would have an outsized impact on the problem”.
So, this Senate inquiry has given prominent airtime to a UK-based witness representing this “global coalition” which has recommended that Australian political representatives should be targeted. That alone should be enough to discredit this Kangaroo Court of an inquiry.
Other submissions to this inquiry have called for climate “misinformation” and “disinformation” to be made criminal acts. The United Nations suggested that we should “criminalise media and advertising firms accountable for amplifying disinformation and misinformation”.
The bigger problem with anyone seeking to outlaw wrongspeak is that no one has the proper authority to do this.
If you give such a power to governments, they will clearly have an incentive to censor anything that criticises their decisions.
And there is a lot of legitimate criticism to be made of the federal government’s failing energy policies.
No one has a monopoly on the truth and that was on clear display at this inquiry.
A group of scientists from the University of Melbourne made a submission that accused Nationals ministers of “misleadingly blaming renewable energy for the [SA 2016] statewide outage, despite the advice of the Australian Energy Market Operator”.
I pointed out that the ABC headlined a report at the time, “AEMO releases final report into SA blackout, blames wind farm settings for statewide power failure”.
None of the scientists could say where the ABC had got it wrong, or even if the scientists had actually read the AEMO report.
The whole hearing descended into the farce of the classic stoning scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
In that scene, John Cleese, playing a Pharisee, accuses a poor man of blasphemy for saying the word “Jehovah”.
In making his case against the condemned man, Cleese himself can’t stop saying the word “Jehovah”, and hence Cleese is the one who ends up being stoned.
Likewise, the net-zero gang came along to accuse others of misinformation, but could not stop engaging in misinformation themselves.
The lesson is that we should never seek to silence criticism. Instead of seeking to censor the reporting of the energy policy “score”, what our political leaders should focus on is delivering results. If their promises of renewable energy delivering cheaper energy and lots of jobs come true, they will not need to censor opposing views because such views will be discredited.
The problem for the net-zero zealots is not biased reporting, it is that reality bites.
And the lived reality of net zero is not turning out to be the utopia that was promised.
Just like the losing soccer team, we should sack net zero and start again with a new energy plan.
Matt Canavan is an LNP senator for Queensland
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