Responding to the Greens on President Trump Matters of Public Interest
I rise to speak on this motion from the Australian Greens and highlight that President Trump has been elected as the 47th President of the United States by a functioning system of democracy.
It is different to ours, granted, but it has checks and balances that keep executive power in check.
At the end of the day, it is the choice of the American people as to who they wish to be their president.
The Greens have just said that he will say things that have never been said before. I noticed that a lot of people gave him grief about his comments on America wanting to buy Greenland, as though he’d somehow gone off the reservation.
If you look at history, there have actually been negotiations before between Denmark and the US about Greenland, and they actually agreed a price.
The US Congress opted not to pay the money, so it didn’t go through, but he is hardly the first person to talk about this issue.
What is important to remember is that the US has overwhelmingly, under whomever has become the president, been a force for good in the world, and that is to Australia’s benefit.
We benefit from the rules based order.
We benefit from the influence of the people of the United States, through our security relationships, economically and in the people-to-people links.
If the Greens want to look overseas and be critical—and here they have said that President Trump is a threat to Australia and the world because of his actions on things like human rights et cetera—they could at least be consistent.
I note that on Insiders, on the ABC, the Deputy Leader of the Greens refused to say whether Hamas should be disbanded.
Given that Gaza has not been a democracy for a long time now, and they’re a terrorist group with an awful track record on human rights, you’d think that the Greens could at least be consistent.
If they want to look overseas in a more positive sense, perhaps they could look at Finland, where Tea Tormanen, of the Greens party in Finland, led the movement to preference science, engineering and economics over ideology when she moved her party to support the introduction of nuclear power in Finland.
What was the result?
Finland now generates power that is 98 per cent emissions free, and its power prices have dropped to the equivalent of A$0.12 per kilowatt hour, compared with my home state of South Australia, where we pay 45c per kilowatt hour and sometimes even higher.
If President Trump is such a danger to the world, why do his policies agree with those of the Greens in Finland and President Biden, his Democratic predecessor?
Both are supporters of nuclear power because it provides lower-cost, lower-emissions and more-reliable power. And that’s not just the executive order signed by President Trump or the IRA Act passed by President Biden.
If you look at groups like the OECD, the IEA, engineers and economists, such as economists at Frontier Economics, the studies and modelling from these independent expert bodies highlight that, unlike the ideology of the Greens and Labor, which is driving up the cost of living and the cost of power here in Australia, the decision to consider the science, the engineering and the economics will put a nation on a trajectory to lower power costs.
If you are questioning whether we have a problem, just read the reports today from Independent Food Distributors Australia, who highlighted that under the approach the Greens and Labor have taken—ideologically driven—the Godden Food Group, for example, as their power contract expired, faced an increase of 238 per cent to renew it.
So, Australians should be asking, in the next month or two, whether they are better off now than they were 2½ years ago.
Do they want more of the same?
Do they want to see an alliance between the Greens, ideologically driven, and Labor?
Or do they want to see economics, engineering and science underpinning a policy that has been proven globally to drive down the cost of electricity, which will drive down the cost of living?
If they want the latter, they need to vote for the coalition, who will get Australia back on track.