Speaking in support of Peter Ridd, Senator Malcolm Roberts talks about the beneficial impact of science on society and the need for maintaining the objectivity that goes hand in hand with the scientific method. "Objectivity frees us from the bullies' control."
TRANSCRIPT:
(This is derived from an automated process. The video recording is authoritative.)
Well, good evening everyone. It's lovely to be here, and thank you very much to Jewel for organizing this event. And let's put our hands together for Jewel because it's, uh, And I also want to thank everyone for being here because this is important for Peter Ridge's.
Support Peter is what Peter's doing, is much more than just scientific integrity. Much, much more. It's costing us all trillions of dollars. It's costing each of us in this room thousands of dollars.
And I'll explain why in a minute, but it's costing us enormously in terms of the values it's undermining and destroying in this country, and freedom. So I, I wanna also mention and acknowledge, uh, that our party's leader, Senator Pauline Hansen, I do this not because, uh, she's our party leader, but because she's so damn good at what she does.
When we were looking at the government's previous bill, uh, that went through the Senate late last year, Dan Tehan was the education minister and Dan put forward the bill, and Pauline said, we will support this providing you do something about Peter Ridd and about the destruction of our universities and freedom of speech.
What would you like us to do? And Pauline rattled off a list and that's, and she got a lot of it from Peter. So I want to acknowledge that there are people in federal parliament and Dan Tehan's one of them, and his successor, uh, uh, minister TJ is another.
They're going to come forward with a bill to restore some of those freedoms in the near future. But let's get back to science. And it's ironic, isn't it, that Pauline Hanssen didn't go to a university, but she knows what's happening in the universities better than vice chancellors do. That's appalling that the vice chancellors are that way.
So let's think about science. What has science brought us? Come on. Electricity. Electricity, yes. Progress. Internet progress. In what way? Better living standards. Better living standards. What else? Nice things.
Nice things. Comfort, ease, security, lighting, safety. And also long, longer living and, and safer living. It's brought us material wealth. Look how far we've come in the last 170 years, despite the last 20 years of reversal. Look how far we've come in the, in the previous hundreds of thousands of years. And in the last 170, we've come so far with materially enormous. It's staggering.
Everything in this room has come as a result of science, making a discovery either in the manufacturing of something or the actual harvesting of something, everything. And we are living longer, safer, happier lives.
But science is much more than just the pure dry knowledge or even the practical knowledge. It's much more than that. And that's what I'd like to discuss us. The sci, A scientist is defined as someone who follows the scientific method.
And I won't go into that in detail now, but the root, but the, but the end result of the scientific method is objectivity. And that's extremely important because objectivity frees us from the bullies control.
Many people think it's just about coming up with new inventions. It's not, it's about freedom in our society. Freedom in all forms. Economic freedom. You know, when my grandfather was born, he was pretty much tied to a job in the, in the valleys of Wales, in his valley. He didn't go very far.
But now someone in Australia can go almost anywhere in the world and work. So if you've got a bully in charge of the mine in your, or your factory in your valley, you are stuck there 150 years ago.
Not anymore, you can go anywhere. Science did that for us. It ended physical intimidation because no longer did the strongest person, the financially wealthiest person, the politically connected person, the economically powerful person, no longer did they have sway over our lives because we had objectivity.
This has only been with humans for about three or 400 years. The Greeks had some touches of it, but three or 400 years since the Enlightenment. So it's the, it's the, the freedom now to control our resources. We have control over our land, our property because of science, but much of our journey is about control versus freedom. When I say our journey, our journey here on, on, uh, in, uh, in our lives, on, on, on Earth as humans, much of it is about control versus freedom. And that's a theme that, that I quite often go to his read. Von Mises, his work, Ludwig von Mises' work well you, you probably hope you read the book where he talked about the way that the word liberal was captured.
Liberal is someone who a tag given to someone who believes in liberty and espouses liberty and fights for liberty. What does liberal mean these days? Not the party. What does liberal mean? Lefties.
Lefties that was deliberately hijacked to destroy that libertarian argument. It was deliberately hijacked. Ludwig Von Mises was one of the best economists ever, couldn't get any tenure in American universities because they didn't like his argument, because they were fighting freedom.
The human condition is the development of our ego. And as a result of that, our fear and it leads to human behavior, which is quite often driven to control people. Whether we control our kids, control our parents, control our neighbor, control the local sporting club we're in.
But it leads to suppressing of human progress. So the human condition, the ego drives sometimes counterproductive behaviors. Even though at our core, humans are caring people, aren't we? We at our core are caring and that that holds back human progress.
And at times it seems, especially in federal parliament as though everything is about control versus freedom. Control versus freedom. Look at our energy sector. That is what determines our productivity. We have destroyed our energy sector, and I'll talk about the cost of that in a minute. Due to so-called science.
We have destroyed our Murray-Darling basin due to so-called science. And it's rubbish as Jennifer will, will, will know, we are destroying agriculture in this state as a result of reef science, which is rubbish. And Peter read has led the charge on that now, and this is what's so significant that I want to bring to your attention now, those who seek to control, and there are people who want to control, they want to capture science to control us.
And I'll show you how they wanna actually capture control. The very concept of science, and these are the substitutes for science, some of the substitutes of science, no longer does data and objectivity rule at universities claims of consensus. The 97% consensus, when you look at the figures from John Cook's rubbish paper, it's actually 0.3% of scientists academics are, are in agreement 0.3. But even if it was a hundred, it doesn't matter because consensus is anti-science.
It's not about objectivity or they appeal to the name. The CSIRO is the top 100, top 1% of scientific organizations in the world, but they can't give me data. They're hopeless. They're rubbish.
Or they smear us, ridicule us derogatory, hurtful labels or implied smear like, oh, Jewel, you would believe in, you wouldn't believe in the moon landing, would you? I know you are not.
See that's what they do and that's how they live. Or they come up with catastrophic consequences. Great Barrier Reefs gonna be dead in 12 years. Sea levels gonna claim us all.
Rising sea levels, ocean, alkalinity, storms, insects, ticks, malaria, droughts, floods, species extinction. My God, we're getting overwhelmed. You haven't got more than five years to live. I'll tell you a joke later on about Al Gore computer models. They falsified, uh, they, they output is falsely called data.
They actually say that the output of a computer model is data. That's how desperate they are to, to, um, use these unvalidated, uh, computer models, unvalidated and erroneous. Or they say if statements, Jennifer, if Antarctica melts, it'll rise 20 meters.
What's the chance of Antarctica melting? And all people remember is the sea levels are gonna rise 20 meters. It was a rubbish statement in the first place. Peer review, another logical fallacy. Somebody who we don't know, who hasn't, who hasn't really looked at the paper, their opinion is worth, is worth something when there's no data. This is insane.
Celebrities including a socially awkward 16 year old, take their word for it. The UN has got so desperate that they're now using an awkward, well, she's now 18 years old. Greta Thornberg, hopeless. Where's the science?
Greta can't tell you that emotion, fear, guilt, pity lies and distortions. And these are the things that are now anti-science, but they're passed off by our opponents as science. And so what we have now is that the distortion of freedom, academic freedom, and the claim of ownership of what is a scientist.
Scientist is an advocate who espouses the control side of politics. That's what a scientist is these days. And it's rubbish, complete rubbish. They can sign real scientists like Peter Ridd, Professor Peter Ridd to the dust bin. That is what's really going on here.
And their whole pseudoscience is to control our policy. And this is where it leads us to governance that is not based on data. I've been in federal politics now about three years in total in the Senate.
And instead of data, well, let me put it this way. In my experience, every single major problem in our country has its roots in Canberra. Absolutely I'll challenge anyone to name a, a problem that hasn't got its roots in Canberra.
Covid or Covid came from overseas. But the roots of our problem on how it's managed came from Canberra. The restrictions basically were paid for by Canberra, allowing the states to go against competitive federalism.
Every major problem comes from Canberra. And why? Because government is not based on data, it's based on ideology, in motion, vested interests, fear, uninformed opinion. And quite often policies in Canberra contradict the science.
They contradict the empirical evidence and the costs. Listen to some of these costs. I commissioned Dr. Allen Moran to, to come up with the first analysis of the extra costs of climate policies and renewable energy policies on our electricity costs.
The figure I'm about to give you is the additional cost on our electricity, on our electricity prices due to renewables and, and, um, climate policies. $13 billion a year. That's the additional cost that works out at an average of $1,300 per household per year.
That's adding all the costs through the supply chain. Does anyone know what the median income is in Australia? 49,000. What is it after tax? I haven't done the calculation. 34.
How can we afford people on $34,000 take home paying an extra $1,300 on top of their electricity bill? That's the first time anyone's done that study. And I commissioned Dr. Miranda to do that. Previously the figures were in consolidated form. Now they're scattered across various budgets and agency reports because the government is telling us six point a 5% of your electricity bill is due to solar and wind rubbish. It's 39% and all the other inefficiencies that get stacked on top of that for every so-called green job due to solar and wind, it's costing us 2.2 jobs in the real economy.
We're going backwards and it's costing our nation trillions of dollars. Literally, I'm not exaggerating. If you look at not just the cost, but the opportunity costs trillions of dollars and poor governance is destroying our country. Is anyone surprised?
No. You can see it, can't you? You can feel it. So what we've come up with as one answer, and it's just one answer, there are many things to do, is an office of science, scientific integrity and quality assurance.
And we've worked with Peter Ridd on this. It wasn't our idea. We got it first from, uh, the American Environmental Protection Agency. We'll have questions later, Jeff. Uh, but Peter has jumped right on board with this.
He pushed it himself independently and we joined forces on that. So that leads me in a few minutes to talking about Peter. You can see why his quest is so damn important, can't you? It's about freedom, it's about governance. It's about the very security and future of our country.
So what do we see in Peter? We see someone who is absolutely objective. We see someone who is honest. We see someone who can't be bought. We see someone who is a faith is faithful to the science.
He honors the science. He protects the science because it's giving us so much. He is a good person to be with. He is courageous, he is determined, and he gets belted time and time again.
But he gets up every time and away he goes again and look where he is got, he's got to the High Court And his dishonest university has cost him a lot of money and a lot of time. But he's still going. He is still going. So he's determined, he's courageous and he has enormous integrity. What more do we need?
Wanna come to Canberra, Peter. We need that down there. Look, I'm gonna end by saying that first of all, Peter is much more than a great scientist. He is a great scientist.
His inventions have gone around the world and used in his field in other re in other res in Australia as well. So he is much, much more than a great theoretical science scientist.
He is a practical scientist. He's solved problems, he's given good advice. Maybe in the questions I can answer some more question, more comments about what he's done. But his cause is much more than about science.
Peter's cause applies to every single one of us in this room. And to everyone who's watching this video, everyone Peter's cause applies to everyone in Australia. Peter's cause applies. And I mean this sincerely.
You're starting to get a little bit teary. It applies to everyone on this planet, everyone on earth. It applies to our whole planet. People who value freedom will support Peter.
It's not sufficient for me that Galileo was vindicated after he died. I want this professor Peter rid to be vindicated. Now that's what we need. I'm gonna leave you with two quotes, one from the Dalai Lama. In order to exercise creativity, freedom of thought is essential. It's not only thinking freely and independently, but then exchanging ideas. 'cause ideas exchanged are enormously powerful. The second one is Steve Jobs, and I hope the James Cook University who employed Peter is listening.
Steve Jobs, who's built, who, who built, he's dead now, who built a remarkable company, said it doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do. We hire, he said, we in Apple, we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.
This man is very smart, but he is more so more important. He's practical and he's a real human and he's got an enormous ticker. So please support Peter Ridd.
