The brand new federal MP for the Queensland seat of Flynn was a founding member of a membership shaped to advertise local weather science denial, and was a signatory to an international statement claiming “there is no climate emergency”.
Colin Boyce didn’t reply to questions as as to whether he’s nonetheless a member of the Saltbush Membership, a gaggle which revealed commentary in the course of the election marketing campaign that mentioned the local weather disaster is “a fraud”.
He wouldn’t say whether or not he nonetheless supported the “world local weather declaration”, which he signed in 2019 alongside figures equivalent to Ian Plimer. On the time he was the one Australian MP – state or federal – to publicly assist the doc, which repeats long-debunked speaking factors on local weather change which can be contradicted by scientific establishments and academies around the globe.
Boyce, a one-time boilermaker who resigned as a Queensland MP to run for the federal parliament, shot to prominence in the course of the election marketing campaign when he mentioned the Coalition’s net zero pledge was “flexible” and left “wiggle room”.
A search of Queensland Hansard confirmed that in his 4 and a half years in state parliament Boyce repeatedly criticised and rejected local weather science.
In a 2019 speech, Boyce claimed that pollution-prevention measures within the Nice Barrier Reef catchment have been “primarily based on flawed, manipulated science that’s pushed by a socialist political agenda”.
Throughout the identical speech he mentioned: “I imagine in local weather change. It’s a regular, cyclic occasion that has been taking place for tens of millions of years and can proceed to occur.”
“Local weather alarmists make outrageous claims that we are going to all die from sea stage rise, temperature rise and local weather occasions and are being known as out. Their doomsday predictions, together with the demise of the Nice Barrier Reef, haven’t eventuated.”
In a 2018 speech, he learn into Hansard an article by Viv Forbes, a Queensland-based coalmining millionaire and one of many key figures of the Saltbush Membership. The article claimed that burning fossil fuels created “plant meals” and that “we must always have a good time, not concern, the ‘fashionable heat period’”.
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In 2021, after an explosion on the Callide coal-fired energy station in Boyce’s citizens, he argued for the development of a brand new coal plant. He mentioned the argument towards constructing new coal crops was “pushed by the mind-numbing, eco-Marxist millennials and higher middle-class ‘wokes’ who’ve been indoctrinated with some quasi-religious perception that coal is unhealthy and carbon dioxide is poisoning the planet”.
Boyce has beforehand paid for Fb advertisements that decision renewable power “a fantasy”.
On Tuesday, Labor ministers in the Queensland parliament used question time to lampoon Boyce, who will turn into Queensland’s latest federal LNP MP after an election the place the Coalition misplaced heartland seats to the Greens and climate-conscious independents.
“As soon as once more, the local weather change deniers, the science sceptics and the anti-vaxxers within the Queensland LNP helped wreck the federal coalition and destroy the … federal Liberal party on the way in which,” the treasurer, Cameron Dick, informed parliament.
“They ensured that Josh Frydenberg misplaced his seat. And who did Australia get in return? Colin Boyce.”
Boyce enters the federal parliament because the decimated ranks of Liberal moderates try and convey the social gathering again to the centre. One expessed concern that Boyce, who will sit with the Nationals, has the potential to additional injury the Coalition’s means to attraction to misplaced voters.
A Queensland LNP state MP mentioned “we used to carry our breath” when Boyce stood as much as converse.
“He’s Canberra’s downside now,” they mentioned.
