One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce sent the collective Left into fits of hysteria by repeating Senator Hanson’s desire to make the Department of Climate Change extinct.

Former Deputy Prime Minister and now One Nation MP, Barnaby Joyce, told our Editor-in-Chief Rowan Dean, ‘The climate change department has got to go. Climate legislation has got to go. Restrictions on us getting oil out of the Great Australian Bight and other areas has to go.’

We asked Spectator Australia followers what they thought, and the vast majority of respondents want the Department of Climate Change gone. Most would have preferred it to have never existed.

One Nation included the pitch to remove the department under its Slash Government Waste policy which it took to the previous federal election.

It is the first entry under ‘Eliminating Wasteful Departments or Agencies’.

• Abolish the Department of Climate Change and related agencies, programs, and regulations, saving approximately $30 billion per year.

The wider policy proposes $90 billion in savings and includes abolishing the National Indigenous Australians Agency and making significant cuts and reforms to the NDIS. One Nation has also proposed withdrawing from the United Nations, World Health Organisation, and Paris Agreement. Doing so would free Australia from significant policy constraints and physical costs.

In a press release in early April, Barnaby Joyce said:

‘What we know is that climate change departments across Australia are bleeding taxpayers to the tune of many, many billions of dollars. Money that could be used to make cheaper, more reliable energy, including fuel, here in Australia.

‘People might be alarmed to know that not only do these climate change departments cost the economy many millions, they also stop mining activity, they drive up the cost of energy, and cause huge swathes of the economy to lose productivity and their workforce.’

Before anyone gets too excited and starts envisioning Joyce going ‘full Milei’ by taking a chainsaw to the green bureaucracy, it has been pointed out before, including by the Institute of Public Affairs, that international agreements such the Paris Agreement, along with UN regulations, have been written into foundational legislation upon which other nests of energy and environmental policy have been built.

Ridding Australia of this gangrenous presence is not as simple as dissolving a department – although that would be an excellent start – it would require a total overhaul of significant laws and a decontamination of remaining departments.

The entire economics of energy production and mining would need to be revised and to do so, a powerful anti-climate change majority would be required in both Houses of Parliament.

Essentially, if the Australian people believe they have seen enough of Climate Change propaganda and Net Zero insanity – if they think the Iran war has revealed structural frailties in Australia’s national security – and if they no longer wish to watch their Prime Minister touring Asia, begging for fuel as though Australia had become a welfare recipient trespassing on the charity of its neighbours … well, they will have to give political parties promising a different view actual power, not a protest vote.

Globally, Climate Change and Net Zero industries represent trillions of dollars in profit, largely taken from the public as tax disguised as environmentalism.

It is a significant transfer of wealth, not only from the middle class to corporations, but from Western nations to what is often generalised as the Global South. Even terror-held nations such as Afghanistan have been getting in on the climate cash train. ‘Climate’ has become the ultimate washing machine of geopolitics.

Powerful industries, institutions, and individuals profit from ‘climate change’ and they will fight like hell to ensure that political parties are prevented from taking genuine legislative action against the policies that facilitate the transfer of wealth.

And it is these policies that have to be targeted.

No doubt there will be a combination of technological fear-mongering, complaints about ‘lead times’ on ‘nuclear’ or other technology, panic over apocalypse dates that keep being pushed out, the bombardment of the news cycle with taxpayer-funded studies that support the Net Zer narrative, fierce political campaigning from movements reliant on climate-induced terror, rampant misinformation about both the climate and opposing industries, threats and demands from international bodies and alliances who might attempt to punish us through trade deals, and a grass roots campaign from the individuals employed by climate hysteria.

Reclaiming Australia from ‘Climate Change’ will require significant strength of character.

Farmers know that Australia will eventually starve if something isn’t done about climate policy. The problem is, city voters, who hold the balance of power in every election, are unlikely to change their minds until after the farms are sold and the food runs out. There is a tendency to learn every legislative lesson the hard way. To totally ruin a nation before deciding to fix it. Almost every revolution in history has provided proof of this toxic human trait. And worse, Australia appears to have one, perhaps two generations uniquely detached from the world around them. They waste the privilege of universal suffrage through disinterest.

How can these city voters be reached?

Can Barnaby Joyce and One Nation reach them via their dominance of social media? Maybe. Maybe not. What about the Coalition – do they still have a voice in the city or has the Blue Ribbon territory been ceded to the Teals and Greens?

The question of how to reach these voters, as Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans managed in their previous election campaign, and which Nigel Farage and Reform are starting to achieve in the UK, is something that remains elusive to Australian politicians.