Every now and again, a story breaks that should change everything.

Unfortunately, I’ve been in this game for long enough to know that it probably won’t change everything, but if we get behind this story and help to amplify it enough, then it could very well change some things, and that’s going to have to do. The story itself is to do with the Senate Selects Committee into information integrity on climate change. It’s as Orwellian as it sounds, but thankfully some people have been very committed and done a lot of hard work to try and make sure that this attempt to justify censorship actually backfires and becomes a place where the truth finally gets told. One such person is Gerard Holland from the Page Research Center and he joins me now on the Topher project. Gerard, thank you so much for coming on, mate.

[From video] Thanks for having me, mate. [End video]

I couldn’t believe what I saw when I read your submission. But before we dive into your submission, we need to talk for a moment about what is this Senate Select Committee? Uh what is this about and what is it supposed to be doing? What is the problem that this committee, we’re looking at the homepage here from the Parliament of Australia. What is the problem that this committee is supposed to be addressing or solving?

[From video]

So, essentially this was set up as an inquiry into myths and disinformation in the energy and the climate debate in the public. Uh this is a Greens-led Senate inquiry uh with a Labour vice chair. So you can sort of imagine the kind of preconceived conclusion that they were trying to work towards. [End video]

Well, I’m sorry to interrupt this interview with Jared Holland from the Page Research Center. There are some absolute bombshells later in this interview to do with more than $100 million in foreign funding funding the renewables lobby and specifically trying to destroy the social and political license for coal. We’ll get to that in a minute. But first, my name is Topher Field. This is the Topher project and this is what I do. I bring you stories that no one else will and no one else is bringing you, including stories that I consider to be absolute bombshells to be honest. Absolute game changers. If only we could get enough people to know about it.

And you can help me to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net because I am 100% viewer supported. I don’t get a billion dollars in funding like our ABC do. So, I rely on you guys. And also, if you like my videos, then you’re going to love my books, which are all about civil disobedience in the modern age. That’s Good People Break Bad Laws and also Good Christians Break Bad Laws for those that are interested in the theology of civil disobedience. Then there’s also the DVD of my internationally acclaimed multi-award winning documentary Battleground Melbourne. It’s all about the madness that went down in Melbourne, Australia during the co lockdowns under Daniel Andrews. Plus, there’s also t-shirts and hoodies in a range of different thought-provoking and funny designs. And you’ll find all of that at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com and everything you buy will be helping me to keep bringing you stories like this one.

And now without further ado, let’s get back to this interview with Gerard Holland from the Page Research Center.

[From video]

And there was a paper that came out um from an Australian academic mostly looking at the US and and shining a light on this thing called the Atlas Network. Now essentially Atlas is just a um you know an association of free market and libertarian think tanks across the world. Um we’re not involved in Atlas just to be super clear because that’s one of the accusations always thrown at us. But my understanding of them is it’s literally like you go to conferences, they share and exchange ideas as there are many of these kind of networks and organizations, people who share values and are doing similar sorts of things. But this paper came out of the US accusing the Atlas network of being the the kind of the puppeteers behind this vast network of miss and disinformation around climate change and energy in order to delay and obstruct the transition towards renewables.

And so, uh, the the Senate committee was set up to find out, well, just how baked into the Australian community is the Atlas Network and are they secretly, um, working behind the scenes to sabotage, um, what these eco warriors are doing. Um, so, so we were invited to make a submission and as a lot of other organizations in our space and I think basically to try and draw out of us whether or not we are affiliated with this network. But one of the things that really struck me was actually there is a lot of mis and disinformation in the energy and climate space. And um I I’m sure you have strong thoughts on some of the science side of it, but particularly from our research and I’ll leave that kettle of fish there and I’m very happy to wax wax on it, but I’ll stick with what I’m an expert on.

Um on the energy side of it, there have been some really persistent narratives that are just well and truly false. And they are pared by the ABC. They’re pared by the energy minister. They’re pared by the prime minister. they’re pared by 95% of the submissions into this inquiry and that is that renewables are the cheapest form of energy and that coal is unreliable and expensive. So that was kind of the start point for our submission is well let’s start digging here because where does this lie come from because actually this is one of the most fundamental distortions of our prosperity in Australia at the moment given how important energy is to everything in our economy. [End video]

It is quite extraordinary to me that the very same people who tell us not to worry about the World Economic Forum or the influence of the World Health Organization or other globalist bodies which without question do have ties into Australia, those same people that tell us not to worry about that tell us to be terrified of people like the Atlas Network and and other groups like that. It seems a little bit hypocritical.

Um coming back to the inquiry itself and particularly to the submissions for those that want to see your submission the page um sorry the page uh research center I had a mental blank there for a second uh you can head over to the government’s website the select committee on information integrity on climate change and energy head down to the submissions tab and what you’ll find is actually all of the different submissions are there across multiple pages and in fact the page research center submission is submission number 140.

I’ve got it loaded up here. Now, the text is going to be too small for people to read, but I want people to get just a bit of an idea of just how sort of thoroughly and methodically you’ve gone through this particular topic. Uh it’s 44 pages in all. And you go through initially the misinformation around this claim that renewables are the cheapest form of energy uh and that coal is in fact more expensive and becoming even more expensive as time goes on. Uh and then ultimately looking into the Gen cost report which is as best as I understand it and you know more about this than I do that really forms the basis that’s the foundation on which a lot of these claims are built. Correct me if I’m wrong. Why do you start there and and and what’s the truth around the cost of coal the cost of renewables all of that.

[From video]

Well, I think like the first starting point is essentially well what is the truth? Like like if we are trying to filter out and and and discern between myths and disinformation, well, we have to know where our NorthStar is and what what is provable and factually evident. And the reason we brought up the the Gen cost report is because even in the CSRO’s own press releases, the big headline, renewables remain the cheapest newest build technology. It was the cheapest and retroactive change that wasn’t true. And there’s a couple of linguists that they play here and I’m conscious we haven’t got huge amount of time. I’ll try and like rush through it.

Um essentially right now in 2024 the when the last report was was made. Coal the lower band for coal already comes out cheaper. And this is not the coal that we’re producing currently. This is for experimental new design reactors that don’t actually exist anywhere in the world that haven’t been built but are hypothetically a low emission form of technology. So even with this brand new technology that we’ve never built on green field sites, not developing on on on brownfield sites, yeah, the lower bound still comes out cheaper than renewables. So already that’s misleading within their own report.

Um but then they project five 10 years into the future and they say oh well renewables just come out cheaper in in five years time so therefore renewables remain the cheapest build. But again once you dig into that that’s based on coal reactors uh coal fire power plants that that don’t currently exist. Um it’s only based on green field sites. They don’t look at brownfield sites. They don’t look at refurbishments. They don’t look at additional units. Um they don’t look at utilizing existing transmission lines. Um and and once you take all of that into account, like overwhelmingly the cheapest thing we could do for our energy grid is just to refurbish what we’ve already got and build units where we’ve already got space.

Um so, we wanted to lay that out and and and we’ done some um modeling on a previous report, which actually looked at again on green field sites, um you can still produce energy from coal fire power plants cheaper by about 30 to 40% than what we’re getting currently. Um but on the transition and the trajectory that we’re heading to just because of all the additional infrastructure, the access roads, the uh the transmission lines, the distribution network, batteries, etc., um you’re looking at at least another 60 to 70% uh increased power prices just in the short term. So, so this was like an overwhelming fabrication that has just been picked up and astroturf and ran with elsewhere.

So, you go, well, who is who is amplifying this message? Who was fed into the CSRO report? And why is the public perception around this so wrong and so muddled at the moment? [End video]

Yeah. And why is the select committee so concerned about alleged misinformation coming from overseas when we seem to have such an abundance of the stuff being made right here at home? But as good as that section of your report is, the actual bombshell comes a little bit later on where you begin to dive into the funding around a lot of this stuff. And again, people aren’t going to be able to read this report, but I want to give you some idea.

Uh, this is talking about brownfield sites, etc. The lie that lives on, this idea that renewables are cheaper. Uh, and then we’re starting to look at their political side of things, the political endorsements, the media references of this misinformation, and then ultimately the funding that has come into Australia for the explicit purpose and this is not a conspiracy theory, you’ve got the receipts here. I actually say this. We have received into Australia over $100 million in foreign funding for the explicit purpose of destroying the social and economic license and the political viability of coal and, dare I say, gas and basically any cheap form of energy. For those that don’t believe me, go to the website, download submission number 140. Uh, but Gerard, how did you even find this information?

[From video]

Well, there was a couple of well, half of it was just like shooting off into the dark and just trying to find, well, who are organizations that have attacked us? Who are organizations that have attacked our peers? Who are prominent organizations that are proudly proclaiming some of these myths and lies? And then you start to go into the question: well, who funds you?

But then there was a real bombshell document that we were able to uncover that is dated back to 2011. Now, this alleged document was designed by John Hepburn, who was the head of Greenpeace Australia back in 2011, who’s now the executive director of a group called the Sunrise Project, which is one of the largest charities in Australia. And essentially, they set out a strategy pitch and a funding pitch to international donors, with initial seed funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Like, this actually sounds like one of those QAnon conspiracies from back in early 2020s, but we actually have the document, with the explicit aim of ending and disrupting what they projected was an upcoming Australian coal boom, and trying to keep as much coal in the ground as possible, and to destroy the social license of coal so that Australians pivot away from it.

And essentially, you know, back in 2011, we weren’t anywhere near as anti–fossil fuel as we are now. We rightly saw that our prosperity was sort of underwritten by the incredible, you know, coal boom and the cheap energy that flowed from that. That was our competitive advantage all the industry and manufacturing and everything else that came from that. And so they realized, well, if we want to transition away from fossil fuels because we have this ideological fixation with climate alarmism well then we need to destroy that social license. And so we need to basically create a propaganda campaign against the Australian people, create a network of organizations who fulfill different roles, and then get the money into that to then begin to shift public perception so that, you know, it would be anathema to even consider building a new coal–fired power plant. And they’ve been enormously successful.

So one of those organizations that they funded is the Environmental Defenders Office. Now they fed into that initial strategy document in 2011 and are now worth just shy of $20 million annually. Their sole purpose is to litigate on climate first, you know, Aboriginal issues, etc to stop projects. And they’ve kept billions tens of billions of dollars of coal and gas in the ground. They’ve held up so many projects across Newland, across Santos, Barossa, in the New England like, all over the place have been enormously successful.

And essentially, that coal boom that Australia should have had we never had it. We produce about the same amount of coal now to export as we did 10 years ago. But Indonesia and Mongolia have tripled, quadrupled their coal output. So essentially, the entire coal industry has moved to Indonesian shores. And at the same time, we’ve seen increasing power prices as we’ve begun to early decommission our coal–fired power plants, pull all this infrastructure out of the grid, and accelerate this transition towards renewable energy. [End video]

Yeah. And there’s so much to this. I did a video recently helping my viewers to understand the BIDST tax system and the fact that here in Australia we actually pay the highest available or the highest needed price at the time rather than the lowest. There are so many different layers and places that we could go.

I want to finish on this though. I was recently at the CPAC conference in Brisbane the Conservative Political Action Committee conference. We had a number of Nationals politicians and some Liberal Party politicians there, all very much pushing back against net zero and saying that we need to we need to get rid of it, or that they need to get rid of it out of the Liberal National Party. Where do you see this going from here? Do these revelations change much? Are we going to see political license for coal begin to come back? What happens in Australia from here?

[From video]

Look, it’s hard to predict, right? I mean, this is a huge amount of cash in the fight. So just these organizations that we looked at just in 23–24 accumulate over $170 million. So to put that figure in perspective, that is more than Labor and the Coalition spent combined fighting the last election. There’s a bit of a meme that’s floating around, right? That Big Fossil spends heaps of money and all their big lobbyists and all that kind of thing. It’s actually a total myth. Maybe it might be true overseas. But you have to realize in Australia, the vast majority of profits if you’re an oil or gas or coal company come from your exports. Your domestic market is such a tiny little speck in the bucket.

So essentially what’s happened is when this wave of cash came in and started attacking these corporates especially when the litigation came in their strategy became we need to work really closely with the government at the time and the resource minister to make sure that we can keep our approvals and just keep and if we just keep our heads down and shut up, we’ll be able to start shipping this stuff overseas.

So they literally have just completely walked away from our domestic energy needs because it’s just not a fight worth having. And this is even though we’re saying we need more fossil fuels there is not big fossil fuel money in this fight domestically in Australia. So what happens? Where does it go? Bills are going to keep going up.

The question is: if you’re living in a teal seat or an affluent seat or you’re in, you know, inner city Sydney or Melbourne, and so you don’t actually have any connections to industry or manufacturing — you don’t run a business, your only power costs are your fridge and your Netflix subscription will they go up enough that you begin to feel it yourself? And when your living standards continue to decrease, with all of the propaganda that’s being thrown at you, will you be able to sew up that because energy prices are increasing, the cost of everything else is increasing?

And so, you just need to look at this: last term, the Albanese government subsidized their way out of their high energy bills. They literally just paid people off. And all these bill reductions that they were promising people that came from redistributing it from the taxpayer. So, will they just continue along that strategy to buy themselves more time and political momentum?

The inverse of that is: we head into a recession. We’ve had the largest amount of business insolvencies for small and medium businesses on record. Stagnating productivity for the longest period since, like, the 70s. The ASX is pretty much frozen in place. Like, no one wants to be chucking any money into Australia at the moment. The existing companies that we have in the mining and resources sector they’re not looking to expand their operations here. They’re looking overseas for other opportunities.

It might just be that the music stops and we head into a recession. And that’s really what I’m fighting for is: I deeply love this country. I deeply love the people of this nation. And even if they’re a bit misguided and not quite in the know, I’m sort of doing everything I can that if we can raise enough salience and make this a political issue, then maybe we can avoid the kind of Venezuelan–Argentinian collapse that I’m worried we’re on the trajectory to head towards at the moment. [End video]

Well, I’ve said ever since I came back from Caracas City in Venezuela in 2015 that we are not special. And if we repeat their mistakes, then we will get their results. So I’m certainly on the same page as you there, Gerard.

Well, this has been a ray of sunshine. All of a sudden, we were talking power prices, now we’re talking recession and Venezuela–style. I believe it was a weight loss program that that country went on they lost about 15 or 20 kilos per person. I could certainly use a bit of that, but maybe not for those reasons.

Gerard, thank you so much for the work that you do. This is such an important report that you’ve come out with more than $100 million in foreign money funding the renewables lobby for the profit of these companies that then receive vast amounts of taxpayer subsidies. There’s so much more that we could dive into, but that’s all we have time for. Gerard from the Page Research Center thank you so much for joining me on the Topher Project.

[From video] Thank you for having me and thank you for all you’re doing as well and trying to get the word out there.[End video]

Cheers. That was Gerard Holland from the Page Research Center and as you could tell we could talk for a very long time about energy and all of the many layers of issues that surround that. I hope you’ve enjoyed this interview. My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project and I rely on you guys for my support to be able to keep the Topher Project going. So, if you’ve appreciated this interview and you agree that this is a really important story, then please buy me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And also, if you like my videos, you will love my books, which you’ll find at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com, along with my DVDs and my merch and more.

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