[From video]

Now this is an absolute fabrication. Now, the ABC had gone through the 166 references that we had made, cherry-picked out of context, and then used that to base the claim.

They knew that we had done our own independent modeling, and they knew that our own independent modeling had come first. I think Chris Bowen has even accused the Nats of basing their energy modeling off Coal Australia, which is false. It is a lie. It is deliberately deceptive. [End video]

Regular viewers will be aware that I’m no big fan of the mainstream media, but the ABC especially I reserve a particular kind of eye for, because not only are they a very powerful mainstream media institution, but they operate thanks to over a billion dollars a year of taxpayer funding, and they have a charter mandate to be politically neutral. So when they get something wrong, I think it is an extra level of serious over and above when the mainstream media gets something wrong. And boy, did they get something wrong this week. I’ve brought on Gerard Holland from the Page Research Center to tell me all about it. Gerard, thank you so much for joining me here on the Topher Project.

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

When I came across this, it struck me as genuinely quite serious and bordering on political interference, but there’d be many of my viewers who would have no idea at this point what it is that we’re actually talking about and what the ABC have done. But there’s a bit of background needed here. Can you tell me about the Page Research Center, what you do, the report that is central to this particular story, and the role that that report played in the Nationals and their decision to ultimately walk away from their net zero by 2050 goal?

[From video]

Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll try and keep it to two or three minutes, not 45, because there’s a lot to unpack there. But essentially, my organization, the Page Research Center, we’re a think tank that’s primarily focused on rural and regional Australia. We are firmly of the belief that with Australia’s regionally integrated economy, better outcomes for the regions mean better outcomes for all Australians. We conducted a piece of analysis that we released on Sunday, which is called Delivering a High Energy Australia. And essentially what we set out to do was present a discussion paper that looks at what is going on in our energy and climate environment, what targets have we set ourselves, how is that impacting things, how’s it impacting cost of living pressures, how’s it impacting our environment, what’s working and what’s not working? [End video]

I’m sorry to interrupt this interview with Gerard Holland from the Page Research Center, but my name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project, and this is what I do. I bring you stories and interviews that help you to cut through the crap and make sense of the nonsense that comes out of the mainstream media and, sadly, from our politicians as well. If you appreciate what I’m doing here at the Topher Project, then please buy me a coffee via the button that you’ll find at topherfield.net. And if you like my videos and my interviews, then you’re going to love my books. They’re about civil disobedience, about government, about power, about human rights, about the perverse incentives of politics. You’ll find Good People Break Bad Laws this is about civil disobedience in the modern age. Good Christians Break Bad Laws this is about the theology of civil disobedience. You’ll also find my documentary multi-award-winning, internationally acclaimed documentary Battleground Melbourne. You’ll find the DVD of that, as well as my t-shirts, hoodies in a range of different designs, and everything you buy is going to help me to keep the Topher Project going. So without further ado, let’s get back to my interview with Gerard Holland of the Page Research Center.

[From video]

Largely, three themes emerged from that. The first was around affordability. Now, it’s no secret that we’re in the middle of a cost of living crisis at the moment, and that isn’t an accident. That has been because of deliberate policy choices that we have made that have pushed up the cost of goods and services for all consumers. And nothing is more distortive than energy policy. Energy isn’t just an input into the economy it is the economy. If you grow it, dig it up, manufacture it, process it, transport it, refrigerate it, consume it at home that requires energy. And if you push up the price of energy, well, that pushes up the price of everything else. We’ve seen energy prices spike electricity alone, 39% in real terms adjusted for inflation since Australia has adopted net zero targets. And I’m really happy to get into that, but um that’s probably a different conversation.

The second point is around fairness, and people probably aren’t aware that Australia has actually done an amazing job in decarbonizing since 2005. We’re one of only two or three nations that is on track, and I think we’re second or third most decarbonized nation in the world. We’ve done about 28% reductions on 2005, and I think the only ones ahead of us are the UK, who’ve streaked out at like 40–47%. But the rest of the OECD, the rest of Europe, the rest of the US, and of course the developing world who’ve actually increased their emissions they haven’t come close to what we’ve done.

Australia’s already doing quite a lot, but what the government has done has set even more aggressive targets by 2035. We’re one of the few nations that have even set 2035 targets, and they are just unrealistic, unattainable, and will come off the backs of working Australians. The other point to fairness is all of that decarbonization has come from the regions. So 95% of emissions that we have reduced since 2005 have come from changes in land use. That’s a kind of euphemistic way of saying we have taken farmland and locked it up as forest or, in reality, pest-infected scrub. Once you remove that land use change, we’ve actually pretty much stayed about the same as what we emitted in 2005. And depending on the data set, if you look at the World Bank, if you look at the OECD or Australian government figures, and again, we looked at all of this in conducting our report, we’re either a slight reduction, a slight increase, or about the same.

But we’ve also seen a huge reduction in emissions in our primary and secondary industries, and we’re in industrial recession at the moment. Overwhelmingly, these industries are based in rural and regional Australia. And so, it’s not fair. We would argue that it is just one part of society Australians from the bush and only a couple of sectors of society that are overwhelmingly paying for this decarbonization agenda. And whilst having a cleaner economy and and and a clean cleaner air to breathe is a shared public goal well that should be shared across all Australians and there might be fairer ways to do that. That was the second point around fairness.

And the third one was just around better outcomes for our environment. And I’m firmly of the belief that we are sacrificing our farmland, our countryside, our national parks in order to serve global climate targets. And actually Australians who are about 1% of global emissions. We should not be sacrificing our natural environment to offset China, India, and Indonesia’s emissions. And one of the big sections of our report, we dedicated an entire section towards well, how do we actually improve the outcomes for our environment? How do we actually conserve what we have? How do we have a better approach to our waterways, to our soil health, to our pest control? How do we have better interactions with the environment as Australians and make sure that we’re not locking the bush up as a museum that is participatory for recreation, for going on hikes, for cycling, for hunting and fishing, whatever it is, but making sure that actually we are encouraging Aussies to get out into the bush and make sure that our national parks and other services are properly maintained. And so that was the other point around better outcomes for our environment.

And we presented this document to the national parties, to the National Party on Sunday, and they had an opportunity to sort of digest it, debate it, and then off the back of that they came to a unanimous decision that it was time for Australia to abandon its targets by 2050 and to adopt the six principles that we had outlined in the report, which broadly cover what we’ve just discussed around affordability, around fairness for the regions, fairness for us doing our part in the world, looking for tech and innovation as a way to reduce emissions, not penalizing heavy industry who are unable to do their job any other way, to make sure that we are investing in our natural environment, conservation efforts and ensuring that our national security apparatus is focused on lethality and defense and not arbitrary decarbonization targets. So, those are the six principles that the NATS signed up to off the back of our report. [End video]

So, that’s the backstory and that brings us to the actual story. What I wanted to talk about and what grabbed my attention because the ABC seemed to have framed your report in a way that to me, I mean again this is just my opinion, it struck me as being borderline political interference from our taxpayer funded national broadcaster. That’s just my opinion. Tell us a little bit about what happened on the 7:30 report, how your report was framed, the implications of that from your perspective, and why you’ve actually demanded a full retraction and apology from the ABC.

[From video]

Yeah. So, we were quite keen to make sure this was a rigorous, thoroughly academic piece of work and we have diligently cited multiple sources wherever we can of every single data point and claim that we make throughout the paper. In total, we have over 166 individual references that point to other authoritative sources that reinforce the conclusions that we came to. Now, the ABC made the exaggerated claim, not even exaggerated, the false, the blatant lie, that we got our energy modeling, specifically our cost for what a grid that’s by coal fire power generation would cost, from the coal peak body Coal Australia. Now, this is an absolute fabrication as we reference and evidence in the paper. Our assumptions around the cost of coal and nuclear and renewables and all other technologies came from a previous piece of work that we did that we released in February, which I actually think I’ve got on my shelf here. So, this is Economic Self Harm or a Pro human Future: The Case of Australia.

So, that work we conducted, we set out and did all that modeling back late last year and that took from Gencost, the CSRO, AMO, the Australian Energy Regulator, the IEA, the CIS, Arch Energy, Oracon. It was a very thoroughly, diligently researched piece of work and we actually spent multiple pages in that document outlining how we came to our different costings for nuclear, how we came to our different costings for coal down to what is the caloric value of the coal that we’re estimating, what is the whack, the weighted average cost of capital over time that we’re making assumptions over, the capacity factor. This was a really rigorous body of work and we referenced that in our Delivering a High Energy Australia document.

Now, we added an additional reference again to be thorough, and this was a submission that Coal Australia had made to the CSRO when they were calling for public submissions into their methodology of their Gencost report. Now, Coal Australia commissioned independent clean energy advisory firm Ark Energy to do their own modeling and costings of what building new coal fire power stations on brownfield sites and refurbished coal would cost in Australia. Now, they did this work months after we did. We only have access to it because these submissions are publicly available, but they came to very, very similar figures to what we had come to in our report back in February. So, we included them as an additional reference. Let me be clear, as an additional reference to support the work that we had carried out earlier on in the year.

Now, the ABC had gone through the 166 references that we had made across this report. They had gone to that one reference, cherry-picked out of context, and then used that to base the claim that we got our energy modeling and our coal assumptions from Coal Australia. Now, what’s really egregious about this is they knew that we had done our own independent modeling and they knew that our own independent modeling had come first and that’s because they actually reached out to us for comment before the story went to air. In fact, they went to multiple sources for comment. I won’t mention names, but they went to a National Party MP and sort of asked, are you aware that the decision that the National Party based their leaving net zero is based from modeling from Coal Australia? And that MP came back and said, “No, actually I think the energy modeling came from the Page Research Center’s earlier report that was released back in February,” and sent them a link. But you can check with the report authors with them if you would like.

Then the ABC got in touch with me, asked a very similar question, and I explained what I’ve just outlined to your viewers that here is the document where we got our modeling from. I attached it in the email, I sent them a link, I pointed them to the footnote references within the document and highlighted that the entire document and our energy figures didn’t even just come from this one source. They came from all of the other government advisory bodies, all of the other costings from Gencost and others. And what we had done is aggregated these different data sets to come to a conclusion around the cost. Now, when this went to air, it was just a simple line: “The Page Research Center report the National Party based its decision on got its energy modeling from Coal Australia, the peak fossil lobby group based in Queensland.” That was the line that went to air, and then they went to Matt Keane for comments, who obviously has a very big stake in this. He made some disparaging comment about, oh isn’t it terrible that the Nats are outsourcing their policy work to the fossil fuel lobby.

So we were furious. I watched this live and I was angrily tweeting, why is the ABC blatantly lying, misrepresenting our work? And we have since had a response from the ABC and they’ve acknowledged that perhaps they should have presented it in a slightly different way, and they should have acknowledged our response to their comment, and they’ve now put a little subtext on their website if anyone wants to dig it up. But the damage is done. They’ve got their line now and already other media outlets have been spouting it, and I think Chris Bowen has even accused the NATS of basing their energy modeling off Coal Australia, which is false. It is a lie. It is deliberately deceptive. And I’m sorry I’m getting a bit worked up, but I’m still pretty, pretty angry about it, to be honest, because basically they couldn’t fault any of the numbers. Like, we were so meticulously detailed in coming to these costings and coming to everything in the report the land use changes, the environmental damage, the impact on industry, the impact on households, the cost of living pressures we were so meticulous that rather than taking on the data, they tried to smear us by association to discredit the report more broadly. [End video]

It’s an astonishing thing and I think all taxpayers should be absolutely outraged. I mean, I want to make a bunch of different jokes. There’s that old joke that says, “I thought my father had dementia. He seemed confused and he was just babbling things that were just completely false.” And then I realized it wasn’t dementia. He was watching the ABC. You know, there’s sort of the humorous side of it, if you will. But honestly, this is taxpayers’ money. This is a billion dollars. This is a trusted broadcaster that a lot of people do turn to and rely on. And this is a situation I think the smoking gun here is what you came to at the end there, which is we know that they knew. This wasn’t an error that went to air and they’re now scrambling to correct afterwards. We know that they knew. We know that they reached out to the Nationals for comment. They were put in touch with you for comment. You gave them exactly the right sources and resources.

What we have here is a situation, unfortunately, Gerard, where people who watch shows like mine and there are decent media out there, not a lot of them unfortunately, but they do exist people who watch that for their source of information are living in a very different world to the people who are watching things like the ABC, where we’re making our decisions and forming our opinions off two entirely different sets of facts. How do we move forward as a country? How do we come together and actually unite and work together towards a better future when people are quite literally living in parallel countries?

[From video]

I think this is actually a much bigger question than just our energy report, and you know I look at what happened with the invention of the printing press and how that led to hundreds of years of war across Europe when the traditional gatekeepers of knowledge and information were broken open and then you had this flurry of new information and the public beginning to become siloed. And even then, that seems so rudimentary compared to what we’ve got now. I mean, the fact that we’ve got algorithmically driven content that basically puts directly in front of our eyes what it is that we’re interested in, what is going to hold our attention or make us angry because that’s what’s more likely to provoke a response out of us and that is just going to increasingly get more and more siloed as time goes on.

You know, there’s a famous media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, who argued the medium is the message. And I worry that’s where we’re headed now we are getting sound bite media. We’re losing that rigorousness in debate. You know, there was a time when it felt like the rise of podcasts meant we all sat down and we’d listen to two or three-hour Jordan Peterson lectures and become more intellectual, but I think TikTok has just crashed that like a wave, and we are now just getting very, very divisive content. And I don’t know how you can wind that back in. I mean, the thing with the ABC is that their viewer share is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, and they’re increasingly appealing to a very narrow market. They do still matter because they are still seen as authoritative and they do create those sound bites that other media representatives can latch on to and repeat in the public square.

But how do we come together, Topher? I don’t know. I think we are very much guinea pigs in a brave new world and we’re just figuring this out. But the antidote isn’t just relying on the mainstream media and hoping they’ll figure it out. I think it is in doing the kind of thing that you’re doing in independent media and actually finding sources that you can trust that are willing to put their hand up and say when they’re wrong. As you know, I wish the ABC were able to do that on air and actually inform their viewers. But when we’ve got journalists who have integrity, who are willing to put their hand up and say when they were wrong, and likewise are willing to go that extra mile and make sure that what they’re reporting is true and they’re not misrepresenting people, to give their audience the true facts well, then at least those who are seeking it out will be able to have a bit more of a grounding in reality. And you know, it’s a bit like Plato’s cave you might be able to pop your head out and see the real world and not get stuck in the shadows. [End video]

And I think importantly, acknowledging when we get it wrong and acknowledging that just because someone disagrees doesn’t necessarily make them evil is going to allow us to at least get along even though we may continue to disagree, to be able to find a way of moving forward together. Well Gerard, thank you very much. I applaud what you do and the Page Research Center and the reports that they author are quite incredible and, as you say, very, very rigorous and valuable contributions to public debate and discourse in Australia. I applaud your influence and the impact that the report had on the National Party specifically. But most of all, I applaud you standing up to the ABC and sticking it up them when they have used our taxpayer funds to, quite frankly, deceive the public. And finally, thank you very much for coming on to the Topher Project.

[From video]

Mate, thanks for having me on and giving me an opportunity to sort of set the record straight and talk about what really went on. And just a quick plug you can check out our work at the Page at page.org.au or follow us on X, Instagram, Facebook, The Page Research Center. Please do check it out. We put a lot of work into it and we’re really trying to go above sort of mudslinging in Australian politics and give something that’s rigorous and well evidenced. So, do check our work out. [End video]

Yeah, well said and I’m happy to recommend that people do exactly that. Thanks so much. Well, thank you for watching my interview with Gerard Holland of the Page Research Center. It certainly is disappointing to find that our taxpayer funding and money is being used by the ABC to spread literal, actual misinformation. My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project and I rely on you. I am 100% viewer supported. So, please help me to keep the Topher Project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my videos, you’re going to love my books about civil disobedience, about power, about government, and about what we need to do when our government oversteps its boundaries. You’ll also find my DVD documentary, as well as my t-shirts and hoodies in a range of designs, all available at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. And everything you buy is going to help me to keep the Topher Project going.

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