The High Court’s ruling on a major coal mine expansion in NSW, on the basis of Scope 3 emissions, is cause for alarm.

A 3-2 majority held that the NSW Independent Planning Commission failed its statutory duty under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act to consider whether conditions should be imposed to minimise greenhouse gas emissions ‘to the greatest extent practicable’, including Scope 3. These are the downstream emissions generated when the countries that buy our coal burn it.

Australian thermal coal is high-quality bituminous, with higher energy content and generally better plant efficiency than much of the sub-bituminous material sold by competitors, yet the court required decision-makers to grapple with the overseas combustion that makes up roughly 98 per cent of the project’s emissions.

The concept of Scope 3 draws on the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the reporting norms outlined by the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement. The Coalition signed Australia up to the UN’s latest brain fart and the Labor government is loving this because it fits with their ideological agenda. Like everything to do with the UN, this is going to cost us big time.

Despite the best of intentions outlined by Angus Taylor at the weekend’s CPAC event, can Australians really trust the Liberal Party? After all, much of what they are saying now is the stuff they should have actioned years ago when they were in government. Hanson put it bluntly at the same event. The Liberals signed us up to Paris and Net Zero, so why would we trust them to get us out of it?

It’s not just about Taylor. The Liberal Party’s internal political stoush continues unabated.

Former treasurer Josh Frydenberg is re-establishing his presence in the mainstream media. Andrew Hastie has blown any chance of leadership, and the Wets want to hang their hat on somebody other than Taylor. Frydenberg may just be their man.

It is difficult to put too much blame on Nationals leader Matt Canavan. If it wasn’t for the Nats, the Libs would still be championing Net Zero.

Pauline Hanson used this year’s CPAC event to announce that a One Nation government would call a Royal Commission into Net Zero. It’s a great headline, but royal commissions have become par for the course. Several times now new governments have called royal commissions or inquiries into the actions of previous governments.

For all the fanfare, royal commissions haven’t achieved much in recent years. The imprisonment and later exoneration of Cardinal George Pell is a metaphor for the politicised nature of what was previously an opportunity for Parliament, and not just the government, to rally around a well-resourced inquiry leading to recommendations to address a national problem. These days, the terms of reference are politicised and cleverly designed to achieve a political rather than a policy outcome.

Hanson’s pitch was more pointed. She wants to drag every corrupt contract into the open and to expose the dirty arrangements and the decisions that left power bills higher. Even so, an inquiry alone will not do the job. What matters is the accompanying legislative commitment to scrap Net Zero, dump Scope 3 rules, and exit the Paris Agreement. One Nation NSW has already flagged an omnibus bill to do exactly that.

Pauline Hanson has long called for an audit of the international treaties Australia has signed up to and the impact these treaties have on our sovereign capabilities. This is not just a limp throwaway line. I have seen it first-hand.

After researching the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, the Women, Peace, and Security agenda, in my academic days, I have seen how ‘cottage industries’ develop around quaint ideas that drive ideological agendas in our political institutions. Adopting a gendered perspective in military and peacekeeping operations makes a good deal of sense. But when the cottage industry adopts the framework as a vehicle for driving home identity politics, the good intentions of the original principles go sour.

This is exactly what happened to the guiding principles of the UN. Eleanor Roosevelt was heavily involved in drafting the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These days, identity politics would have it that the declaration is a form of white-privilege thinking that adopts a Western, individualistic world view. Its antagonists argue that the UN Declaration is based on a triumphal Western universalism that isn’t shared by the relativists of non-Western cultures.

Probably the best way to explain the difference is to refer to unoppressed women who choose to wear a bikini as ‘uncovered meat’, while women covered head to toe in religious garb are somehow expressing their unoppressed faith.

The UN was an important mechanism in defeating the Axis powers during the second world war and in rebuilding Europe in its aftermath. The world order it created is still subject to the whims of the five permanent members of the Security Council.

In the other folds of the UN system, however, the third world has let loose with its relativist rot while trampling all over the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s nuts that Australia should contribute to an organisation that has not only lost its way but has become a vehicle for the global left’s destructive ideology.

The major parties are unlikely to withdraw Australia from the UN. They are also unlikely to audit the international treaties Australia has signed up to. What we are facing was previously regarded as a ‘democratic deficit’ by the left. In effect, you vote for a government that is a puppet of a supra-state organisation. Voters do not get to choose the puppet master.

Australia is now in such a position. You vote for a government that then implements the rules of an unelected body. When these rules are no longer based on the principles of universal human rights, but relativist ideology designed to destroy liberal democracy from within, then we don’t need a bar of it.

Which brings me to the obvious conclusion. Only One Nation has the courage to test the efficacy of the treaties we have signed with the UN. Not only that, but until proven otherwise, One Nation appears willing to do what they say.

Our political elites are incapable of understanding they have lost our trust by talking out of both sides of their mouths for too long. Most punters doubt the major parties can change their default positions.

Can One Nation save us from the UN? Perhaps. But what we can tell from the empirical evidence is that the Uniparty will keep doing what it always does, and that has nothing to do with the needs, wants, and desires of ordinary Australians.

Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you’d like to support his writing, please shout him a drink over at Donorbox.

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