In this interview Peter Ridd appeared on 3AW Mornings with Tom Elliott to discuss the IPA’s research on Net Zero.
All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.
Below is a transcript of the interview.
Tom Elliott:
Okay, so when I read this this morning, I really was shocked. The Australian Human Rights Commission says the science has settled on climate change and that climate misinformation requires regulation, otherwise the planet will cook and we’ll all be dead. My next guest, a few years ago had a different opinion on the health of the Great Barrier Reef. He’s a physicist, author, and former professor at James Cook University. Peter Ridd, good morning.
Peter Ridd:
Morning.
Tom Elliott:
Now, I’ve got that right, haven’t I? The so-called settled science said the reef was dying or dead, and you said actually it’s quite healthy. And did you lose your job for that?
Peter Ridd:
Yeah, I lost my job for that and actually was then proven correct, because then over the next few years the amount of coral on the Great Barrier Reef doubled. Because with a cyclone you can lose a lot of coral, and then the last five years, in fact, we’ve had more coral on the Great Barrier Reef than in the previous 35 years since records began. But you see that is disinformation according to the Australian Human Rights-
Tom Elliott:
So is that what the Human Rights Commission is saying, that you cannot have a different point of view, and that if you do, you need to be regulated?
Peter Ridd:
To be fair, they did put in a few caveats about free speech, but the problem is, they always do. These organisations say, “Oh, we value free speech,” and then there’s a great big “but,” and then all the caveats come out. Essentially, what’s happening here is that the Greens and Labour have got an inquiry and the Senate going, where they seem to want to bring in controls on misinformation. They claim that people like me are being paid by big oil. They literally do. I was accused of that in a previous Senate inquiry, despite the fact that I’ve lost my job and it was a bit of a freedom moment actually. But it costs me dearly. And I can guarantee you big oil never rings me up.
So they’re obviously running scared. They can see that they’re going to have to introduce legislation because people are not buying it. If you look at the opinion polls that are run by the Institute of Public Affairs, the average person is only prepared to pay $2 a week for net-zero to mitigate carbon emissions, and they don’t know that they’re already probably paying somewhere around $1,000, $1,500 per family in taxation and all the rest of it for net-zero. Once all this gets out, it’s all over, red rover, and they’re trying to clamp down on people like me. It’s their only solution.
Tom Elliott:
Well, this is the thing. For example, when Darwin wrote his theory of evolution, the Church was horrified because God had created all the creatures and the animals and the people, and they were just plunked on the earth a few thousand years ago and that’s all there was to know about it. And it was only because as an observant scientist, he said, look, I think there’s a different explanation here. The Catholic Church used to try people for heresy for saying that the earth went around the sun instead of the other way around. Can anybody really say that the science is settled on anything?
Peter Ridd:
Not totally. There’s things like Newton’s laws of motion and laws of thermodynamics. I’m a physicist. We know pretty well that these are right within certain amounts of uncertainty. But even there you’ve got to say, well, somebody like Einstein came along and said, well, actually they weren’t right in various situations. But then you have things like climate change, which is diabolically complicated. It’s not like, well, let’s have a look to see whether the earth’s going around the sun, or vice versa. This is really complicated. We’ve had massive swings of climate in the past, which we completely do not understand. So yes, there is a place for people to have different opinions on something which is not just unsettled, but there’s huge areas where we don’t have a clue. We don’t have a clue about a lot of what happens in clouds, the way it affects sunlight coming in and infrared radiation going up. This is all complicated stuff.
And so the idea that a government authority is going to regulate what somebody like me is going to say, is an absolute joke. But it shows they are getting desperate. I actually almost want to encourage them to do it, because me being fired from a university made me go from being a nothing to having actually a voice and people are starting to listen to me. There is nothing like being censored to get people angry.
Tom Elliott:
Yeah. Well, I agree. Because I look back at some of the things I’ve said about all sorts of issues, and that’s what we do every day for three-and-a-half hours on this programme. And it seems like the Human Rights Commission will probably want to silence me or regulate me for a whole variety of different issues. Okay, so where does it go now? The Parliament read your submission and the Human Rights Submission and various other submissions, and then does what?
Peter Ridd:
Well, it’s of course the Parliament is completely dominated by Labour and the Greens, so they’ll be able to do exactly what they want. My prediction is there will be legislation which will try to control social media companies. But even you, yeah, you will certainly be caught up in this net, and if you break the law, who knows. If you keep on doing it, you’re going to have to go to jail. What I will be doing is, I’m going to start talking in code when this legislation very likely comes in. So instead of talking about the Great Barrier Reef, I’m going to be talking about the grass in my garden. There’s got record amounts of grass in my garden. We’re going to all have to go underground. It’s going to be rather a lot of fun if they actually go to do this. Hopefully they will bottle out and realise it’s a crazy idea, but I’m not terribly hopeful.
Tom Elliott:
Because I remember, I think it was other 2005 or 2010, some climate scientists said there will be no more snow on the Australian Alps by 2020. And this year we’ve had, I mean not the absolute best season ever, we’ve had one of the better seasons in recent memory, and there’s still plenty of snow as you and I are talking.
Peter Ridd:
And the same scientists said that the dam would never fill, and then within a couple years we had the worst floods in Queensland in Brisbane for half a century. So yes, there’s been prediction after prediction after prediction by these so-called experts, which are on the other side of the argument to me which have been proven to be wrong, and yet this is what happened. For example, for me, a whole group of people said that a particular reef up here on the Great Barrier had no coral on it. So I sent my guys out to check out because it sounded a little bit strange. We were able to find there was huge amounts of coral on this particular reef. And by the way, when I then reported that, I got into trouble. This was the precursor event before I was ultimately fired. So you’ve got on the other side they make mistake after mistake after mistake, and I certainly don’t call for them to be censored. But the other way round certainly happens.
Tom Elliott:
Yeah. Just as I recall, you were fired for not being collegiate enough, which is sort of academic speak for saying you didn’t agree with the others. Is that right?
Peter Ridd:
No, that’s wrong. That’s what’s reported in The Guardian and all the rest of it. I was fired after saying there was a lack of quality assurance in the scientific institution, which made their work untrustworthy. I didn’t say that they were wrong, they just didn’t have the quality assurance.
Tom Elliott:
But to plain-speaking people, you-
Peter Ridd:
I’m basically saying their work is complete rubbish. And that by the way, is not collegiate, is it? It’s not a very nice thing to say to them. But in fact, the university got rid of me because of what I said and also because I broke their censorship. They said, “You are not allowed to talk about the action that we are taking against you, this dismissal action against you. And if you do, then maybe you can be fired.”
Tom Elliott:
And you got fired.
Peter Ridd:
And I said, “No. To hell with that. I’m going out. If I get fired, I’m going to get fired.” What then happened is the High Court agreed that the university had no right to tell me not to talk about these problems, that my colleagues were untrustworthy. I had a right to be uncollegial. I actually had a right to be uncollegial. But by the letter of my contract, the university had the right to tell me to shut up about their essentially unlawful action.
Tom Elliott:
All right, thank you for your time. Peter Ridd, physicist and former professor at James Cook University. And what he just described will soon become the norm if the Human Rights-
This transcript of Peter Ridd on 3AW Mornings with Tom Elliott from 24 September 2025 has been edited for clarity.
