In this interview Mia Schlicht appeared on Credlin – Sky News Australia 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.
James Morrow:
Peta Credlin. Joining me now, our Sky News contributor, James Bolt, and research fellow at the Institute for Public Affairs, Mia Schlicht. Guys, everything you thought or had been told previously about eating apparently has been flipped on its head. The United States has just overhauled its food pyramid and finally decided to place protein and healthy fats over carbohydrates. But there was a very funny moment when US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was announcing the changes. Have a look at this.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:
We only released these earlier, two days earlier. I’m sorry.
Brooke Rollins:
Duck is also high in protein.
James Morrow:
I love that RFK’s ringtone is a duck. James Bolt, let me go to you first on this here. We all kind of knew instinctively that this whole idea that we should be eating tonnes of grains and carbohydrates wasn’t good, didn’t we?
James Bolt:
I do find it quite hard to trust people that have comical ringtones. So I’ve got a lot of conflicting emotions right here. But I’ll tell you what, I’ve been told literally everything is both good for me and can kill me. I mean, coffee is like Schrodinger’s as beverage. It’s both killing me and keeping me alive at the same time. Meat’s good, then it’s not good. Now carbohydrates are good and now sugar’s bad. I’ll tell you what, it always comes back to if you’re eating more calories than you’re exerting, that’s not a great thing if you want to keep fit. I’ll be sticking to that one.
James Morrow:
Mia, it’s interesting though, because of course that American food pyramid originally, which was so grain heavy, was the product of lobbying from the great lobby back in the Nixon administration. Is this what happens when politics starts to interfere with actually true expert science?
Mia Schlicht:
Well, I think that’s right. I think it’s quite interesting to see a number of people now kind of freak out. They’re in the zone of their whole lives. They’ve been told to trust the experts, do what the experts tell you, but now they don’t like who the experts are. They’re a bit stuck and they don’t know what to do. But look, I think this is a great call, good on the Trump administration. Not only are they pro octane, they’re also pro protein. People have got a finger on the poles. People want to be eating more steak, less baked beans. Unfortunately, here in Australia with the way our economy is going, we might be stuck on baked beans a little bit longer, but if Trump can get the economy under control in America and they can all afford more steak dinners, then good for them.
James Morrow:
Good for them. Absolutely. Hey, on another note that’s a little bit related actually because it’s about greenies and things like that. The shocking story out of Berlin where 45,000 households in Berlin have been left without power after a far left extremist group carried out an arson attack on high voltage cables near the Lichterfelde Power Station Southwest of the Capitol. James Bolt, this is obscene to me. It is freezing cold winter in Berlin. Tens of thousands of people have been left without power by, let’s call it what it is, a terrorist attack, and yet it’s getting no attention around the world. James Bolt, had a right wing group done something like this, we’d never hear the end of it.
James Bolt:
Yeah. I think the group that committed that attack put out a statement in which they said, “Well, we’re aiming it towards the wealthy suburbs.” And they apologised nicely to less wealthy people that would get caught up in it, but they said that it was a price they needed to pay to target the wealthy. What an absolute clear example of how the radical left view individual people. We are not individuals, we are not worthy of respect. We are all pawns in a class game and some people are going to have to be hurt if justice is to be served. But I’ll tell you this, if you are a radical and you are thinking of making it very, very hard for people to turn on their homes, do not do it as a free citizen, become a politician and get paid for it.
James Morrow:
Absolutely right. Mia, it is appalling though that we haven’t heard much about this in the rest of the world because it does seem to me that this is where the bias of the media comes in because on a certain level, we’ve seen it the way they cover climate protest. We’ve seen the way they adored Greta Thunberg. They kind of agree with this.
Mia Schlicht:
Well, that’s right. And you can just see how they hold Greta Thunberg up on this pedestal despite all the chaos she’s caused. And I think you’re right in saying that if this was a right group who caused trouble like this, it would be all over the media. It’d be front page even here of our ABC. But I do think this was some of the most dysfunctional political activism I have seen in a very, very long time. As James said, they came out and said basically that it wasn’t their intention to hurt any of the lower class that were going for the ruling class. And it just shows how these groups have no idea how the world actually works. When you dismantle the energy system, when you have an energy system that doesn’t work, the people that hurt the hardest and first is the working class. It’s not the rich.
And we’ve seen that here in Australia with our energy system that’s quickly crumbling before our eyes. It is working class families who are having to make the decision between heating and eating. It is our farming communities who are having their properties and their businesses destroyed all in the name of the renewables rollout. Those are the ones who are hurting first, and it’s political groups like this who are elitist and they’re completely out of touch.
James Morrow:
Well, and the thing is anybody who is not dirt poor, they hate, and it’s actually kind of refreshing to have them be honest about it. Hey, James, let me ask you about this real quick here. Labour has again fallen short of its housing targets with a new analysis saying Australia’s going to miss targets by more than 50,000 homes deepening the affordability crisis. Again, this just strikes me that why does this government keep insisting on pumping the country full of more and more people, most of them without the skills that we supposedly need in the face of a housing crisis and a social cohesion crisis?
James Bolt:
Yeah, that is an important part of it, but I swear this headline comes out every single month, maybe every six months, that whatever target labour has set for itself, it hasn’t built on housing. The reality is it is far too hard to build new houses in Australia and to build apartment blocks in cities. And until the regulation is wound back and until it’s easy to build, we are just going to be stuck in a loop where prospective home buyers like myself are just priced out of the market indefinitely.
James Morrow:
Yeah, I know, James, but if they’re going to keep building all these apartment blocks, I wish they didn’t have to be so ugly. James Bolt, Mia Schlicht, thank you so much for your time.
This transcript with Mia Schlicht talking on Credlin Sky News Australia from 8 January 2026 has been edited for clarity.
