The media and Labor lied about Malcolm Roberts. By One News.
Malcolm Roberts spent 89 minutes telling his own supporters that there is no evidence of chemtrails in Australia, and that chasing them is a distraction. The Australian quoted from that video on Wednesday and told its readers the One Nation senator had “embraced the chemtrails conspiracy theory.”
Chemtrails is the belief that the white trails behind aircraft are chemicals sprayed deliberately on the population rather than ordinary condensation. Roberts does not hold it. He says so repeatedly across the video, to an audience that did not want to hear it, and he published the full transcript on his own website. On the strength of the coverage, the Prime Minister has since said his views make him unfit to sit in the Senate.
The video was never hidden. Roberts posted it to his own YouTube channel on 10 July 2025 …
The conversation:
[Roberts] down with a former Qantas captain, Graham Hood … Across a career at the controls of those jets there was no switch in the cockpit to release chemicals, and no tank fitted anywhere on board to hold them. It is an eyewitness account from a man who would have had to be one of the people doing it. …
Here is what Roberts said in the interview:
“So many people ridicule the notion of chemtrails in Australia,” he said. “I don’t ridicule the idea. I’m open to there being chemtrails in Australia.
“I have never denied it.
“I won’t say there are chemtrails in Australia because I haven’t seen evidence for it. So, I won’t say there are any. I won’t say there are some. But I just don’t know.
“And I think it’s likely, highly likely, that the USA military are doing trials on these things.”
To aid his argument, Senator Roberts asserted that the US military has a history of conducting “inhuman experiments with drugs and chemicals” that had “killed army people and army soldiers in America”.
When Jack Quail in The Australian quoted Roberts, he omitted the part in red above, where Roberts denied chemtrails but couldn’t rule them out because he didn’t know for sure (obviously, no one does). Without the bit in red, Roberts sounds like a man edging toward the a crazy fringe theory — which fits in with the picture of Roberts and One Nation that The Australian has been painting in the last few weeks.
The impression given by The Australian’s article — without ever quite saying so directly — is that Roberts believes “a debunked conspiracy theory which posits that deadly toxins are being released into the atmosphere as part of a secret global depopulation plan.” But no, Roberts was debunking the theory for his followers.
Four sentences are missing from the published version, and they do not sit just anywhere. They sit precisely between “I have never denied it” and “And I think it’s likely, highly likely.” They are the four sentences in which the senator says he has not seen evidence, will not claim it either way, and does not know.
The paper ran the two halves as consecutive paragraphs, with no ellipsis and no other mark to show that anything had been taken out between them. What was taken out was the part where he says he cannot support the claim.
And here is his own summary, from later in the same recording:
“There’s no evidence to support chemtrails in Australia. My office and I cannot find any evidence of chemtrails or geoengineering in our country.”
The rest of the video is Roberts pulling apart the “evidence” his own supporters send him. He calls the popular chemtrails film The Dimming “just crap.” …
Watch the video and you come away thinking Roberts talked people out of chemtrails. Read the headline and you would think he had signed up to them.
The establishment lies constantly about climate skeptics. Among the lies told about me, the ABC came to our house and interviewed Joanne and me for a program in 2013 called “I can change your mind“. We took the precaution of filming them interviewing us. Sure enough, they broadcast deceptive propaganda. They had me saying a sentence that they constructed from two different things in the interview, an hour apart, spliced together — to make me appear to say something stupid that I disagree with and never said. All caught on camera. Which we posted on the web, along with a full explanation of the context, here.