Malcolm Roberts

Malcolm Ieuan Roberts (born 3 May 1955) is an Australian politician.

Roberts was born on 3 May 1955 in Disergarh, West Bengal, India.

He is the son of Ieuan Roberts, a Welsh coal miner, later a coal mine manager and then Queensland's chief inspector of mines, and Ethel Jago, from rural Queensland.

His childhood home in India was staffed with servants, and as a child, Roberts built a miniature coalmine in the yard of his home.

Roberts graduated from the University of Queensland with Bachelor of Engineering (Honours).

He also has an MBA from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

In 1977, Roberts began work as a coal miner.

During this time, until 1979, he worked in this role at five different mines across Australia before becoming a mining engineer.

From 1982 to 1988, Roberts worked as a manager for Coal & Allied at West Wallsend.

An Australian court found that Roberts had wrongly sought a $30,000 tax deduction for the costs of the MBA spent between 1988 and 1990.

The mine proved to be unprofitable due to its location, leading to its sale in 1988, at which time Roberts took a redundancy package.

After completing an MBA, Roberts was appointed general manager at the Gordonstone coal mine in Queensland, the largest underground mine in Australia.

Roberts left the role three years later.

According to Roberts, he resigned due to a lack of support during an industrial dispute, but others have suggested that he was let go after cost overruns at the mine.

With his wife, in 1994 he established a management consultancy, Catalyst For Corporate Performance, and became involved in Eastern and alternative self-help techniques including meditation.

Roberts served as chairman of the board of the Brisbane Montessori School from 1999 until 2003 and served voluntarily on the advisory board (as a parent representative member) of the International Montessori Council from 2000 until 2008.

Timothy Seldin, chairman of the Montessori Foundation, stated that Roberts' views "are not representative of Dr Montessori's global vision, and do not reflect the views of the Montessori Foundation or the International Montessori Council".

From 2006 until his election to the Senate, Roberts was a full-time political activist, speaking at rallies against the Labor Government's carbon tax.

He sent hundreds of emails to political, scientific and media figures on the topic.

He met politicians, had universities launch academic inquiries into climate scientists and sent legal letters demanding the resignation of government ministers.

He is the leader of the Galileo Movement, established in 2011.

A 2011 Scientific American article on the group stated that it "recycles many of the same straw man arguments and distortions about the science that other groups have previously employed".

He also served in the Senate from 2016 to 2017.

Roberts studied engineering at the University of Queensland.

He was a mining engineer before entering politics, working in the Australian coal industry.

He worked as general manager of the Gordonstone coal mine in central Queensland.

Roberts was elected to the Senate at the 2016 federal election, running second in One Nation's ticket in Queensland behind party leader Pauline Hanson.

Thereafter, he worked as an engineer and general manager for companies such as Peabody Coal Company, Consolidation Coal Company and Atlantic Richfield, though he had not held paid employment for eight years prior to his election in 2016.

Roberts was elected to the Senate at the 2016 Australian federal election, running in second place on One Nation's ticket in Queensland, behind party leader Pauline Hanson.

However, he was subsequently found to be ineligible for election.

He received 77 first-preference votes in that election, the lowest number ever for a member of the federal parliament.

In 2017, during the Australian parliamentary eligibility crisis, he was disqualified from parliament for holding British citizenship by descent in breach of section 44 of the constitution.

Following the 2017 resignations of Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters due to dual citizenship and Matt Canavan's resignation from the Cabinet for similar reasons, Roberts' place of birth and citizenship was scrutinised by the media.

Roberts released a statutory declaration to the effect that he is only an Australian citizen, despite birth records showing that he had previously been identified as a British national.

A spokesperson for Roberts stated that Roberts was "choosing to believe that he was never British".

He is a member of One Nation and has been a Senator for Queensland since 2019.

He was re-elected to the Senate at the 2019 election as One Nation's lead candidate in Queensland.

Roberts is a conservative known for his climate change denial, and has been a proponent of fringe global warming conspiracy theories.

Prior to his election to the Senate he founded the Galileo Movement to lobby against the Gillard government's carbon pricing legislation.

He has also been associated with anti-globalism and opposition to the United Nations.