The media and Labor lied about Malcolm Roberts. Here are the four sentences they cut

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 under the title Chemtrails or Contrails? A Look at the Facts!, and published a full transcript of it on his own website at the same time. It runs 89 minutes. In it he sits down with a former Qantas captain, Graham Hood, to work through what people are actually seeing in the sky. Anyone can watch the whole thing, which is worth keeping in mind when reading what was written about it.

Captain Graham Hood flew for 53 years. He spent 32 of them as a Qantas captain, logged 36,000 flying hours, carried around six million passengers over 12 million miles, and by his own reckoning burned more than 100,000 tonnes of kerosene in the upper atmosphere. In September 2021 he walked away from that career rather than comply with Qantas’s COVID vaccine mandate, a fact The Australian itself records. He is not a man with a reason to protect the airlines, the regulator or the government.

In the video, Hood is talking about ordinary commercial airliners, the civil aircraft whose criss-crossing trails make the patterns people photograph from the ground and call chemtrails. This is his verdict on them:

“I have never flown one of these with a chemtrail switch in it. I’ve never seen a tank where chemicals would be put in it.”

In plain terms, 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.

The aircraft are not the only thing the coverage left out. Across those 89 minutes the two men take the chemtrails theory apart for their own audience, piece by piece. Roberts describes the public appeal he issued three years ago asking anyone in Australia to send him evidence of chemtrails, and what it produced. And the genuinely uncomfortable findings sit somewhere else entirely.

There is an Act of the New South Wales parliament that authorises silver iodide to be released into clouds, names the tracing agent that goes up alongside it, and provides that the operations may be carried out despite any other Act or law. There is a documented record, opened up by a United States Senate committee, of the American military running chemical and biological experiments on its own soldiers and civilians. Roberts raised both. Neither made the story.

Captain Graham Hood set the terms in the first five minutes

Hood opened the conversation by saying what he thought the real fight was, and it had nothing to do with vapour trails.

“The real enemy is out there. The real enemy is, let’s face it, we’re starting to see now a communist takeover of the world. That’s clear that that’s happening. And all these things are distractions and we’ve got to make sure we keep our eye on the ball.”

That is the video The Australian described as a senator embracing a conspiracy theory. It is an hour and a half of a veteran airline captain and a sitting senator telling their own audience that the chemtrails scare is a distraction, and to keep their eyes on what is actually being done to them.

Hood is not a blanket sceptic either. He says plainly that he believes weather engineering is real and that weather modification programs have been running for a long time. His argument is narrower and harder to dismiss: he spent half a century in the upper atmosphere, and what people are photographing is not it.

Roberts does not dismiss why people are frightened. He points to what governments did during COVID, the mandates and the coercion, and says trust was destroyed for good reason.

“Who wouldn’t be scared that when you see something in the sky, it’s not the government trying to pollute your lives?” he asks. “Who wouldn’t be?”

Then he spends the next hour and a half explaining why the evidence still is not there.

Malcolm Roberts is an engineer, not a bystander to the science

Roberts is no stranger to evidence either. Before the Senate he earned an honours degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Queensland and an MBA at the University of Chicago, then spent decades in the coal industry, rising from miner to general manager of what was then the largest underground mine in the country. The video is essentially an engineer and a pilot working through why the trails people photograph are water vapour and not poison.

The sentence The Australian left out

This is how the paper presented the senator’s words to its readers.

Read that and Roberts sounds like a man edging toward the theory. He is open to it, he has never denied it, and he thinks it is highly likely. Now here is the same passage as he actually said it, unbroken, from the transcript on his own website. The words in bold are the ones that did not appear.

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.” Hood produces an archive photograph taken by a tail gunner showing that the trails behind Second World War bombers came off the propeller tips and wingtips, not from spray nozzles. They explain that the widely shared photo of Angela Merkel beside rows of tanks is an Airbus ballast test rig filled with water, used to shift weight around the cabin during certification flights. The “chemtrail squadron” cockpit photos are pilots mucking about with stickers on hydraulic switches.

Hood also puts the practical question. Millions of people work in aviation worldwide, not just pilots but engineers, refuellers, fuel manufacturers, air traffic controllers and airside security. More than 95% of high-flying aircraft in Australian airspace are ordinary civilian airliners. If a secret fleet were spraying the country, where does it refuel, where does it land, who maintains it, and why has nobody walked out with the paperwork? 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.

Roberts’s answer to the coverage was to place it in a pattern. “First they came for Pauline. Then they came for Barnaby. Now it’s my turn,” he wrote on X, describing the reporting as “selective cherry picking and dishonest distortions by mainstream media to mislead Australians on behalf of their uniparty mates.”

What actually is sprayed over Australia, and the Act that allows it

Nobody reported this part, which is unfortunate, because it answers the question everyone actually has. Something is being discharged into Australian skies. It is not a secret. In New South Wales there is an Act of Parliament that names the chemicals.

The Snowy Mountains Cloud Seeding Act 2004 authorises Snowy Hydro Limited to carry out operations “designed to increase precipitation by the discharge of a seeding agent into passing clouds.” The statute names what goes up. Section 4A: “Silver iodide is an approved seeding agent.” Section 4B: “Indium sesquioxide is an approved tracing agent.” A tracer is released alongside the seeding agent so the operators can follow where it goes. Section 4C makes land-based aerosol generators the approved method and allows ministers to approve aerial discharge on application, which is precisely the distinction Roberts drew in the video between material that is flown and material fired from the ground.

Then comes section 7, headed “Application of other legislation.”

“Authorised cloud seeding operations may be carried out despite any other Act or law. The Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 does not apply to authorised cloud seeding operations.”

The section then spells out what that means in practice. Development consent is not required. The operations cannot be prohibited or restricted by any environmental planning instrument. No environment protection licence is needed under the Protection of the Environment Operations Act 1997. Stop work orders, interim protection orders and environment protection notices cannot be made or given so as to prevent or interfere with the seeding. The operations are deemed consistent with the management principles of any national park land they are carried out on. And section 9 closes the loop: compensation is not payable by the Crown arising directly or indirectly from the carrying out of authorised cloud seeding operations.

There are safeguards. They belong in an honest account, so here they are. Operations require an approved environmental management plan. Snowy Hydro must report to the relevant ministers and the Environment Protection Authority by 31 March each year, including monitoring of the agents’ environmental impact. The EPA reviews those reports. Ministers can suspend or terminate the authorisation if satisfied the operations are causing significant adverse environmental impact. But the architecture is unmistakable. Parliament wrote cloud seeding out of the state’s environmental assessment regime, placed it beyond stop work orders, and ruled out compensation. The Act also allows the operations to be carried out within or outside the Snowy water catchment.

Snowy Hydro ran the program across roughly 2,110 square kilometres, seeding only when precipitation was likely to fall as snow above 1,400 metres, a threshold written into section 4 of the Act itself. It began as a trial in 2004, became an ongoing operation in 2013, and independent evaluation found that in suitable conditions it lifted precipitation by an average of 14%, with no evidence of significant environmental harm or effects outside the target area.

In Tasmania it goes back much further. Hydro Tasmania has been cloud seeding since 1964, beginning in cooperation with the CSIRO, flying silver iodide over the Gordon, Great Lake, Upper Pieman, Mersey-Forth and Upper Derwent catchments between 1 May and 31 October.

Roberts was careful about this, and his office published its cloud seeding findings rather than sitting on them. He said seeding had been done in Tasmania and the Snowy, and that in the ACT it had been “at least talked about.” That distinction holds up. The ACT government does not conduct or authorise cloud seeding over Canberra. He also said some of it is flown and some is fired from ground-based generators, which matches the Act. A man supposedly lost to conspiracy theories was being more precise than most of the coverage about him.

Captain Hood explains how cloud seeding actually works, and why it mostly does not

Hood, who was nearly one of the pilots, explains the mechanism. In the late 1970s, as a young flyer in Tasmania, he was offered a job flying a light aircraft at low level, dropping silver iodide into cumulus cloud to make it rain over drought country. He did not get the job, but he knew the work.

The critical limit is that seeding cannot create weather. It can only persuade cloud that is already there to let go of its water. A particle of silver iodide is introduced into existing cloud as a nucleus, and roughly 4,000 microscopic water molecules bind to that speck until the droplet is finally heavy enough to fall. No cloud, nothing happens. The CSIRO has been doing this since the 1950s. Hood does not editorialise about whether that is a good thing. Whether it is right or wrong, or good or not, he says, is debatable. What is not up for debate is the mechanics. “Cloud seeding is not making cloud,” he says. “It’s getting existing cloud to drop the water.”

Which is why neither man is impressed by it. Their conclusion from the research was blunt: cloud seeding is expensive, most of the time it fails, and it is not very effective. When they recorded, Roberts noted that Snowy Hydro was exploring using it again. What happened next confirmed their verdict rather than his concern. In 2025 Snowy Hydro permanently ended its cloud seeding program, having decided that the escalating costs outweighed the benefits. The most sophisticated weather modification program in the country was switched off because it was not worth the money. It is a poor foundation for a secret global operation.

Roberts asked the public for evidence for three years and got none

On 13 September 2022, Roberts publicly invited anyone in Australia or anywhere else to send him evidence of chemtrails over this country. He repeated it on social media, and the request is still open. What came back, he says, was photographs of clouds, pictures of storms, patent applications and grant submissions, none of which show anyone putting anything into an aircraft.

He asked the parliamentary library to research it. It found nothing. “If the parliamentary library can’t find it, it’s not there,” he says, noting the library is independent of government. He checked national water quality monitoring for any chemical spike, across every state and region, and found only normal background traces.

One detail says more about how Roberts operates than anything else in the video. CASA is the agency that would have to issue permits for any such spraying. Roberts does not trust it. But asked whether the regulator was lying to him in Senate estimates, he said he would not make that accusation without proof, and would not make it even under parliamentary privilege, where he could say it with total legal immunity. A senator who wanted a headline had one available and refused to take it.

Nor is cloud seeding the only thing going into Australian air, and Roberts is careful to separate the categories. Crop dusters spread insecticide and fertiliser, and have done for generations. During the Second World War the British and American air forces dropped aluminium chaff to confuse enemy radar, which he points out is a metal rather than a chemical. And helicopters are spraying across south-east Queensland under the fire ant program, which he does not accept is as harmless as the name suggests. “They’re not baiting fire ants,” he says. “They’re spreading toxic pesticides, insecticides around.” He objects to it, says he is doing what he can to stop it, and calls it one more case of government showing it cannot be trusted. None of it is geoengineering. All of it is real, documented and on the public record, and none of it is a secret plan to poison the population from a passenger jet.

Has the US really run experiments on people? Yes, and the files are public

Strip away the framing and there is one factual claim Roberts genuinely makes about the United States. He says the American military has a history of running experiments on people with drugs and chemicals. That part is true, and the American government itself has confirmed it.

The CIA’s MKUltra program dosed people with LSD, some of them without their knowledge, and an army scientist named Frank Olson died in 1953 after being covertly drugged. In 1950 the US Navy sprayed bacteria over San Francisco to test how a biological attack would spread, and a local man later died in the outbreak. At Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland the army exposed around 7,000 soldiers to nerve agents and other chemicals over nearly three decades. All of it was dragged into the open by a United States Senate committee in 1975.

So Roberts is on solid ground when he says the US military has done this in the past. Where he stops matters just as much. He does not say airliners over Australia are spraying anything today, and about this country he says the opposite. The one former US Air Force whistleblower he found credible, a woman who worked in procurement at a defence facility, told him she doubted commercial aircraft were involved. And the researcher his video leans on, Jim Lee, took his findings to the US Congress by doing the unglamorous thing: he had kerosene soot analysed, found trace aluminium, barium and strontium in ordinary untreated jet fuel, and argued that today’s problem is real pollution rather than a spraying program. Roberts says that finding deserves proper research.

Both men also welcome the American move to investigate the question properly. When it was raised that US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr intended to look into the chemtrail phenomenon, Hood’s response was that it was brilliant, because at last there would be real evidence either way. Neither man is hiding from scrutiny. They are asking for it.

There is one atmospheric effect they do not dispute. With around 38 million commercial flights a year burning kerosene at altitude, Hood accepts that aircraft are producing cirrus cloud in bulk and are changing conditions in the upper atmosphere. That is a real issue about pollution and volume. It is simply not the same claim as a covert spraying program.

What Malcolm Roberts actually posts about

Roberts’s own feed, across recent weeks and months, has been about things that are harder to wave away.

He pointed to the OECD, which found Australians have suffered the sharpest fall in living standards in the developed world, with real household income per person down more than 8% since 2022.

He noted that Mr Albanese signed a deal on 9 July to sell Australian uranium to India for its nuclear power program, while Labor still refuses to have the same conversation about nuclear energy at home.

He flagged a government scheme offering up to $20,000 for people from “diverse and underrepresented groups” to fly to the COP31 climate summit, funded by taxpayers during a cost-of-living squeeze.

And he shared the news that a New South Wales wind farm had killed 20 wedge-tailed eagles in 18 months, a reminder that the green transition carries an environmental cost of its own. These are mainland wedge-tailed eagles rather than the endangered Tasmanian bird, but 20 dead raptors at a single site in a year and a half is not a rounding error.

In the video itself he lists what he thinks people should be angry about instead: the UN Lima declaration and what it did to Australian manufacturing, the Kyoto protocol and the energy sector, the Paris agreement and net zero. Those are the fights he says get abandoned every time his own supporters send him another photograph of a cloud.

Why now, and why not the Liberals

There is a reason the scrutiny arrived when it did. One Nation has spent 2026 at or near the top of the national primary vote. Our poll tracker has Roy Morgan putting it on 31.5% in June and on 28% on 13 July, ahead of Labor on 27.5%, while both Newspoll and YouGov had the Coalition down at 17%. The most recent national figures, from Resolve on 19 July, have One Nation on 26%, Labor on 28% and the Coalition on 23%.

Then there is Victoria. On 13 July RedBridge polled 6,500 Victorians for the Victorian Trades Hall, the peak union body in the state, and found One Nation leading on 27%, a point clear of the Coalition and Labor, who were tied on 26. That is the most progressive state in the country, in a poll paid for by the union movement, and One Nation has not yet named its candidates for the election on 29 November. A party polling first draws attention a party polling at 4% never did.

Pauline Hanson has made the same argument. “Supporters are seeing straight through the lies and distortions that have been employed against One Nation over the past month by the media and political establishment,” she wrote, describing it as “desperate tactics by a desperate establishment terrified by the growth of a party pursuing common sense policies.”

The Coalition has had its own rough year, with a leadership spill and a record-low vote, so this is not a claim that Liberal troubles go unreported. It is a narrower point about tone. When a Coalition MP stumbles, it tends to be written up as a policy story. When a One Nation MP does, it tends to be written up as evidence of character. Roberts, an honours engineer who spent 89 minutes demanding evidence, got the second treatment.

An 89-minute video became an eight-second headline the moment One Nation started polling ahead of the Coalition. The video is still online, and so is the transcript. Anyone can go and watch a senator and a 36,000-hour airline captain spend an hour and a half telling people to stop believing something, and then read the write-up that says he believes it.