Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I feel as though I should make some response to that comment but I think it was just so disgraceful that I am going to let it go. But I would like to mention some of the matters that the member for Kingsford Smith raised. He talked about wanting to spend more money on foreign aid. That is very nice, but where is this money going to come from? If Labor has these wonderful plans and these wonderful ideas to spend more money on foreign aid, where is the money going to come from? What programs are you going to cut, what schools are going to go with less, what hospitals will go with less, what aged-care centres will go with less so we can afford more money for foreign aid? The money has to come from somewhere. Or is the alternative plan simply to borrow more money? Is the plan to borrow more money from overseas to loan it back overseas in the form of foreign aid? If we are going to come into this parliament and be fair dinkum, if we are going to complain about cuts to budgets and things, we must say where the money is coming from.

When it comes to foreign aid, there is a quote from a guy called Bono that sings in some band called U2. His quote is—I think this is worth members of the Labor Party noting—'Commerce, entrepreneurial capitalism, takes more people out of poverty than aid.' That is not a comment from the member for Goldstein or a comment from me; that is a quote from Bono, the lead singer of U2. We see it time and time again—the best antidote to poverty is free markets, free trade and capitalism. That is what history shows to us. During the last 20 years we have seen one billion people lifted out of poverty across the world not through foreign aid but through capitalism and free markets, and we should say that unashamedly.

But we do have areas of poverty in this country. We need to all work together to try and raise people out of poverty, and the best way to do that is to increase wealth, to create wealth in our society, because before you can distribute wealth you have to create it. Sadly, what we see from so many policies on the Labor side and on the Green side is that they destroy wealth. If you destroy wealth, you have less to distribute, and the people that are harmed the most are those that we wish to help the most.

One area where we see this is in South Australia. South Australia, perhaps coincidentally with the highest renewable energy target in the country, has the highest electricity prices in the country. What does that lead to? It also has the highest proportion of customers that have had their electricity cut off. If you want to put people in poverty, I cannot think of anything worse than a family having their electricity cut off—to have it disconnected so you cannot cook your dinner on the stove at night, you cannot turn the heater on when it is cold in winter, you cannot have a hot shower in the morning and, yet we have policies from Labor governments that are increasing their costs of electricity in this country, pushing people into energy poverty, and we are seeing people having their electricity cut.

This is unacceptable. And, what do we see from the Labor Party? Instead of learning from the disaster that is the South Australian economy, instead of learning from where we see a record number of Australians having their electricity cut off—South Australia, the highest number electricity disconnections—instead of learning from that, what do we see? We see the Labor Party, not only wanting to copy South Australia's renewable energy target, but increasing it. Renewable energy is important but it cannot be done at the expense of the poor and those less well off in our society that will pay the ultimate thing when they have their electricity cut off. I thank the member for Goldstein for this motion. Poverty is a serious issue which we should take seriously in this country. (Time expired)

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