Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's now clear that after this week's Queensland state election Labor will not be able to govern alone. Their only, slim, chance lies in a coalition with the Greens. But, unlike the major parties, the Greens face no real scrutiny of their policies. Most voters know the public image of the Greens—that is, they are focused on climate policy. However, without proper scrutiny it is difficult for those same voters to be fully informed about the ruinous economic and social policies that lie beneath this so-called warm and fuzzy propaganda. For most Queenslanders, the Greens' full vision for our state is an economic wasteland of subsidence handouts, crime and poorly run state owned businesses—for everything—which would disincentivise small business and be fundamentally unacceptable.

At the last federal election, Queenslanders totally rejected the Labor Party's high-taxing agenda. However, if you thought Labor's $387 billion worth of new taxes was bad enough, just take a look at the Greens. The Greens openly admit that their so-called plan for economic recovery is to impose—this is just in Queensland—$67 billion in new taxes in just four years. That's $13,400 in new taxes for every man, woman and child in Queensland. The Greens would literally quadruple the rate of some taxes in Queensland and leave our economy in tatters. They would impose huge new taxes on resources, Queensland's biggest export, when we have never needed the export income as much as we do now. They would impose a big new tax on the banks, when small businesses are crying out for loans. They would impose a whopping 75 per cent developer tax on the construction industry during an economic crisis when hundreds of thousands of construction jobs are on the line, particularly on the Sunshine Coast. What do Queenslanders supposedly get for these vast new taxes? Apparently we'll get 78,000 new jobs and a wind turbine factory. The Greens intend to spend more than $850,000 of Queensland taxpayers' money on every job created, while devastating two of the state's most important industries and choking finance for the rest of us.

I would ask anyone on the Sunshine Coast, and indeed across Queensland, still considering voting for this dystopian vision of unemployment and economic collapse to look deeper into the Greens' policy proposals. On law and order, the Greens want to legalise public drunkenness and dangerous drugs in Queensland, ban young offenders from being charged with criminal offences no matter how serious their crimes, and scrap many of our state's prisons. Does this sound like a Queensland that you want to live in?

At a federal level—and, let's face it, they take their leadership across the board—the Greens have opposed the federal government's security legislation on nearly every occasion that cognate legislation has come before this place. It's the same legislation that has kept this country safe for several decades. They want to ditch the ANZUS alliance and cut military spending to boost the aid budget, at a time of the greatest geopolitical insecurity since World War II. They want to introduce a universal basic income, estimated to cost some $400 billion a year.

The individual candidates standing in electorates on the Sunshine Coast illustrate very well what lies behind the propaganda locally. Like his colleagues across the region, the Greens candidate for Glasshouse, Andrew McLean, would end dispatchable power generation in the Queensland electricity grid within 10 years, resulting in inevitable blackouts across the state. The Greens candidate for Caloundra, Raelene Ellis, is campaigning to prevent the state government investing in Bells Creek arterial. She wants to prevent the construction of this desperately needed, congestion-busting road which many of us have been fighting now for many years. This is the sort of stuff that the Greens are all about: debilitating taxes, industry destroyed, criminals set free, the government in control of our lives—and all for a free lunch. It's no exaggeration to say that a Labor-Greens coalition would be a disaster for everyone in Queensland.

House adjourned at 20:00

See this speech in context