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

If you wanted to undermine Australia, what would you do? I suggest you would start by making an attack on our nation's competitive advantages, the advantages that have made us one of the richest and most prosperous countries on the face of the planet. If you wanted to undermine Australia, the first place you would start would be coal. You would attack that magnificent rich black coal seam that runs down our eastern seaboard. It is a coal seam that has been a source of our competitive advantage and wealth creation for decades. You would demonise it. You would teach children in schools that using coal-fired power to generate electricity would create bad weather. You would show children pictures of coal-fired power stations with steam coming out of them, and you would tell them that it is carbon pollution.

If you wanted to undermine Australia, you would put in a series of policies that undermined the viability of our coal-fired power stations and gave commercial advantage to their competitors by subsidising them. And you would add the cost of those subsidies onto the price of that electricity. That's what you would do to undermine Australia. You would stand there with a straight face and you would say that coal is not economically viable as a source of electricity generation. While, at the very same time, across more than 50 countries, hundreds of new coal-fired power stations are under construction that will pay a premium for Australian coal.

You would also, if you wanted to undermine Australia, attack those that say that low-cost energy is important; you would attack them and you would vilify them. You would ridicule them as dinosaurs, and you would call them deniers, equating them to deniers of the Holocaust. You would also then say that it is cheaper to generate electricity from solar panels made in China, knowing that when you're talking price you're not comparing like-for-like products, because you cannot compare intermittent electricity generation with the price of dispatchable or baseload generation.

If you wanted to undermine Australia, once you had fixed our competitive advantage in energy generation, you would then go on and try and close down our coal exports. You would seek to block all new coalmines. You would tie those mines up with red and green tape, and tie them up for years and years in the courts so that those new coalmines wouldn't go on. And, at the very same time, you would bank and you would spend the billions of dollars in royalties that our existing coalmines own.

If you wanted to undermine Australia, after you had finished with coal you would move on to uranium. Australia has the world's largest known reserves of uranium. You would ban nuclear power in this country. You would abandon its development, even though that would make us a stand-out nation, as one of the 25 largest nations in the world. In the 25 largest and most powerful economies you would make our nation a stand-out as the only nation that bans nuclear power and doesn't use nuclear power for baseload power.

If you wanted to undermine Australia, you would demonise free markets and entrepreneurship. You would seek to divide Australians. You would run a phoney class war every day in question time, pitting one Australian against another. If you wanted to undermine Australia and divide Australians, you would also engage in identity politics, saying that everyone belongs to a special-interest group, and you would promote groupthink.

If you wanted to undermine Australia, you would peddle the myth and the lie that workers are worse off than they were 40 years ago. You wouldn't let people know that 40 years ago life expectancy in this country was almost 10 years less. Someone born today as opposed to 40 years ago has a different life expectancy of almost 10 years. You wouldn't let people know that someone living in Australia today has much greater opportunities to travel, both domestically and internationally. Someone in their 20s today, as compared to someone in their 20s 40 years ago, will have far greater opportunities to see so many more countries of the world.

You wouldn't let people know that over that 40 years there have been enormous improvements in communications. The facilities that I have on the iPhone that we take for granted today would have cost me upwards of $1 million 40 years ago. You would also not let people know about the enormous advances over the last 40 years in photography. I live in a bushfire-prone area. People tell me that one of the first things they do when a bushfire is approaching is to grab the family photos, because those photos are so valuable. Today, as compared to 40 years ago, someone will have hundreds, if not thousands, more photographs of themselves. They'll have them in colour, they'll be high quality and they'll cost a fraction of what they did 40 years ago.

They won't let you know that the cars that we drive today are not only cheaper but safer. To take an example of a new Toyota Camry: in 1995 it was $24,000; last year it was exactly the same price. But it was safer, more fuel efficient and more luxurious—yet it was the same price. If you compare that to average wages, 20 years ago that car cost 37 weeks wages for the average worker. Now it costs 16 weeks.

If you wanted to undermine Australia, you would idolise the likes of Marx, Lenin and Mao in our schools and universities. You would see that it was trendy to put their images on T-shirts, and you would never explain to our youth that their socialist ideology resulted in 100 million deaths last century, the greatest catastrophe in human history. If you wanted to undermine Australia, you would ensure that Western civilisation is not taught in our schools. You would demonise our past, our proud Australian history. You would make out that our forefathers were genocidal, misogynist racists. But, sadly, that's what we see. Those things that I went through, every single one of them—the things you would do if you wanted to undermine Australia—are the policies of the Labor Party and the Greens today.

We need to go back and we need to teach our children about our proud history and our past. We need to teach them about Western civilisation. We need to teach them about how the free market has lifted more people out of poverty than anything else that has been known in human history. We need to teach them that the wealth that we have in our nation today is not fixed. It did not come by fluke or by chance; it came through hard work and it came through the competitive advantages that our nation has.

The competitive advantages that that we have as a nation we must guard with everything that we have. We have surrendered them on energy. We have a Labor Party over there that wants to impose a 45 per cent emissions reduction target—completely absurd. We heard today from the business councils that that policy would be economically devastating. It would be a jobs killer. But that is what we face. We also face a Labor Party that wants to leave this nation with an uncompetitive rate of corporate tax. Whether you think the corporate tax rate should be higher or lower, we cannot go forward over the next decade with an uncompetitive rate of corporate tax. These are the things that we fight for on this side of the House. These are the things that I'm proud to stand in here as part of the coalition parties and fight for. (Time expired)