Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I retract the word 'lie'. They wilfully sought to deceive ordinary Aussies in a campaign in a desperate attempt to grab power from the Liberals. Labor misrepresented 'Mediscare' and they are now misrepresenting the effects of this legislation. How despicable! How contemptible! Complete disregard and disrespect for the people of Australia and for this parliament. Labor's hypocrisy is just breathtaking.

The great Ben Chifley and John Curtin must truly be turning in their graves. If they were alive today, I have no doubt that Ben Chifley and John Curtin would be One Nation leaders. They would know that Pauline Hanson's One Nation is the party that stands up for the rights of proud Australian workers. Ben Chifley and John Curtin would not sell out workers for political kickbacks like the Leader of the Opposition did. They would not sell out their own workers' jobs in mining, forestry and energy and today's so-called Labor Party has done. They would know where the light on the hill was. They would know the ALP have extinguished that light and plunged states like South Australia into darkness. Even the name ALP applied to the rabble of corrupt union apparatchiks and crypto-Marxists who fill the opposition benches would be an affront to Ben Chifley and John Curtin, those champions of the nationalist working class. No wonder they removed the letter 'u' from their latter day party name; they were no longer a labour party and they did not want a real worker to sue them.

I can just imagine what Ben Chifley and John Curtin would have to say to those opposite right now. They would be absolutely appalled. I can just imagine the great Ben Chifley thundering his opposition to Labor and their anti-Semitic Greens partners, fellow travellers in this chamber. Can you imagine what a One Nation Senator John Curtin would have to say to the leader of the Labor Party here in this chamber? What would he have to say to Senator Wong? He would be shocked and ashamed that the likes of Senator Wong pretend to lead the party that he used to represent and sneer at the honest Aussie workers her party should be defending.

However, in truth not absolutely everything that those opposite have raised here is wrong, and this is to be expected. Despite the great hypocrisy of the current opposition leadership, its ideological bankruptcy and its extraordinary irrationality, right thinking may still not be beyond them. It is said that a baby, given enough time, will eventually recite the Gettysburg address. Or perhaps more prosaically, we know that even a stopped clock gets the time right twice a day. So we see that this is where Labor's truth is to be found these days—in the indubitable twice-a-day wisdom of the stopped clock. I note that, in a rare moment of clarity, an opposition senator observed that the budget measures proposed in this bill are very small savings compared with what could be generated if foreign multinationals paid their fair share of tax here in Australia. Well, honourable senators may be surprised to hear that One Nation could not agree more. This is why I raised this issue in my first speech six months ago and why our leader brought on the debate yesterday on multinational taxation.

Labor is, of course, a late convert to catching up with multinational tax dodgers. They recently had six years in government, which they spent like drunken sailors, but failed to even consider tackling this issue that is vital to families' cost of living. Contrary to the conclusion of my Labor colleagues, we do not consider fair taxation of multinationals to be an argument against the government's legislation. In fact, to conclude this actually makes no sense at all. Yes, foreign multinationals need to pay a fair share of tax here. We agree; and, unlike the Labor-Greens junta and the Liberal government, we intend to take steps to ensure that they do. However, these future increases in revenue are not an argument against taking responsible and long overdue steps to rein in the budget deficit now—'as well as, not instead of' should be our motto here.

But perhaps the biggest problem with this legislation is that the government's ambitions to rein in debt and overspending are far too modest. There are many areas outside social services that we have identified and will pursue in the months ahead. Perhaps because the government continues to pander to Labor, to a leftist media and to flip-flopping centrist crossbenchers it seems to only ever tiptoe around the real issues in terms of spending cuts—window-dressing—just as we see very weak and timid measures proposed in other areas such as the drawn out and ultimately inconclusive agony over the fundamental issue of free speech.

The basic problem seems to be that the government is terrified of offending someone and being seen as too far to the right. One Nation is not afraid. We do not care about these perceptions. The Greens may believe that morality is a contorting Brazilian gymnast with a colourful costume, unlimited flexibility and an uncertain gender provenance. The Greens may believe that truth is an optional luxury or just another lie as yet undiscovered. But One Nation does not. Truth does not change depending upon one's standpoint, it does not disappear when it proves inconvenient, and it is not amenable to selective re-interpretation.

There can be no greater difference between political parties than revealed by the difference between the lying hypocrisy of Labor and the cultural Marxist immorality of the Greens compared with what One Nation represents. Love us or hate us, no-one can deny the utter sincerity of our beliefs. We do not try to say what we think will be safe or popular. We say what we believe is right and we face the consequences. Our nationalist movement recognises that objective truth exists. What concerns us is not perception but clarity. Win or lose, we will never resile or recant, we will never quit and we will never waver in our commitment to tell the truth and fight to restore the prosperous, law abiding, cohesive, monocultural nation that successive leftist governments have sought to destroy for over 40 years. One Nation will not linger ineffectually in this place nor slowly fade away. We will burn brightly like a meteor in the southern night sky, a harbinger that heralds the rebirth of One Nation to bring back Australia and protect Australian families.