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

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I rise to discuss the core of this bill, the Human Services Amendment (Photographic Identification and Fraud Prevention) Bill 2019—that is, providing integrity. And that leads to accountability. Accountability in this parliament is so low, and people right around our country know that. Anybody who goes from this parliament as a representative of the people, and listens to the people, will find out that the people can cite instances where the accountability is low. Integrity is what it's all about.

As a One Nation senator for Queensland, I know that our supporters have a moral compass and a strong work ethic. So they're annoyed—because any lapse in accountability, any lapse in security or any lapse in integrity is paid for by the taxpayer, and the taxpayers are on the hook already for $160 billion worth of welfare. Now much of that welfare is necessary: age pensions, Department of Veterans' Affairs pensions and so on. Much of it is necessary, and we are a generous people. We Australians are known for our generosity. We will help mates. We will also help mates around the world who aren't Australians, and that is where the problem comes because of our generosity. We've all heard the saying 'generous to a fault'. We are generous to a fault because we turn a blind eye to the people who are ripping us off. Some of those people, as Senator Hanson mentioned, have come from overseas. They have been here five minutes and are plugging into a system to which they're not entitled.

Through this bill we're looking to provide for the security of taxpayers. That is important. If we don't provide for the security of taxpayers and accountability of government spending of taxpayer money—and that's where it comes from: increasingly burdened taxpayers—it will end up undermining the payment of benefits long term. We can pay welfare payments only while the taxpayers are able to fund it. Who pays for government failures? The people pay for government failures. One of our many roles here in parliament is to protect the people's money.

We have instances where people have found retribution from Centrelink because Centrelink has made mistakes. Every person, agency and entity makes mistakes. We're not debating that. Centrelink has come back savagely and torn into people. That shows that the system is not working. They don't have the data.

We also see people in this chamber wanting to increase Newstart. That's wonderful, and we support them on many aspects of that. We ourselves want to increase the payment of pensions to married couples—$150 per fortnight. It is one of our policies That has an impact on many other pensions. We are about maintaining generosity. We are about maintaining fairness—that is fundamental to Australian values and fundamental to One Nation—but we are also about accountability, responsibility and stopping the rorting.

As I said, the key word in this bill is 'integrity'. I see a lack of integrity around this parliament. I mentioned it when I was first in the Senate and I mentioned it again at the start of this parliament, the 46th Parliament. Taxpayers are on the hook here and taxpayers lack protection because there is a lack of accountability. Let's have a look at some of the basic economic management in this country. Let's look at the primacy of energy and see if we can find where the integrity is there. You will find there is a lack of integrity in economic management and a lack of integrity in the management of energy.

In this country we used to have competitive federalism as a foundation stone to our Constitution. That has been blown to the side and completely ignored. We now have centralisation, and with centralisation comes a lack of competition for managing this country's resources. We now find that we have centralised bureaucracy running what they call a market—but it's not a national energy market; it's a national energy racket. It has been so abused. The government itself has admitted that there is now rorting. There is gaming going on. This is just one example of a supposedly transparent scheme where the masses don't benefit directly. The gaming of the national energy market leads to multinationals and large Australian companies rorting the system and driving up the price of electricity. And who pays? The people who use electricity pay. It is now a necessity.

In addition to the national energy market we find that the bureaucracy is now gold plating the networks, so we have people making huge amounts of profit unreasonably, despite the protection that should be there. We have then things like the actual payment rates for retail providers of electricity. In some states they are guaranteed returns of around 26 per cent. Then we have things like the state government in Queensland actually owning the generators on behalf of the taxpayers but privatising them so, instead of it being a department that is accountable to the taxpayers at every election, we now have a corporation with a board of directors. We used to have a system in this country where the focus was on driving down the price of electricity and each state competed with other states to drive down the price of electricity while ensuring reliability. We now have an inherently unreliable system that is mismatched and mismanaged with a hodgepodge of renewables and intermittents coming in. What happens is that in Queensland and in other states, wherever there is a corporatised system—which is the case for the generators in our state—the emphasis of the directors is on maximising productivity. That's how they manage and that's how they're held accountable. So, when they maximise their profit, they drive a maximising of electricity prices—the complete opposite of the old competitive federalism where we drove down the price of electricity. We used to have an actual market between states and any—