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

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I support this bill, though we need to do far more. We need to get manufacturing moving. We need to protect Australia from the risk of sources of imported goods drying up and we need, as Senator O'Sullivan has said: jobs, jobs, jobs.

Queenslanders and Australians everywhere have heard us speak about the gaps in our productive capacity, the gaps in our economic resilience, the gaps in our economic sovereignty and the gaps in our national security. That was before COVID, and now it's even more so, especially since COVID revealed that we did not even have enough personal protective equipment to protect our valued healthcare workers and everyday Australians. And now, we have to store our own oil in the USA because we have nowhere to store it here. At first, after COVID, we couldn't even manufacture ventilators. It is all thanks to Aussie ingenuity—and a personal thank you to all those innovative Australians who did step up to fill this gap.

Certainly we need the skills. Australia needs the skills and the capability to ensure that we can protect ourselves from future health disasters and economic disasters, especially things like the prolonged border closures, international transport closures or blockades cutting sea transport. These are possibilities. We see the news of what's happening in the South China Sea. We see the growing confrontation between America and China. We need to think about our security.

This government has presented a bill for the creation of the position of National Skills Commissioner, yet we need to ensure this is not just an advisory role. Just setting up this office for four years is costing taxpayers over $48 million. I quite often hear Liberal and Labor people and the Nationals saying, 'We've spent a million here, we've spent tens of millions here, we've spent hundreds of millions here and we've spent a couple of billion here.' It's not the money that matters; it's the environment in which that money can be turned into something beneficial for the people of Australia. So we expect a return on investment on that $48 million by giving the commissioner the teeth to ensure that vocational training across Australia is high in quality, consistent and competitively priced. Training by itself is not the answer. It needs to be good, effective training.

Where is the accountability between the federal funding of approximately $1.5 billion a year to the states, to the vocational providers, to ensure that our vocational trainees get a high-quality education and an affordable education that really lands them a job? If the government is going to invest $1.5 billion per year in vocational education and training, then Australians have a right to ensure that our taxes are well spent. We need a review of the performance of the National Skills Commissioner after 12 months, or possibly after three years. We need that review. We also need to understand that it is not the commissioner who is going to get us effective training. It is not the commissioner who is going to decide what skills are needed. Government—Liberal, Labor, Nationals—have shown a very poor track record of anticipating demand for specific skills. Those decisions must be based upon what the market needs. It's the men and women in work, it's the men and women investing and it's the men and women leading corporations that determine the skills we need—and, actually, going beneath that, it's the market that drives those skills. They will tell us what skills are needed to service the market.

More importantly, we need to restart manufacturing in our country, and that needs more than training. It needs much more than training. It needs an integrated approach: an industry and economic environment which enables and encourages Australian investment. How the hell can people afford to invest when energy prices are so high? How the hell can it be that we don't have reliable, affordable, stable, synchronised electricity? We have the cheapest coal in the world, the highest quality coal in the world. We export that to China and they produce coal far more cheaply. They sell it to their manufacturers at 40 per cent of the price we sell it. Why? Because our own electricity prices have doubled in the last 10 years. Why? Because of Liberal, Labor and Nationals policies, based on rubbish. A climate scam is what is destroying our manufacturing industry. Labour costs are a smaller component of manufacturing these days than they used to be. Electricity prices are significant. We have gone from the lowest priced electricity to the world's highest prices. That's been due to regulations based not on data but on opinions from the Liberal, Labor and Nationals governments.

How can it be that China takes our coal thousands of kilometres and sells it at 40 per cent of the price we sell it for? It is because of regulation. It is government screwing with the market. It is the government screwing with regulations. Listen to some of these factors, all government driven: the renewable energy target introduced by John Howard's government and the national electricity market introduced before John Howard, if memory serves me correctly, but worsened under John Howard's government. The national energy market is a racket, not a market, and the people in Australia are paying the price.

The retail margins are guaranteed in some states at high levels with very little risk. The networks are gold-plated because of regulations. And then we have privatisation. In Queensland, our state, the Labor Party in the state government uses that as a tax. The government receives $1.4 to $1.5 billion dollars a year in tax, due to excess charges from the generators. Privatisation, the sale of assets, is failing around the country. That is an essential asset and it is crippling our manufacturing, crippling jobs right across agriculture. Farmers will not irrigate because the price of pumping water is too high.

The second thing is tax. That is part of the business environment. Multinationals in our country are going without paying any company tax due to agreements from Robert Menzies' Liberal government in 1953, perpetuated by the lack of tax on the North West Shelf gas that was enabled by Bob Hawke's Labor government in the 1980s. Both sides have done that. Former deputy commissioner of taxation Jim Killaly said in 1996 and again in 2010 that 90 per cent of Australia's large companies are foreign owned and, since 1953, have paid little or no tax. What that means is that mums and dads, families, small businesses, Australian-owned businesses have to pay more tax than they need to. It means Australian businesses are at a competitive disadvantage of about 30 per cent because they have to pay company tax. Larger companies have to pay company tax but the foreign companies don't. So we need to set a level playing field by taxing multinationals and reducing the tax burden, by simplifying the tax system and by having a comprehensive review of tax, because that is one of the most important factors driving the lack of investment from Australians.

We also have an abundance of regulations that are crippling our country. We have red tape from the bureaucracies at the state, federal and even local level. We have green tape, driven by rampant environmentalists. We have blue tape, driven by the UN. The blue tape is arguably the largest component of tape and the most expensive of all, put in place by Liberal, Labor and Nationals governments.

We then have economic management. How can companies prepare and plan for the longer term, which is needed these days, when we have governments making economic management decisions based purely on electoral payoffs, not just every three years, as it used to be, but now annually. Budgets are based on bribing taxpayers to vote for a particular party. Economic management is now a 12-month issue, very short-term, and is counterproductive to a good business environment. We have states now with lower accountability because competitive federalism has been white-anted. The Queensland Labor government can sit on closing its borders and decimating tourism and small business in our state. Why? Under the Commonwealth Constitution, we're supposed to have competitive federalism. Yet in 1943 income tax was stolen from the states and given to the federal government. And now, essentially, more than 50 per cent of state government expenditure is from the federal government, tied to federal government conditions and guidelines, which effectively means that the federal government is running much of what the states do.

The federal government is running much of what local councils do around Queensland and around Australia. I was at the Balonne Shire Council in February 2017. In answer to a question of mine they told me that 73 per cent of their annual revenue comes from the federal government, with strings attached. Not only does the federal government tell them how to manage their local community; the federal government only has three- to five-year windows, which means local councils can't go beyond that time frame in doing their planning. How can local councils make a long-term plan? This is what's hampering governance in this country.

I plead with the government to make sure that we focus on our economic productive capacity, our economic resilience, our economic sovereignty, our economic security, our economic independence, which has been smashed by the elitist quest for interdependence, which is really depending on others—that is, a loss of dependence. Nonetheless, this legislation will help all Queenslanders to improve our state's economy and to repay the debt hole in which the Labor government in Queensland has buried Queenslanders. We need training but we need jobs. We need Australian jobs, we need Queensland jobs, especially in regional Queensland. Training is a minor component yet an important component. Beyond that, we need to get back to basics to create the economic environment to drive Australian investment.

I will say it again. We need our economic productive capacity to be restored, we need our economic resilience to be restored, we need our economic sovereignty and independence to be restored, and we need our economic security to be restored. Australia has the people, the resources, the opportunity and the potential. We just need to get back to what we had, get back to the basics. Australia led the world in per capita gross domestic product and income in the early years of our Federation—when our Constitution was followed and the states behaved competitively towards each other. That's what we need to get back to—a productive environment.