Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator McKim, you'll be pleased to know that tonight's budget is prioritising people. The income tax cuts are for low- to middle-income earners. They are for the battlers, the working class. That's because we know that if you want to get ahead in this country, if you want this country to succeed, it is all about wealth for toil. You're not going to get Australia out of the mess that COVID's got us into if we don't get people back to work. We can't stay under the doonas forever, and these income tax cuts are going to direct more money to the people who go to work every day. If the tax cuts put more money into their pockets, they will spend more and that will create more employment. We know it will work because we saw in the Howard-Costello years regular income tax cuts every year and the economy continued to grow. Wage rises went high, incomes lifted. Wages have only stopped growing since Labor introduced the Fair Work Act. Those opposite don't want to talk about that, do they? Employer improper payments, because of the Fair Work Act, are so complicated that even Labor aligned firms like Maurice Blackburn have been caught out paying the wrong salaries. Now, if an industrial relations firm can't work out what the right salary to pay is, what hope do the rest of us have? What hope do small businesses have if they can't afford to pay a high-priced lawyer?

In welfare support, the Morrison government doubled JobSeeker the moment we shut down the economy and the country with COVID. It went from about $540 a week to around $1,100 a week. We implemented JobKeeper straightaway. We've spent over $200 billion supporting the economy since the introduction of COVID. We've given two $750 payments to pensioners. There has been no shortage of support for those in need since COVID has struck.

And the government is investing in infrastructure. I don't know exactly what's in tonight's budget, but from what I read—I love it how the media know more than our own backbenchers, but that's another story for another day—we are led to believe there is going to be significant investment in infrastructure. That is going to be very welcome to the economy, because it's infrastructure that provides essential services.

I stood up here in my maiden speech and I said that government should never have sold infrastructure. Hawke and Keating should never have sold the CBA or CSL. How many billions is the government paying to CSL? We sold that back in 1992 for $200 million. A couple of years ago, we signed a $3.4 billion contract for nine years—almost $400 million a year—in order to get CSL to clean the blood that's donated to Red Cross. Why on earth did we ever sell that asset? That was just madness. I don't know what former Prime Minister Paul Keating was thinking, but that was just silly. Queensland Labor has just decimated that state by selling our forestry plantations, our ports, our railways, our roads and our Golden Casket. Never sell infrastructure that provides an essential service that people pay taxes for. They expect governments to provide essential services. They're not going to line up in front of Macquarie Bank when it all goes wrong. So this government supports infrastructure, and it's something I'm pleased to say I back wholeheartedly.

I want to talk about the inequality allegation, which is total rubbish—that somehow the LNP and the coalition aren't being fair. If you want to talk about inequality, let's look at Victoria and Queensland. If you want to see an example of brutal, misogynistic inequality, go and hop on the Facebook page of the member for Hughes, Craig Kelly, and look at his posting with the Helen Reddy song, about all the women who have been arrested in Victoria for trying to stand up for their rights. Of course, the name of the Victorian Premier, Daniel Andrews, never gets mentioned on that side of the parliament, does it? They have complete amnesia when they look at Victoria. They don't want to acknowledge what a debacle that state is. If there was ever an example of inequality, it's in Victoria and in Queensland, my beloved home state.

How disgraceful and embarrassing was it to see Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk get up there and say, 'Queensland hospitals are for Queensland people and New South Wales hospitals are for New South Wales people'? That is terrible. My mother was born in Kempsey. My family on my mother's side are from the Northern Rivers, Kempsey and Orange. I love New South Wales. There might be three nights of the year when I don't, but the rest of the time I do. It's a beautiful state, and it is just embarrassing that the Premier has kept pregnant women from getting to hospitals, kept families from attending their family members' funerals, kept other people from getting necessary cancer treatment or recuperating from cancer treatment and separated children who attend boarding school in Queensland from their families—all to save her own skin. So I don't want to take any lectures from the Greens or Labor about inequality in the coalition, because if you want to look at inequality you've only got to look at the complete destruction of our individual freedoms under the Queensland and Victorian state governments—shocking!

Then we come to the climate doom and climate collapse stuff. It just goes on and on and on and on and on. If you want to talk about equality and looking after taxpayers, how about we get real here and look at the subsidies that renewable energy gets: $10 billion for the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and $5 billion for the Snowy Hydro pumped hydro project. Three and a half billion dollars of taxpayer money has been pumped into the Climate Solutions Package, $2½ billion into the Emissions Reduction Fund, $1½ billion into the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, another $1 billion into the Grid Reliability Fund and half a billion dollars into the National Hydrogen Strategy. The renewables industry would have to be one of the most propped-up rent seekers this country has ever seen, and it doesn't end there. AEMO have come out and said that, if you want to get to 90 per cent renewables, you're going to have to spend $100 billion. That's not to get to 100 per cent renewables; it's to get to 90 per cent renewables. They won't go to 100 per cent, because they know that you're always going to need baseload power, whether it be coal or gas, in the background to back up renewable energy.

If we go and actually analyse what's happening with energy prices, we can see why they're rising. Despite the fact that everyone says that renewable energy is cheaper, it's not. Maybe renewable energy generation in the middle of the day is cheaper, but the cost of transmission, storage, security services and clean-up is not. Of course that's never factored into it, because there are no environmental bonds; and I'm glad we got that motion up today—I'll be sending that off to all the state premiers, demanding that environmental bonds are paid by these renewable companies. When they talk about costs, 48 per cent of energy costs now are in transmission costs. It's from building all those transmission lines which have to connect solar and wind.

And, of course, what's in all these transmission lines? It's switchgear. And what's in the switchgear? Sulphur hexafluoride, which is the most potent global greenhouse gas there is on the planet. It has a greenhouse-warming effect that is 23,000 times greater than carbon dioxide. Somehow, I don't think that's part of the clean, green dream. And what's in the solar panels? Nitrogen trifluoride, the second-most toxic global greenhouse gas in the environment, is used to make solar panels. That stuff hangs around in the environment for 700 years—700 years! And it goes on: what's used in the batteries? Lithium, which is a one-per-cent ore body; there is one per cent metal in the ore. That means we have to mine 100 tonnes of the ore just to get one tonne of metal. Then it has to go all the way to China or somewhere like that, get melted down through four energy-intensive electrolysis processes and then come back—and it lasts for about eight years. (Time expired)