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

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I will be speaking to the Treasury Laws Amendment (2021 Measures No. 3) Bill 2021. One Nation will be supporting this bill. The first schedule indexes the starting point for the Medicare levy. Medicare must be supported. Without Medicare, everyday Australians would be held hostage to the greed of the medical establishment, which we see happening in the United States and elsewhere—and right here, given the vaccine rollout—in conditions that suit big pharma. Getting sick should not be a financial death sentence. Healing sick workers so that they can return to work as quickly as possible is the best outcome possible for the worker, for the worker's family, for the employer and for the whole economy. Medicare supports Australia's productive capacity. Indexing the Medicare threshold maintains the fairness of the system while maintaining the broadly based nature of the levy.

The family home guarantee, on the other hand, is not a great idea. The response to structural unaffordability in the housing market is not to give people handouts to afford houses. The answer is to deal with the structural unaffordability. The Prime Minister failed to take this opportunity, instead electing to go with a flashy promise that presented the opportunity for yet another announcement and another glossy brochure. We want substance. There is no domestic pressure on home prices. Median wages are going backwards. Fewer and fewer people are able to afford their own home. Immigration numbers are down to historic lows. So, where is this demand coming from? Where's the demand pressure that's fuelling double-digit growth in real estate prices?

A total of $87.8 billion flowed into the Australian real estate market from foreign buyers in the last year that we have figures for, 2018-19—later data would be nice, by the way. This did not include money being transferred from destinations like China for Australian residents to use to purchase residential properties. Anecdotally, this is a large part of the demand for residential property in the capital cities. The result is price inflation, resulting in worsening affordability for everyday Australians. The Morrison government, it seems, has decided to put housing affordability into the too-hard basket, waiting on the Prime Minister's desk for the next occupant. That's terrible governance.

This bill makes emergency flood payments tax deductible—fair enough; compensating victims of flood damage to restore our productive capacity is of course the right thing to do. Yet building dams for flood mitigation works even more effectively, and far better. Remember when we used to do that? Dams are wonderful things. They provide water for communities, water to grow food and fibre to feed and clothe the world, hydroelectricity—and yes, they mitigate floods. As our high immigration rate leads to expanding development, dam based flood mitigation must become a priority.

I want to raise something here. The Greens are either confused or hypocritical, because they oppose dams, yet dams will lead to increased irrigation, which will lead to increased green plants, and that means increased absorption of carbon dioxide. Now, we know there's no need to absorb more carbon dioxide, because nature controls that level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and our planet's climate is varying naturally. But the Greens are being either hypocritical or dishonest by saying they don't want dams but want more carbon dioxide absorbed.

This bill allows for tax deductibility for compensation payment for thalidomide victims. That's entirely appropriate. Thalidomide is a terrible chapter in the history of pharmaceuticals. The question must be asked, have we learned anything from the thalidomide disaster—the thalidomide scandal? Over the past 20 years, 104 medications and medical devices have been withdrawn from sale by the TGA following initial approval and widespread use. Not one of these withdrawals was initiated by Australia's own testing program—not one. In Australia the TGA tests around 400 product batches a year, out of 28 million prescriptions. This very low rate has not detected a single product requiring withdrawal. Every one of those 104 withdrawals has been due to overseas agencies testing and detecting critical harm.

This is not good enough. Now we have an obscene rush to introduce vaccines that are based on new and untested technologies, mRNA vaccines. They've been given provisional approval, and already people have lost confidence in the vaccines and are afraid of the vaccines. They're fearful of the vaccines. One Nation has no confidence in this process, so I expect that a future Senate will be asked to approve tax deductibility for compensation for victims of COVID vaccines. At the rate that harm is being detected here and especially overseas, that may well be in this Senate's lifetime.

I want to finish with some words about productive capacity. I've harped on about two things in the Senate. The first thing is empirical scientific evidence, the need to base policy and decisions on solid, scientific data and hard facts and observations. The second thing I've been focusing on is productive capacity. I'm so delighted to hear Senator McKim from the Greens mention productive capacity today. We know that others in the Liberal-National government have been mentioning productive capacity. We've even had the Prime Minister taking it up. But we want to see substance, not rhetoric. Don't just steal my words and take my intent; we need action to restore Australia's productive capacity. The Liberal, National and Labor parties are following the Greens policies, decimating our country's productive capacity. Yet our productive capacity is the key to our country's future. One Nation wants to restore it. We will continue working on this, because we want to bring Australia back to the point where we are No. 1 again, as we used to be, worldwide for per capita income. The key to that is what caused it in the first place: productive capacity.