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

It's interesting. I'll just take off from Senator Green's comments about the skills crisis. The former coalition government spent $100 million on subsidising TAFE apprenticeships by 50 per cent. That was a fantastic scheme. It just goes to show that this is the party of the battlers now. Don't kid yourself. The party on the other side is the party that wants to throw money at the big end of town. Make no mistake about that.

What's interesting about question time is: whenever questions were put to Senator Gallagher, she had absolutely no answers for the way forward—absolutely no answers for the way forward. And I'll tell you what: you won't see anything from Senator Wong, either. I well remember when she turned up to RRAT and was trying to have a crack at us on the Leppington Triangle, claiming that we'd paid $30 million for a $3 million block of land, and Senator Sterle couldn't understand why I was being so quiet. Of course, I was just sitting back and letting Senator Wong show how little she understood about finance, because, had she actually understood accounting standards and valuation standards and prior case law, she would have known that you pay the best use—AASB 13, paragraphs 29 and 30. And if Senator Wong or anyone else on that side of the chamber would like a lesson in finance, I'm more than happy to help.

I won't just sit here and bag you out; I'll actually give you some free solutions. First of all, you've got to have identified the problem. And of course the problem was none other than Paul J Keating, who, under the Hawke government, basically ripped the guts out of the manufacturing sector in Victoria with the Button plan, and commoditised higher education with the Dawkins plan, where suddenly education was treated like just another commodity—'Anyone who wants a degree can get a degree'—and of course that gutted the TAFE sector. So we were throwing all this money into the university sector at the expense of the TAFE sector.

Now, let me get this very straight—and I want this on the record. This country was built by the battlers. It wasn't built by the blowhards. And you've got to put your primary industries in front of your secondary industries in front of your tertiary industries. We've got to get people back into those workshops, back into the manufacturing sector and back onto the farms and value-adding to our primary production. That's where we've got to go back to.

The way to do that is to cut taxes—and that is something that the coalition government has a proud record on—and also not shut the economy down. They like to bag out the former coalition government for the money that we spent. Well, let me assure you that, before the COVID crisis had broken out, we had balanced the budget. In 2018-19, the budget was balanced, for the first time in a number of decades—since, actually, the prior coalition government. But what happened was this. We had the state premiers just wrecking the economy. Now, I disagreed with the former Prime Minister on this, but he tried to set up a national cabinet in the best interests of the country. The country was sabotaged by Labor premiers, who continually locked down, who continually ran a fear program, who continually wanted to throw more money at it. Even when we pulled JobKeeper, Labor—the opposition at the time but now the government—wanted to keep spending money; they wanted to keep it going. This is the sad thing. And they're still going to pursue spending more money. They're going to drop $20 billion on building transmission lines for all these unreliables that aren't going to go 24 hours a day; they're not going to work when the sun isn't shining or anything like that.

If we want to get this country back on track, we need to invest in baseload energy. That's why I'm so pleased that the opposition leader, the member for Dickson, has now said that the coalition will look into nuclear as well. That's a fantastic idea. We can have coal, as well as nuclear, as well as gas. With cheap reliable energy, that is how we will power this country.

But, going forward, I'm still yet to hear anything about what the RBA does. This was another big stuff-up by the former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, when he gave the RBA independence. Anyone who has followed monetary policy as closely as I have for the last 30 years would know that all the RBA governors basically graduated from university and started work at the RBA. They are hoodwinked by RBA groupthink. They are more focused on inflation. And it is the tail that wags the dog, because let me tell you this. If you got washed up on a desert island, would you, (a) go to the bank, or (b) look to control the means of production? I'll tell you what you'd do: you'd look to control the means of production. You wouldn't go: 'Oh, well, we can't build any infrastructure because we might have too much inflation.' No, no, no. What we would do is: we would go out and we would actually start building, which is what we need to do.

And you should be listening to this, Senator Wong. I'm happy to walk you through it, because I know it's baby steps with you at the moment, but I'm more than happy to. We have to build. You guys have got to build if you want to get this economy back on track.