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

Well, Jim Chalmers handed down his second budget, and I want to talk about a few things that are in it and the things that should be in it but aren't. It turns out our budget cartoon was prophetic. The Treasurer needs to find a new career as a comedian. First, lets talk about the surplus. It's the first surplus delivered in many years, but only because Labor included the interest from the Future Fund for the first time. Otherwise, it would have been a deficit budget. Don't forget that Labor had an unexpected $50 billion windfall from the previous government in the form of royalties. It's a very small surplus—$4 billion—and we will return to deficits in the next budget. Across the forward estimates—the next four years—these deficits will add another $110 billion to federal government debt. Within three years our gross debt will top a trillion dollars for the first time and our interest on this debt will be almost $30 billion a year. That's $60 million a day, or $700 per second. That's $30 billion going to central banks and other creditors. Not a single cent of it will go towards a road, a hospital or a school or even towards reducing the cost of living. It's about 75 per cent of Australia's entire defence budget.

Our debt keeps piling up, and this budget is just the most recent opportunity blown by a federal government to undertake urgently needed structural tax reform. Labor has a worse record on debt than the coalition—but not by much. Labor is responsible for $250 billion of debt that the coalition took on when it was elected in 2013. So Labor, stop blaming the coalition for the debt we're in today. You're partly responsible for some of it. However, neither of these parties can bring themselves to really turn things around, deliver consistent surpluses and pay down our huge debt.

There was a lot of pressure on the government to provide some relief to Australians who are struggling with the rising costs of living, and it's fair to say that the government has responded. There's a rise in unemployment benefits, rent assistance and the single parenting payment, and a bigger investment in Medicare. I'm not going to oppose most of these measures for families who are doing it tough. However, I completely reject the single parenting payment increase at a cost of almost $2 billion. It was Julia Gillard, Labor's PM—a woman, mind you—who about 11 years ago reduced to eight years the age of the child when the payment would cease, in an effort to get more parents back into the workforce. Now Anthony Albanese is reliving his childhood, wishing for his mother to be able to be at home for him, and he wants the taxpayers to fund it. Well and good, but it shouldn't be at the cost of our increasing debt, and it begs the question: don't the kids of working mums and dads deserve the same consideration? Albanese was the child, but I wore his mother's shoes as a single mother with three children. Support should be a helping hand, not a way of life. I expect many people may try to abuse the single parenting payment by having more kids just so they don't have to work. This is what happened with Peter Costello's baby bonus.

It's also worth noting here that, with the government slashing more than $20 billion on various relief measures, it will very likely drive inflation rather than cool things down. So don't expect the cost of living to stop rising. Don't expect the cost of electricity or gas to just drop. It will keep going up as Labor and the Greens remove all our reliable generation and replace it with costly, unreliable renewables.

The facts are irrefutable. Since the introduction of renewables, our electricity has become among the most expensive in the world. Climate change has nothing to do with it—only greedy corporations and incompetent governments fearmongering purely for votes and pushing an insidious agenda of international control. We can only stop this by moving to nuclear power. And, as these costs continue to rise, the Reserve Bank's only real mechanism to stop it is to keep raising interest rates.

A home is the biggest investment the vast majority of us will make and, as we've seen during this crisis, there are many families who have been forced to sell their homes because they can't absorb the huge interest increases in their mortgage payments. The great Australian dream of owning a home is getting further out of reach. What we should be doing is implementing policies that help make it more achievable for more people.

First things first—let's stop allowing foreigners to own residential property. Australians can't own property in many countries whose citizens are allowed to own Australian property. That's just not right. Banning foreign ownership, like Canada and New Zealand have done, will increase the supply of homes for Australians to buy. The thousands of foreign owned homes sitting empty should be made to be sold in a 12-month period.

The next step is to lower immigration, which will reduce demand for housing. Since Labor took government, they've been bringing in 7,000 people a week and will continue to do so for the next two years and maybe more. Labor is making our housing and rental prices a great deal worse by letting so many people into Australia, and their worthless housing future fund will do virtually nothing that makes a difference to this crisis.

One Nation proposes another measure to alleviate this crisis: allowing homeowners to rent rooms in their homes to tenants tax free. Having people under a roof is much better than having them living in tents, caravans or cars. This would also provide some additional income to homeowners so they can better manage rising mortgage payments and cost-of-living increases.

Now let's turn to the Voice referendum. Our last referendum was in 1999, and it cost the taxpayer about $67 million. That's approximately $124 million in today's money. The Prime Minister is blowing more than $400 million of our money for this referendum. This makes absolutely no sense unless he's banking a lot of this cash to fund the Voice to Parliament. I suspect Labor will attempt to legislate the Voice to Parliament regardless of the referendum result. Labor doesn't give a damn about what the Australian people think, and the Prime Minister has nailed his political skin to a successful 'yes' vote. If we reject the Voice at the referendum, and the polls have shown we are more and more likely to do that, Anthony Albanese will try to push his personal vanity project through parliament anyway.

Now let's talk about infrastructure. Labor has scrapped another dam project in Queensland. Labor and the Greens really hate dams for some ridiculous reason or another. One Nation, on the other hand, strongly supports the Hughenden Irrigation Project scrapped in this budget, as we supported the Hells Gates Dam project Labor scrapped in last year's budget. In this land of droughts and flooding rains, we need more dams and water security. They create wealth, using water that would otherwise flow uselessly to the sea. They can generate energy. They can help manage droughts and floods. They most definitely improve water and food security and drive growth in our world-leading agricultural industries—more farms, more food and fibre, and more jobs.

Farmers are also screaming out for the road and rail infrastructure which supports their supply chains to be repaired, maintained and upgraded. A lot of road and rail infrastructure was damaged in floods last year and urgently needs repairing. Instead of giving billionaire Twiggy Forrest $2 billion, as Labor has done in this budget, to kickstart a green hydrogen industry, which has never been successful anywhere in the world, I would have directed this money towards this much more urgent repair effort. Let Mr Forrest fund his own pet project that could see him reap billions more if successful. I can assure you it won't be taxpayers who see any profits.

What is absolutely no surprise in this budget is the obscene amount of money thrown at the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. Its funding has been doubled from $7 billion to $14 billion—what a criminal waste of taxpayers' money on things like green hydrogen pipedreams and yet more useless bureaucracy in the form of a net zero transition authority. Last year I showed that the Labor government can't even explain what net zero actually means. But that hasn't stopped them from creating this new bureaucracy to worship with them in the cult of climate change. Enough is enough. It's renewables which have directly led to a 300 per cent rise in our energy bills over the past 20 years, but Chris Bowen does not give a damn about household energy costs. He's aiming for 82 per cent of Australian energy production from renewables by 2030, more than triple what we have now, severely risking our energy security and piling another 300 per cent increase on Australian household and business energy costs. Along with that, we will lose a lot of our industries and manufacturing.

Also, how's this for a budget measure? Labor has stated it's provided indemnity for specialised external advisers who advised the government during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it hasn't revealed the cost. That's right; Labor is protecting the so-called experts whose advice led to the lockdowns and mandates that destroyed jobs, businesses and families across Australia, while our governments put us into hundreds of billions of dollars of more debt. This begs an obvious question: Why do they need protection? Could it be that, while our governments were all patting themselves on the back for their pandemic response in front of the cameras, behind the scenes there were serious legal concerns about the individual rights they were violating and the potential dangers of untested vaccines? Only a royal commission has a chance of getting at the truth, and it's past time the Prime Minister pulled his finger out and followed through on this commitment. I won't stop fighting for a royal commission into the pandemic—if it really was a pandemic.

This budget has been just the latest of many missed opportunities for urgent structural tax reform. Labor spent the weeks leading up to the budget talking about the need for more revenue, and they were actually right about that. There have been huge cost blowouts in the NDIS, with another $21 billion over the next four years, reaching $56 billion a year. I'm hearing constantly from people about how the NDIS is a bottomless pit full of fraud and overservicing, with no accountability and thousands of people on the scheme who shouldn't be. What has the minister done? Absolutely nothing—let's just throw another $21 billion at it!

We have a massive commitment to the new AUKUS alliance. Those nuclear subs are not going to be cheap, but I support them. The money for all this cost-of-living relief has to come from somewhere too. There's a ready source of this additional revenue, but it's not the long-suffering Australian taxpayers. It's the mostly foreign owned multinational resource companies exploiting our world-leading natural resources while paying virtually no tax in Australia for this privilege. For the past six years, I've been calling for reform of the petroleum resource rent tax to make this happen, and, believe it or not, there's actually been a little bit of movement in this budget. The government has introduced a change to the PRRT which effectively mean that companies exploiting our offshore natural gas will pay more tax sooner. So, thankfully, my meeting with the Prime Minister to raise this didn't fall on deaf ears and he took advice from what I told him. The change would limit the proportion of these companies' income which then can by offset by deductions to 90 per cent. It's not a lot of additional revenue—just $2.4 billion over the next four years—but it's a damn good start.

With the reforms One Nation is talking about, we could improve Australia's bottom line by at least $25 billion in a year. We still have a long way to, but I will never stop fighting for the Australian people to get a fair return for our resources. I call on this Labor government to do this. I don't believe they really understand—neither does Chris Bowen with regard to climate change and pushing on that—how people are doing it tough because of the cost of their electricity bills. We've seen the closure of a lot of industries in Australia, and we're going to see a lot more that will close due to the rising cost of electricity. Giving out $500 rebates in your budget, a few hundred dollars here and there, won't stop the cost-of-living increases. People are doing it tough. They're going to lose their homes. That's all because of government policy that happens in this place.

I say to the government: you think that you're safe in your seats and that you've got your income. You've lost touch with grassroots people and how much they are really struggling, even when buying groceries. I see it. I've never lost touch with my grassroots, and I never will. That's why I'll keep fighting for the Australian people.