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

At the end of the day here, we are in a crisis. We are in a rental crisis, a cost-of-living crisis, an energy crisis, an aged-care crisis, an environmental crisis—all brought about by a catastrophic Labor government that has no idea what it is doing. I heard Senator Urquhart say before, 'We're not wasting a day.' Excuse me, but you've wasted the first 16 months of the term of your government talking about a voice when we have got a cost-of-living crisis. And we are going to waste more time talking about this Voice until who knows when because we still don't even have a date for this referendum. We can't get any detail about this Voice. That is the Labor government for you; they are all about fear, not facts. They are all about emotion, not logic.

Let's take this housing bill. They're jumping up and down, wanting to borrow $10 billion at four or five per cent, because interest rates have gone through the roof since Labor got into government, and they want to gamble it on the stock market—the stock market's choppy, so they're going to have to generate about a 10 per cent return to clear five per cent—to then build 30,000 houses over five years, or about 6,000 houses a year. Can someone explain to me the mathematics of how you're going to fit 400,000 immigrants into 6,000 houses? It ain't going to work. You're short by about 300,000, if you assume 1½ immigrants per house. How exactly does Labor think it's solving the housing problem by having such a high immigration rate?

Rather than gamble with money, if you really want true equality here—you're more than happy to go after the oil and gas companies; I don't necessarily disagree with that, subject to the detail. But you're completely avoiding scrutinising the universities and making them pay their fair share of tax. Why aren't they paying tax on income from foreign students? I'll tell you why they aren't—because they're in bed with the Labor Party in pushing their Marxist ideology onto our young children. It all started with the Button plan in '85, when they destroyed our manufacturing industry. They then introduced the Dawkins plan that sent everyone to university so they can be brainwashed and bankrupt by the time they're 22.

That was the Labor Party. Old Hawke and Keating knew what they were up to in the late eighties and nineties, when they brought in this Frankenstein hybrid of Marxism and fascism, they privatised the CBA and let the foreign banks come in when they lifted capital controls in 1985. Yes, Senator Walsh, you may laugh, but you know as well as I do that neoliberalism was introduced into this country under the Hawke-Keating government. It destroyed it, and it will continue that way under the Albanese government.

Question agreed to.