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

I'm glad to speak to the Infrastructure Amendment (Independent Review) Bill 2023 today because it is an absolute disgrace that we are trying to downgrade the importance of infrastructure in this country. All good governments know that you should be building infrastructure, and yet on that side of the chamber we've got a Labor government under Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister of Australia, that doesn't want to prioritise building infrastructure. That's what we have come to expect from these people who would rather tear the building and the infrastructure in this country down than build it up. That's the modus operandi of our Marxists across the chamber here—it's always 'tear everything down'. If they're not tearing down our institutions and our customs and our values, they want to tear down the infrastructure and let it rot it away.

While they're doing this, they are overcharging. They're pumping up immigration—we have 400,000 people coming in this year, and half of them are going to university, so they are not adding to the actual supply side of labour. Even Ben Chifley knew, when he brought in immigrants and he built the Snowy Hydro scheme back after World War II—we don't have that here anymore. The big problem is not just the fact that students spend four years here consuming goods and services and adding to the demand side of the economy but also that university don't pay taxes. We have extra demand on our infrastructure but the universities who are milking the system aren't paying any tax on these students coming in.

Labor have got their priorities all wrong. Rather than building dodgy renewables that are unreliable and expensive and driving up the cost of energy, which is driving whatever manufacturing was left after the 1985 button plan—which destroyed manufacturing—offshore, they now want to de-prioritise Infrastructure Australia. I have to say I am shocked that some of the speeches on the other side of the chamber have been mocking what the former coalition government had scheduled to get built. I'll just outline what Labor have cut from their funding pipeline in their first budget when they got into government last year.

They are pulling $7 billion out of the following projects—and these matter: the Hells Gate dam, the Dungowan dam and the Emu Swamp dam. With the Emu Swamp dam, the amount of effort that is taken to build what is not a large dam and was never an expensive dam—all the farmers in Warwick and the good people of Warwick, in the Southern Downs at the headwaters of the mighty Condamine River, was a dam for their community and a reliable source of water. Let's not forget that this funding is because the state Labor government, under Annastacia Palaszczuk, the Queensland Premier, has not been funding infrastructure. It's not like when I was a boy and you would wake up every morning and there'd be a new dam built somewhere, like the Burdekin and the Wivenhoe, and you'd have new infrastructure like the Captain Cook Bridge and the freeway running through Brisbane. We haven't got any of that. If we didn't have the Palaszczuk government trying to stop the construction of dams—and who can remember the disaster with Rookwood Weir dam in Rockhampton? The federal government had to fund all of that as well because the Labor Premier at the time, Annastacia Palaszczuk, wouldn't build any infrastructure in the regions. This matters, because when you build infrastructure you start to generate recurring revenue.

As a young man growing up in Chinchilla, I got the benefits of that because our premier at the time, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, opened up those coalmines and the Weipa bauxite deposits. We had recurring revenue coming from the trainlines. We had recurring revenue coming from the royalties from the coal and the bauxite. We had recurring revenue coming from the ports—merge charges and things like that. We had all those jobs and all the associated jobs. What that recurring revenue did was pay for recurring costs in schools and hospitals. That's why when I grew up my town of Chinchilla had a maternity ward, but we don't have that anymore. This is the importance of infrastructure: infrastructure builds a nation.

It's about time that the state Labor premiers and the federal Labor government worked together. We've heard the people on the other side blame the federal government. It's not the role of the federal government to be building dams and suchlike infrastructure. That's actually the role of the state government. The last federal coalition government actually went into bat for these incompetent state premiers who are more interested in spreading fear and loathing about climate change, COVID and whatever else they seek to control people's minds with than actually seeking to fund this stuff. What happens when Labor come into power? They cut funding.

I'll continue with these dams. The Hughenden irrigation scheme has been deferred. Hughenden is in North Queensland, just west of the Great Dividing Range west of Cairns. You have black soil there in an area larger than the size of Tasmania. All you have to do is add water. If you want to talk about renewable energy, I'll tell you what renewable energy is. It's the stuff that comes out of the sky—it's the rain and the sunlight. If you mix that with the beautiful black soil around Hughenden and add toil, as the words of our national anthem say, you will create wealth. With that wealth you'll get an increase in land values, an increase in land taxes, an increase in company taxes and an increase in payroll taxes. All of that wealth creation starts to generate recurring taxes for the state governments that then pay for the schools and hospitals. That's how we manage to make ends meet in this country. It is wealth for toil. If you don't build the infrastructure that produces the goods and services, our country cannot move forward.

I just want to touch on another couple of things. They were talking about the car park rorts that occurred under the coalition government. Nothing could be further from the truth there. Those car parks actually mattered a lot. I'm going to call out the hypocrisy of the other side here. The member for Lilley, where my electorate office sits, actually came out in the 2019 federal campaign and announced funding for car parks—announced $7 million for Northgate and announced $4 million for Geebung. Park and ride is a great idea. If we can encourage people to drive to their closest train station so that they catch the train to work rather than cause congestion in the middle of the city, isn't that a good thing? Isn't that a much smarter way of protecting our environment and keeping our atmosphere clean and green and keeping out of the atmosphere carbon monoxide—not dioxide—nitrogen, sulphide and all the stuff that comes out of the car exhaust? Isn't that a much smarter idea?

This is the catastrophising by the other side. They are so good at doing this. Let's not forget that these guys weaponised the rape allegation and they weaponised those car parks. They somehow turned those into a rort when we needed people to be able to park and ride. Bill Shorten, the member for Maribyrnong, was the opposition leader during the 2019 federal election. He was out with the former member for Lilley, Wayne Swan, and Anika Wells actually announcing these park and rides. So the hypocrisy from the other side of the chamber is absolutely breathtaking.

Now I want to talk about my good friend Llew O'Brien, the member for Wide Bay, and all the effort he put in to getting the highway north of Gympie to be built as a dual-lane highway. I don't need to tell you the importance of safety on our roads. I went to my primary school's centenary a couple of weeks ago. It was good to go back. I was looking through the scrapbooks from the years when I was there. An eight-year-old boy was killed in a car accident. It was one of Chinchilla's worst car accidents. His mother; his younger brother, who was five; his mother's friend; and two people from Bulimba had an accident at Chinchilla golf course. I must admit that that shocked me a lot. It still shocks me because the Friday before the Saturday he was killed I spent detention with him. I know more than anyone that every year I went to school someone from my home town was killed on our highways.

We need to spend money on our roads. I know that the federal government only does the federal highways, but the Bruce Highway—I grew up on the Warrego Highway—needs spending. My good friend Llew O'Brien, the member for Wide Bay, fought tooth and nail to make sure that that road infrastructure north of Gympie wasn't going to be built. That's because the transport minister of Queensland, Mark Bailey, would only fund a one-lane highway north of Gympie. The Wide Bay area in Queensland is one of the fastest growing regions in Australia, and yet we had a state Labor government that would not actually put the money in to build a dual-lane highway. Given the royalties and all of the production that comes out of Bundaberg—which is an extremely productive area, with fruit and things like that as well as tourism, and which has enormous population grown—if you were going to upgrade the road, why on earth would you only do it as a single lane?

Of course, they did it as a single lane because the Queensland government are broke, and they are broke because they sold all the infrastructure. Former Queensland premiers Peter Beattie and Anna Bligh sold all of the Queensland infrastructure when they were in government. They sold the Port of Brisbane for a measly six times its earnings. Why would you sell a monopoly for six times its earnings? They sold the Queensland forestry plantations, which contained a reasonable amount of freehold, for five times their earnings. They sold ports. The very things that the great Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen built in his time as Premier—the various ports, Abbot Point and stuff like that—were all sold by Queensland Labor.

This is the thing about the Labor government: they hate to build things. Their modus operandi is to tear things down. They love to use fearmongering. They love to tear down our cultures. This is the great culture of Australia. When I do my stump speech and go around to various communities, I often talk about what a great country Australia is because of the pioneering spirit of those who came to this country. They built things. If you got washed up on a desert island, would you either (a) go and hold a meeting where you'd come up with ideas to scare our children witless or (b) say, 'We're going to start building things'? That's the difference between this side of the chamber and that side of the chamber: we believe in construction, because with construction comes productivity and with productivity comes wealth.

Do you want to know why we've got a productivity crisis in this country, Madam Acting Deputy President? It's because of that side of the chamber. Don't forget that it was that side of the chamber that in 1985 decided to rationalise manufacturing under the Button plan. Well, you did a great job of that. You rationalised manufacturing offshore. Congratulations! And what did they replace it with? In 1990, John Dawkins, the former education minister, came up with the great idea that we would send all of our children to university. That was a fantastic idea! It meant that, before they'd even started a job, they came out of university brainwashed and broke. They got some degree that told them how to shuffle paper in a superannuation fund.

After the great Dawkins plan, we then had Paul Keating come up with the great idea of taking 12 per cent of workers' wages, like the wages of all those workers in regional Queensland. They said: 'We're going to take 12 per cent of your income and give it to someone you've never met in one of the ivory palaces of Sydney and Melbourne, and you're not going to get it back till you're 67.' That's if you get it back at all—if they haven't gambled it away. They're now looking at investing in cryptocurrency, heaven forbid. What next—a market for fairies and unicorns?

We talk about why we've got a productivity crisis in this country. We need to go back to producing goods and services, not buying and selling, playing games with cryptocurrency and the stock market or shuffling money through superannuation funds. We need to build! We know that superannuation costs us $30 billion a year because we've got a whole bunch of financial engineers shuffling paper and gambling with other people's money.

Then we've got the education sector. As I've pointed out before, they now import students. They don't pay taxes on those students. The battlers out there getting out of bed every day and putting their noses to the grindstone have to pay more taxes for the infrastructure that isn't being built. The only infrastructure that's being built at the moment is for renewable energy that keeps on falling over or driving up energy prices, which is only going to send more manufacturing offshore. That matters because, if you want to mix concrete to build the roads or make steel, it's too expensive to make it here, so we have to import it from overseas. We need to build.

I'll finish this off by saying that we need an infrastructure bank. We should not go offshore and borrow another country's currency to fund the construction of infrastructure. I've talked about this before. The sovereign seven are power stations, dams, roads, rail, ports, airports and telecommunications. They are sovereign wealth if you build that asset—debit, asset, credit, equity. We are a sovereign country. We have title over that untapped wealth that those assets will create. We do not need to swap title for a mortgage because they're too silly to borrow money from a privately owned federal reserve. I'll leave it at that.