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

I'll continue from where I left off earlier to say that this bill is nothing more than a gambling bill whereby $10 billion will be borrowed and the taxpayer will incur the risk. The Labor Party hope to invest that money and generate a higher return on the money they invest, rather than the rate of interest they borrowed against. Let's just assume that everything goes perfectly well, that the Labor government can borrow money at four per cent and can earn a rate of return of six per cent on this $10 billion, so they have a two per cent margin. Two per cent of $10 billion is $200 million. If you assume that every house built costs $250,000, that's about 800 houses for $200 million. Labor claim that they're going to house 6,000 people as a result of this bill.

I think the only people that are really going to be making money out of this are the fund managers who get to clip the ticket on the $10 billion that they get to gamble. Of course, these are the same fund managers that get to gamble with the trillions of dollars taken from the pockets of the workers, and of course they clip the ticket on that. We know that they generate $30 billion a year. According to the Productivity Commission, the cost of superannuation is $30 billion a year. So this will also run into millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars in fees for the people—I think it's the Future Fund—who are going to manage it. So as usual, just as with the Voice and native title, there will be fund managers and lawyers and everything clipping the ticket on this and making a great deal of money at the expense of the taxpayer.

Anyway, let's just put aside the entire risk proposition here for a minute and just assume that, yes, they do manage to generate a small rate of return and manage to build houses for 6,000 people. Where are they going to find the builders to actually build these 6,000 houses? If you didn't know already, we have a labour shortage in this country. We already have a labour crisis. Thanks to the genius of the RBA when they raised interest rates, they haven't just crushed demand; they've also crushed supply. There isn't a day that goes by when we don't read about another building company that's gone under, because building companies effectively can't issue fixed-price contracts because the cost of everything is going up rapidly. Because they can't issue fixed-price contracts to the first home buyers or whoever it is that wants to get a house built, the bank won't lend to them, because they always need a fixed-price contract. So the geniuses at the RBA are not only destroying demand but destroying supply. I've long called for a productive quantitative easing program in this country, just as Lachlan Macquarie did over 200 years ago. He built the Sydney hospital and the Sydney barracks. That is the way to productivity: to build things.

Getting back to this problem, this problem has been caused by Labor's reckless immigration program, which has seen 400,000 people come in this year. It's going to decrease to 315,000 next year, but it will total about 1.5 million over the next five years. To think that building 6,000 houses is somehow going to accommodate 400,000 people is just dreaming. What are they planning on doing? Buying a bunch of dongas and putting people in dongas? I honestly have no idea how they expect this fund to be able to fund enough social housing for the number of new migrants coming into this country, as well as, of course, the natural rate of birth, the natural increase, which off the top of my head I think is 100,000 to 150,000 a year.

We've already got problems in this country. I hear from people who have jobs but can't find a place to rent. This isn't a case of people being homeless because they don't have the money to pay rent. That issue does exist, and that's a problem as well. But we have people who have incomes and are sleeping in tents. So all Labor is doing here is putting a bandaid on a much bigger problem, and it's a deflection from the much bigger problem, which is their reckless immigration policy that Australia cannot accommodate at the moment, because we just don't have an economy that is geared towards building. What we have is an economy geared towards consuming.

This is accentuated because 49 per cent of migrants are foreign students. The problem I have with this is that the people who pocket the foreign student fees, the universities, don't have to pay any income tax. If that's not a rort then I don't know what is. You have to ask yourself why it is that the Labor Party, rather than bringing in this policy, don't bring in—I've been very vocal about this before, and I know many of the Labor people follow my Facebook page, where I've done many posts on this—a policy of charging the universities an infrastructure levy. It's not just housing that immigration puts stress on; it's also all the associated infrastructure services that come with it.

I'll compare and contrast the Labor Party of today, which is really more like a Marxist or communist party, with the old traditional blue-collar party of Ben Chifley, which, after World War II, had the Snowy Hydro scheme. He got the immigrants. There were many immigrants from Europe—from Yugoslavia and places like that—who came in. If they didn't go down to the Snowy Mountains, they went up to North Queensland, and they built things. They went and they worked and they built things. The true path to productivity and prosperity in this country is true work. It is as the words of our national anthem say: it is 'wealth for toil'. It is not 'wealth for high immigration'. It is not 'wealth for changing the price of money on the first Tuesday of every month'. It is not 'wealth for gambling a $10 billion housing fund by a bunch of bureaucrats and fund managers who are already skimming $30 billion off superannuation every year'. No, no, no, no. True productivity comes from being on the tools, not pushing pens and shuffling papers.

This is just more of a movement by the Labor Party away from being on the tools. We well remember John Button's plan in 1985. They had this great idea that they'd rationalise manufacturing, and how did that turn out for us? They rationalised manufacturing, all right. They sent it all offshore. Of course, that was a great ploy by the Labor Party, because Victoria, which was once the jewel in the Liberal Party crown because it was the manufacturing state of Australia, is now the jewel in the Labor Party crown. It has now become the Marxist capital of Australia, with a rabid university sector and a rabid superannuation sector.

This is the real shame about this. If we are going to get people into housing and build the associated infrastructure, we have to get our young people to not go to university but to TAFE. We have to get them back on the tools. This levy on universities should actually go to a housing fund for infrastructure, but it should also fund students to go to TAFE. As a matter of fact, I think it's worthy that now, if anyone joins the Army, if they want to become an officer, they go to Duntroon. Why not this: if you join the Army, you go and do an apprenticeship. We could have an actual civil engineering corps within the Army that goes about building federal highways, baseload energy power stations and dams. That is what we have to do in this country.

This idea that you can change the price of money on the first Tuesday of every month is qualitative easing insanity and has got to stop. The idea that you're going to crack down on demand, punish the hardworking Australians through higher interest rates on their mortgages and basically impose austerity is insane. We should be improving productivity. The way we do that is through quantitative easing against the seven sovereign assets that I've talked about in the past—dams, power stations, road, rail, ports, airports and telecommunications. As accountants—and I know there aren't many of you in here, but it's very simple—you debit asset and credit equity, if anyone knows how to read a balance sheet. Equity is title; debt is mortgage.

We need to stop this insanity, and I'm sick and tired of hearing politicians in this place talk about how we've always relied on foreign debt. That is a complete and utter insult to the working people in this country who get out of bed every day and put their noses to the grindstone. Foreign debt is sending us broke. Why on earth do we swap our hard assets and our children's hard assets in the form of dams and power stations for foreign paper? Why do we do that? It is that simple. It is a sleight of hand where you switch a title to a mortgage. That is how our sovereignty defines us—by controlling our currency.

That was another thing in 1985, when Paul Keating decided to open the world to the capital markets: 'We'll let the foreign debt flood in.' In 1985, the four major banks had $8 billion in foreign capital. By 2008, they had $800 billion in foreign debt. And what was that money lent against? It was lent against housing. It sent the price of housing from four to five times earnings to 12 to 13 times earnings. On top of that, in 1990 John Dawkins, a former federal education minister, came up with this great idea that every child should go to university. What did that do? That just pushed back the age our children started working from 17 or 18 to 21 or 22. It meant that, before they even started work, they were broke and brainwashed. They were broke because of this punitive HECS debt that is rising every year, and they were brainwashed by the garbage that universities teach today. Then, to top it all off, Paul Keating introduced superannuation. It's bad enough that our students have to pay HECS off when they get out and start work, and it's bad enough that they're in careers that produce nothing—push a pen and shuffle paper, 'Hey, let's get a job with the future fund and gamble $10 billion on the housing fund!'—but they then have to pay superannuation on top of the HECS and on top of income tax. Why would you bother? Why are we loading our children with all of this paper debt and leaving them with very useless skills, like pushing a pen, shuffling paper and all that sort of stuff? We have to get back on the tools if we want to solve this problem.

So I say to the Labor Party: don't move this bill—this bill is silly and you have to change your mind. This is not the way forward. I will say the same thing tomorrow morning if Senator Bragg's crypto bill comes up: this gambling of paper assets in order to think that you're generating something is completely absurd. What we need to do is to sort out our productivity. It's an overused phrase: we have a productivity crisis in this country. I will nail down what it is: we push our students into university and that delays their working lives by four years. Those can be some of the most productive years of their working careers because they're young, fit and strong. That's when we need them out on the tools, because their bodies can handle it, right?

We have these other massive industries that we're pushing people into, like the financial engineering industry. We've got more academics than we need because we're teaching more students than we need. We've got more people teaching in child care—why not get grandma and grandad looking after the child? That way, we can extend their working lives and they can enjoy the sunset on their working lives with their grandchildren. Then we can get some of the 200,000 people working in child care and shift that back into the family with grandma and grandad. We need to encourage that sort of productive capacity back into doing productive things.

We have to get back our manufacturing sector and, if we're very smart with our quantitative easing, we can build more dams, power stations, roads, rail and transport. If we can lower the cost of energy and actually improve logistics, and lower the cost of business, we will be able to encourage manufacturing back onshore. And we should actually bring back stamp duty on share trading. Forty to 50 per cent of the stock market is traded by scalpers, or high-frequency traders. The money that we could raise from stamp duty should go into abolishing payroll tax. That is another way to improve our productivity and it's another way to make it more competitive for our businesses. We can bring our businesses back onshore. Another policy that needs to happen—and I've encouraged all treasurers to do this while I've been down here—is to lift the rate of withholding tax on profits that go offshore.

I say that this future fund is just another part of the problem we have in this country. Somehow, we think that gambling on and shuffling paper is actually going to create more—it will not. I say: lower the immigration rate, get our own population working again—in real industries—so that we can build our way to prosperity.