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

I rise to take note of all questions. In particular, I'd like to take note of Senator Colbeck's last question today. He asked, 'Why are Australians increasingly being kept in the dark because of the Prime Minister's mismanagement and broken promises?' He also noted that 'the Prime Minister promised that when he was elected there would be transparency, accountability and integrity'. There is nothing that grinds my gears more than when governments refuse to be accountable and transparent. The Prime Minister said, prior to the last election, that his was going to be a different government; he was going to be accountable and he was going to be transparent. Yet, within months of coming to office, that promise was broken.

He refused to release the minutes of the National Cabinet meetings that he had with the premiers, despite saying that he would. We are still waiting for the Prime Minister to release the minutes of those meetings. Those meeting minutes matter, because we need to know what's going on between the federal and state governments. As I've noted many times before in this chamber, our country is being run into the ground by the dysfunctional relationship between the state and federal governments. That's a really key point, and a promise the Prime Minister has broken.

He also said that we would have a royal commission into COVID. He has not met that promise yet. That particular motion has been put forward, here in this chamber, a number of times and Labor and the Greens have voted against it every time. It's another example of Labor's lack of transparency. He's also knocked back an inquiry into the impact of transmission lines on the environment. Here's a government that claims to care about the environment yet refuses to look into the impact on our environment, our biodiversity, our nature, farmlands and our fisheries of wind turbines, both in national parks and offshore, in our fishing reserves. I note that state governments are cracking down on our fishermen at the moment, yet they turn a blind eye to the impact of wind turbines on the environment. The same goes for North Queensland. We've got the Chalumbin wind farm proposal up in the Great Barrier Reef catchment. They can build up there, on the Great Dividing Range, with hardly any environmental approvals, while our farmers are bogged down in both green tape and red tape.

The other point that's worth noting is that Prime Minister Albanese has been unable to provide any details on the Voice. When he was asked in a radio interview if he'd read the pages behind the so-called one-page document of the Voice, his words were: 'No, I haven't. Why would I?' What type of response is that, to holding a referendum on which we're going to spend—I think it's $80 million to hold the referendum on the day, and there's been a couple of hundred million dollars in advertising, so I'm led to led to believe the cost is about $300 million. When you're spending so much taxpayer money when we have a cost-of-living crisis—that's what he should be focused on, because he's broken many promises there—what type of response is that? That just goes to show he's treating the Australian public with contempt over this Voice. Yet again, you have to ask yourself, 'What is he hiding?' Why is he so keen to not talk about the pages that lead into that one page of the Voice? There are 120 pages that have been written behind that one page. You need to go into the detail, but we know that the Prime Minister is not a details man. He's all hot air. He's all form, no substance—and this is why the country is going backwards.

The other thing that he voted on, and the Labor Party voted against in this chamber, was the proposal to have a quarterly report on energy pricing so that people could properly benchmark energy prices. What gets measured, gets improved. It is very important that we get a benchmark on our energy prices that is broken down by the source of the energy and shows how much each particular energy type is. Why on earth did Labor and the Greens vote against that? If they were serious about controlling energy costs and the price of electricity, they would disclose the price of energy on a consistent national basis so that consumers and taxpayers can be properly informed about the cost of living. So I call out the Albanese government for their lack of transparency, their lack of accountability and their lack of details around the things that matter.