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

I rise today to speak to the fact that the Albanese Labor government has no solutions for the cost-of-living crisis and for the first 16 months of their term in government they have wasted $400 million on an idea that went up in smoke. It was something that the Australian people never asked for and never wanted, and on the weekend they voted a resounding no to the Voice, yet Anthony Albanese and his little narrowminded view of the world thought that we needed to divide this country by race. What a disgrace.

What makes it even worse is the fact that we have been going through a cost-of-living crisis, brought about by a COVID overreach, an energy crisis and all of these bad government policies driving up the cost of living, and the Prime Minister's response has been to focus on feelings rather than facts. The facts of the matter are this: the Australian people are doing it tough. They are doing it tough.

It's about time we saw the Albanese Labor government provide some solutions for the rental crisis. But what's their solution? Higher immigration, which is all designed to aid and abet the inner-city Marxists who teach at our universities so that our students can come out and graduate brainwashed and bankrupt. They are the only people benefiting from immigration. Of course it might help Labor get a few more votes, because God knows anyone who has lived in this country long enough knows you would never vote Labor if you want to hold onto your hard-earned wages. If they're not stealing it through your taxes, they're stealing it through superannuation, and, if they're not stealing it through superannuation, they're stealing it through higher energy prices.

I say that it is about time the Labor government actually started to focus on the thing that matters to the Australian people. That is, they want to keep their hard-earned wages in their pockets. We have a rental crisis, or a housing crisis, brought about by high immigration and an out-of-control RBA whose only solution to anything is to increase the cost of interest. There's no talk about issuing new shares and building new infrastructure to increase the supply of energy, water, transport and better roads. No, no. All they can do is impose austerity upon the Australian people.

We have an energy crisis as well. Power prices are through the roof. The Labor government love to blame it on what's going on in Ukraine, but here's the thing: Australia has abundant reserves of coal, gas and nuclear. Why don't we use our own homegrown resources to supply the raw materials needed to produce energy? No, no. The Labor government would rather import renewables built overseas and shut down our own local industries. That is a disgrace. That is an absolute disgrace.

We have the cost-of-living crisis compounded by the rental crisis and the energy crisis, and then we have Labor's obsession with red tape, green tape, blue tape and all these fees and costs that everyone has to comply with in order to get any business done in this country. We've seen that with IR laws that are actually going to make it harder to do business. We see that with so many other aspects in the economy where Labor wants to impose command and control over every aspect of an individual's or a business's decision-making process. We could supply more services into the economy, such as more power stations, whether it be coal, gas or nuclear, or build more dams so we can have more water on our beautiful black soil across all parts of Australia, to supply more food, or, heaven forbid, have cheaper energy to restart our manufacturing process. Do Labor want to do anything about that? No. They want to increase the superannuation rate so that workers pay more money to the rent-seeking, white-collar parasites in their ivory palaces in Sydney and Melbourne and other means of doing business as well.