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

I move:

That the Senate take note of all answers to questions without notice asked today.

I will start by saying that the performance by Senator Wong was quite unbecoming. It was basically just a shouting match to try and shut down the fact that the Labor government has no plan.

This Christmas, we will see tens of thousands of Australians living out on the streets as a result of Labor's reckless government throughout the last 18 months. For the first 16 months, all they could focus on was virtue signalling with their identity politics and the Voice, and $450 million was wasted on nothing. While this was happening, they opened up the borders and allowed the floodgates to open. We saw a rise in immigration, which is now tracking to be 600,000 annually. On top of that, we've now seen the release of 143 hardened criminals, five of which have already breached their conditions. Not only have we got homelessness, high energy prices, a high cost of living and high rents, but now we've got criminals out on the streets. That echoes what's going on in my home state of Queensland, where crime is through the roof. We've got ambulance ramping through the roof. Why? Because we have Labor governments in power across the country, who do not know how to manage the economy or how to uphold law and order. It is a great concern. If anyone was going to play the Grinch this Christmas, it would have to be Prime Minister Albanese, because so many people are doing it tough.

Earlier this week, we saw a pathetic attempt by Senator Watt to make a big statement to Coles and Woolworths. He wants to put a cap on the price of ham. Well, I can assure you that the price of ham is the least of people's problems, as they struggle to fill the tanks, as they're sitting out there waiting for an ambulance to arrive, as they're sitting there on a Saturday morning looking for a place to rent, as they log on to their NetBank accounts only to find that their credit card has been maxed out, or as they're waiting to hear back from their insurance company because their car has been broken into. Law and order is out of control. The cost of living is out of control.

Then we've got our poor old farmers out there in regional Australia, who are doing it tough. Many times I've touched on how the decline of essential services is gutting regional Australia. Labor's response to that is to introduce the nature repair bill, which is basically going to pay wealthy foreigners to come in, buy Australian land and shut it down. That will only destroy more jobs in the regions, which will then flow into the cities and destroy more jobs as the Labor government destroys Australia, destroys its economy and eventually shuts everything down. The question has to be: how much longer can the people, the hard workers of Australia, sustain this type of pressure? That is the question that we will see in 2024.

There is one thing that has shocked me. Regardless of the outcome of the referendum, cost of living should have always been front and centre. You would have thought that, regardless of the outcome, coming out of the referendum Labor would have had a plan to deal with the cost of living. But they haven't got a plan. Their only plan is to keep immigration high and to keep subsidising more foreign built and foreign owned renewables. That is driving up the cost of energy, that is sending businesses offshore and that is basically shutting down our agricultural sector and our mining sector. Those two sectors are what's keeping Australia afloat. The other thing we've seen in these last two sitting weeks is that we're basically now pulling 450 gigalitres out of the Murray-Darling system only for it to flow down to the Lower Lakes and evaporate. We've already got 900 gigalitres evaporating in the Lower Lakes down there.