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

I rise today to speak to Senator Lambie's matter of public importance on the fact that the government has failed to introduce or implement policies to promote wealth equality in this country. The Labor government has a long, long history of driving wealth inequality in this country. I'll go way back to the 1980s and 1990s to the introduction of superannuation. That effectively drove up the cost of living, and it's still rising. If you wanted to deal with the cost of living, you could put a pause on increasing the amount of superannuation being contributed, being forced, being taken out of people's pockets. Next week you are going to have to take another half a per cent of your salary and give it to someone you have never met, and you may or may not get it back when you are 67. This is a classic example of wealth inequality, because we have $30 billion in fees every year paid to manage superannuation accounts. I think that's a little bit less than what is spent on the military. Imagine how many base-load power stations you could build if you actually set about spending money on more productive means.

But I ask you this: why on earth are you taking money out of people's pockets when, today, we have just seen inflation jump back up to four per cent? There are genuine concerns now we're going to see another rate rise. If the interest rate rises, that's going to impact the 33 per cent of people in this country who have mortgages and it is going to impact the other 30 per cent of people who pay rent. Those people that pay rent, they rent from landlords who often rent out their property or whatever and have it negatively geared or even positively geared. So they are going to stick rents up as well. So we're going to have 60 to 70 per cent of people in this country lying awake tonight—not just tonight but for the next number of years—hoping and praying that the RBA governor doesn't increase interest rates again. While people may have been able to sustain the first few increases in interest rates, it is getting harder and harder. It's like one of those machines you see at the show where you put in your 20c and it slides out, eventually, and then a few coins fall over. Eventually, you are going to have a big bundle of people falling over, because that mortgage rate cliff is getting steeper and steeper, and more and more people are being pushed towards it.

The easiest lever to pull to reduce demand in this country is to lower the rate of immigration, especially in regard to higher education, where they are not necessarily out in the workforce increasing supply. Today's immigration is very different to the days in the earlier history of Australia. After World War I, immigrants came in and built Lake Hume and Lake Eildon. After World War II, they built the Snowy Hydro project. They came into North Queensland and they contributed to increasing the amount of land under agriculture and under irrigation. That is the type of immigration we need in this country—people who are going to come here, go to the regions and increase the supply of goods and services. But we are not seeing that. What we are seeing is a massive rise in the number of students coming here and going to university. Yes, they may get a job as an Uber driver, delivering ice cream to people's homes, but that is not productivity.

The other thing we need to see is money going into base-load power, because there is no substitute for cheap, reliable energy. What we have seen is that $23 billion has been allocated in this year's budget for renewable energy projects. The problem with renewable energy projects is that there is the usual conga line of wealthy rent seekers lining up, many of whom aren't even Australians, to be on the receiving end of that money. That's $23 billion of hard-earned taxpayer money going into renewables that aren't reliable, that aren't efficient and that are only driving up the cost of energy and destroying the environment as well. So we need to see a much better policy by the Albanese government that is going to deal with the wealth distribution in this country so that it is distributed in a much more equitable way.