Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Rennick for his motion. I compliment his intellect and understanding—his technical and financial understanding and his understanding of history. I'm going to read the motion because I think it's fitting. This is a very significant motion, which I will be supporting. It says:

That the following matter be referred to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee for inquiry and report by 10 December 2024:

The benefits of conducting a Federal Convention to examine the ambiguous roles between the state, territory and federal governments considering, but not limited to, the following issues—

I'll go through those issues and respond to each in turn, so I will deal with the terms of reference.

I want to point out something that Senator Brockman pointed out and add to it. Systems drive behaviour, and behaviour shapes attitudes. The combination of behaviour and attitudes, plus values, symbols and leadership, shapes culture, but systems are an enormously powerful driver of culture. And culture, as we all know and increasingly understand through business and other organisations, is fundamental to productivity, fundamental to safety, fundamental to quality and fundamental to security. Culture is crucial. As I go through these terms of reference and make some points, please think about the systems and the behaviours that are driving this, and the culture, because our culture in this country is falling to bits. And think about productivity, which is the key to wealth creation.

I'm going to read some figures here from a paper titled 'The Australian precedence for a Hamiltonian credit system'. On page 15 it says that a paper presented to cabinet calculated the value added in exporting aluminium ore, or bauxite, versus processed aluminium, in 1970 dollars. I'll convert that to 2022 dollars. Exporting one million tonnes of bauxite, the raw material, earned $65 million. Processed one step into alumina, it earned $355 million—5½ times as much for Australians. Processed again into aluminium, it earned $1.6 billion—25 times the value of the ore. Finally, processed into aluminium products, it earned $7.8 billion; that's 120 times the value. You can see the wealth that has been created. Instead of just mining red dirt in Western Australia and other places in the country and shipping it overseas, if we process it here we can generate enormous wealth—almost $8 billion worth of wealth, instead of $65 million.

This is from the terms of reference:

(a) the need to streamline the duplication of bureaucracies to save billions of dollars in bureaucratic waste and reduce unnecessary regulations—

Look at the health department and the education department—duplicated at state and federal level, a complete waste of money. Worse than that, it destroys accountability, because when there's a problem with education the federal points to the states and the states point to the federal, and nothing happens. A culture of blame is created. Think about the behaviours and the culture developed under this kind of system.

We need to get rid of that, streamline the bureaucracies and end the duplication to improve productivity. Productivity in the government is abysmal in this country. We're shutting down the private sector, which has high productivity and generates enormous wealth, and transferring it to low productivity.

I'll read the second term of reference:

(b) the lack of accountability and transparency between the state, territory and federal governments—

This goes to the heart of the problem. I listened to a wonderful mayor, dedicated to his town. He pointed out to me that the federal government has the money and the states have the power, through regulations and legislation—because the Constitution has handed them the power for most of the services provided by government—and the local councils have the problems. Now, councils have accounting system problems in terms of their accounting systems driving inadequate behaviours. But the councils depend upon grants, which are sometimes three years in advance or five years in advance, which means local councils do very little in the way of long-term planning; they can't.

But the fathers of the Constitution, our country's forefathers, pinched an idea from America—competitive federalism, which basically means that sovereign independent states are competing with each other to provide the best services, or the most efficient services. The same thing has happened here, and that drives accountability, because if a state does poorly in something then people leave the state and go somewhere else; if a state does well in something, people come to that state. When Joh Bjelke-Petersen, a former premier of Queensland, abolished death duties, people around Australia flocked to the Gold Coast because when they died they could leave their money to their children. And what happened? With that improvement, other states did the same, because they lost people if they didn't.

So competitive federalism is a marketplace in governance, and that's what we need, because at the moment we have central domination of our system, just like what America has sadly evolved into—a central government domination. There's no marketplace in governance. There's very little accountability. The states blame the federal government, and the federal government blames the states. So we need a marketplace in governance to be restored.

Australia, 120 years ago, was the world's wealthiest country in terms of per capita income. We need to get back to that. We have the resources; we have the best resources in the world. We have great people. The education system sucks, but we can get back to a proper education system. We need to restore accountability and we need to bring back competitive federalism, and these terms of reference so far are on the right track.

Term of reference (c) is 'the need for state and territory governments to raise their own revenue to reduce their reliance on federal government funding'. I completely agree. States used to have the right to raise income tax. That was taken away as a war measure in 1942 or 1943 by the federal government and hasn't come back. I would suggest that we need to seriously look at stripping the federal government of income tax powers and, as the terms of reference say, give them back to the states. Let the states be accountable for what they raise and for their interest rates. At least have the debate. When a state raises money, it's accountable for its spending. If it needs to go to its taxpayers for more, then let the taxpayers—the voters—make up their minds. This would bring real accountability and significant productivity improvement.

Term of reference (d) is 'the need for federal grants and goods and services tax allocations to state and territory governments to be much more transparent, efficient and effective'. I wholeheartedly agree. We need comprehensive tax reform to make the GST transparent. Why not just have comprehensive tax reform to see whether the GST can't be abolished and replaced with a far more productive system? Under the GST, states like Western Australia generate the majority of the revenue, and states like South Australia and Tasmania are on the tit for money. They don't have to produce. They don't have to be productive. They don't have to develop their resources. They don't have to be accountable. Queensland, I'm sad to say—at least a couple of years ago—one of the wealthiest states in the world, was a net recipient of GST. That's an absolute disgrace, and that's because of the Beattie-Bligh-Palaszczuk-Miles governments that have destroyed budgets, destroyed the economy in Queensland, exacerbated the revenue problems and created so much waste.

So why not have the states raising the tax? At least have a discussion. It's not the states raising the tax in addition to the federal government; it's instead of the federal government raising income tax. And then have the state governments determine how much they will share with the federal government—accountability and productivity again.

Then we go to term of reference (e), 'the need for the implementation of a coordinated infrastructure funding facility to provide capital for sovereign infrastructure'. A long-term plan—wouldn't that be wonderful? Councils, state governments and federal governments would have long-term plans. It would streamline approval processes.

And what about the project that I've introduced into the Senate? It wasn't my idea. It was the idea of Lang Hancock and maybe even someone before him in Western Australia: Project Iron Boomerang. Restore Australia to being a significant player in high-quality, value-added steel and one of the biggest producers of steel in this world. We've already got, according to proponents of the project, significant interest from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, communist China, Indonesia and, potentially, India and Saudi Arabia in that project. Instead of sending ships loaded with our iron ore from Western Australia and our coal from our east coast, in Central Queensland, we would send coal to the west coast and make steel there, mixing it with the iron ore, and send iron ore to the east coast and make steel there, at Abbot Point. We would have up to 10 steel mills at each end, which would make us a significant producer of steel, which would add productivity, value, security, accountability and wealth generation—enormous wealth generation.

As Senator Rennick said, we can convert nature's blessings into products and services that will meet people's needs. Why ship our raw materials overseas so someone else can do the value-adding? We need to do that here in this country. Connecting the west coast to the east coast with a railway line and having steel mills at both ends would make it very productive. It would open up the whole of Central Australia, the whole of North Queensland and the whole of northern Western Australia and would give the communities in those remote areas access to water from a pipeline, access to communications and access to a railway line, eventually bringing tourists and investors from around the world and exporting products to the rest of the world.

Let's look at term of reference (f):

the need for the Corps of Royal Australian Engineers to take responsibility for building and maintaining all national land transport network roads …

I'm not so sure about this, because it doesn't comply with the true federal system. States need to retain responsibility and accountability, but we need to have the debate. We need to start that debate, and that's what I compliment Senator Rennick for in raising this.

We also need to consider the use of data in our federal government. Data is ignored, contradicted, twisted and misrepresented in this country, and by this federal parliament in particular. We need to get back to good governance through the use of data in making decisions.

I will just take this opportunity—I've mentioned it to one or two senators in the place here—to ask: why don't senators sit in state groups? This is not only the house of review; it is the states house. It is here to protect the states. It is for those reasons—and, above all, to start the debate on how we can improve and restore our country so that it is productive and so that all Australians can be wealthy—that I commend Senator Rennick for moving this motion. I will be supporting it.