Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Oh, yes—Gympie! I should have known, from Gympie. We popped into the Gympie Times, and I passed a comment as to how Susan McDonald had rolled Barry O'Sullivan. Well, didn't I cop it from head office! I should have seen the writing on the wall then; head office had it in for me then, over this little remark. But I digress. That's a story for another day, but I'm glad you reminded me about that, Senator Scarr. Indeed, you can't just pop into a town nowadays and do a cold call, because these small papers in regional towns have collapsed. And we need them for local content.

Also I don't think it's right that you can have the same content on radio, newspapers and TV. I think it's very important that we have a range and diversity of opinion—and, by all means, we're getting that now through social media. I'll tell you what: it's going to be interesting to see what happens in the States if Trump and JD Vance continue to use social media as their platform and turn their backs on the mainstream media. They will be in big trouble.

But, having said that, we do need to have our little guys out in the regions, and even in the metropolitan areas. I know we used to have the Quest newspapers in Brisbane. So that's a policy that I will be advocating.

Now, I do want to reduce immigration. I'm not going to reduce it to zero, because I believe that we are a country that has been built on immigration. I myself am descended from immigrants. But I would like to reduce immigration to between 80,000 and 100,000, and predominantly to the regions. I think it's very important that we do have immigrants come to this country. They do contribute. We can get them out into the regions. I know we need them in hospitality areas. I know our farmers need them. But I do think that we just cannot sustain the rate of immigration that we have at the moment. I will be supporting Labor's caps. I'm not saying their policy is perfect, but we need to make a genuine attempt at reducing immigration so that we can catch up with infrastructure and housing and providing essential services.

The other thing I'd like to do is to devolve responsibility for the curriculum back to the state governments. Ironically enough, it was actually the Howard government that brought in a national curriculum. I think one of the worst things we could ever do, for the curriculum and education in this country, is to have a curriculum set by a centralised department in Canberra. I think we should have a competition of ideas when it comes to education and we should basically go back to the way it used to be, where state governments and the schools, in conjunction with the parents, set their curriculum for those particular schools, and they could tailor it to what they wanted. We want independent thinking in this country. We don't want our ideas and thoughts being centralised in Canberra.

Now, the other thing I will do is to refute climate change policy, and I'll need another whole 15 or 20 minutes to talk about thermodynamics and Einstein's special theory of relativity and why energy equals mass. But, to cut a long story short, what we really need to be focused on are practical solutions—things like keeping our riparian zones clean, keeping pollution out of the oceans and making sure that we protect our biodiversity and fauna. That is very, very important. We need measures like that, and we need to make that we get feral pigs, feral goats, dingoes and feral cats out of national parks. I can speak to that because my brother's property in Western Queensland is next door to a national park and we have feral pests coming across all the time, because they aren't being managed properly.

The last thing I will talk about is that I want to abolish native title where there is no continuous connection with the land. I'm happy to respect the original Mabo decision and the Wik decision, where there was continuous association with the land, but now we have native title over parts of cities. The site of Waverton Bowling Club in Sydney has been handed over. That was my old stomping ground back in the day when I lived in Sydney. There's no continuous connection with the land there, and we're getting all these claims made over vast tracts of land in Queensland. I think it's unsustainable. I think common land is just that: it's common land. It belongs to all Australians, and we need to promote one race, the human race, and focus on looking forward. (Time expired)

Senate adjourned at 20:51