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

I support this motion because history proves that this motion is correct. We only have to go back to 1850, the time of my forefathers in Ireland, when there was what's known as the great potato famine. In actual fact, it was potato blight. Of course, many millions of Irish people starved while the English landlords were exporting wheat to the UK and on to the world. This is why we must always control our agricultural land. It is always very important that Australia can feed its own population first.

I should qualify that by saying that Ireland had a population that was, off the top of my head, the same as it is today, but their population basically halved within a couple of decades, both through the diaspora and, of course, through massive starvation. It's something we forget about today when we often talk about immigration and all of these issues and foreign ownership, but we shouldn't because a large percentage of Australians came from that Irish diaspora in the 1850s. We also need tighter controls over housing. Currently, foreigners are allowed to buy new home buildings and new units. I have to ask why that is the case when we have so many tens of thousands of Australians that are homeless. It only drives up demand. Last week, though, I read in the Australian Financial Review that what appeared to be an immigrant was allowed to buy housing here, so we need much tighter controls over our real estate agents.

I have raised this issue in estimates before: when you do your tax return today, your PAYG income will be automatically uploaded into your tax return, your interest from your bank account will automatically be uploaded into your tax return and your dividends will be automatically uploaded into your tax return. But what isn't uploaded is the rental income you receive. This is a problem because foreigners are buying rental properties and the real estate agent can collect and then repatriate that money directly overseas. That money never gets declared to the tax office, and that has become a money-laundering issue. Another issue I raised was that money was being laundered through agricultural property. Foreigners were buying land here in Australia. Then they could launder the money out through both asset sales and rental income because real estate agents don't have to get a tax file number or withhold money, as that rental money is paid offshore.

We need to look at the reason why one of the largest growths in immigration is as a result of foreign students coming to this country. That is a direct result of what happened in 1985 when Paul Keating lifted capital controls. He effectively overturned the advice given to the Australian people in the 1937 banking royal commission by none other than Ben Chifley, where he said the central bank must always control a volume of credit in the system. Because Paul Keating lifted these capital controls, foreign debt held by the four big retail banks went from $8 billion to $800 billion in 23 years, from 1985 to 2008. That meant house prices went from four times average earnings to 12 times average earnings, which meant the two parents had to go to work. When we had the GFC in 2008, there was the risk of a housing collapse because a lot of older people lost a lot of money. So, in order to prop up housing, Kevin Rudd, in the Christmas of 2008—December 2008, I remember it well—allowed the parents of foreign students to come here and buy houses in Australia. That then fed the banking industry—which of course, as we well know, is a massive sector of our economy. It was also the start of the rise of the university sector and of foreign students, here—basically to prop up the Ponzi scheme that housing is in this country.

The other thing we need to do if we want to sort out foreign investment in this country is to lift the rate of withholding tax on profits sent offshore. There's a lot of hoo-ha about Donald Trump at the moment introducing tariffs, yet we have had reverse tariffs in this country for decades because the tax on profits sent offshore is much lower than the tax on profits here in Australia. That encourages foreign investors. They get a natural arbitrage opportunity to come into this country and undercut—or 'outbid' is probably a better way of putting it—Australians when it comes to buying assets. Foreign investors can actually repatriate those profits offshore and pay no tax, because our tax treaties, in the name of attracting foreign capital, provide a lower tax rate to foreigners than they do to Australians who retain their profits here. So I fully support this motion. We must make Australia great again and put Australia first.