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

I speak as a servant to the many different people who make up our amazing one Queensland community. I have not yet had a chance to make fun of Treasurer Jim Chalmers's ode to soviet glory titled 'Capitalism after the crisis', so let me start there. A Treasurer with no real-world business experience, no firsthand knowledge of free markets and no life outside the machine of politics has decided to tear down Australia's economic system and rebuild it—hammer in one hand and sickle in the other. Reinventing capitalism is not visionary, as Jim Chalmers hopes; it's a cliche.

Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Roberts, can I just remind you to address people in the other place by their correct titles.

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

Mr Jim Chalmers?

Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I believe he's the Treasurer.

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

Worse, it confuses political theory with economics. The Treasurer has studied only one of those, and it's not economics. Mr Jim Chalmers has studied political science and now sees every problem as a political one. The Treasurer knows nothing about economics and clearly dismisses the need for it. How ironic that Mr Jim Chalmers's now legendary article opens with a quote from the Greek philosopher Heraclitis, when he says:

No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it's not the same river, and he's not the same man.

What? It's not without merit that Heraclitis is known as the 'obscure philosopher'. This nonsense may make the Treasurer sound smart at a dinner party for pseudo-intellectual lefties, yet, to everyday Australians struggling with the rising cost of living, falling real wages and a housing shortage, it's nothing more than intellectual masturbation.

When you hear 'command capitalism' from the Treasurer, what he's really saying to the Australian people is this: 'I don't trust you. I don't respect your choices. I don't recognise your freedom. Everything you have belongs to the state, and you will do as we command.' Commentators refer to this fantasy as Jimbonomics. That's their view. In reality, it's about threat, force and regulation designed to herd businesses into supporting fringe activism that rewards the elites at the expense of everyday people. It's about control over 'we the people'. Rather than the state owning everything directly, all the wealth in the Treasurer's economy will be owned by the billionaires that own the UN and the World Economic Forum.

Already, woke politics has engineered a rapid descent of employee privacy, with governments ranking businesses based upon the race, religion, sexual preference, gender and disability of their staff. Human beings have become commodities in the implementation phase of the great reset, the new world order. The recent Workplace Health and Safety Amendment Bill 2023 from this government actually requires an employer to know the vaccine status of their employees and to bar those people from the workplace if they are not vaccinated—inhuman. Pfizer says, 'Cheers for that bill. Thank you.' Treasurer Chalmers has lit a fire at the heart of parliament that seeks to destroy everything good and prosperous that everyday Australians, across the 235 years of Western settlement in Australia, have built.

As many have said in criticism of the Treasurer's treatise on communism, there can be no democracy without capitalism, and there is no capitalism without the free market. It's time we started asking if Labor is planning on reimagining democracy itself. Is it? The Albanese government have introduced legislation that clearly shows this is their intention, so at least the Treasurer has been honest about his intentions. Listen to this. The Treasury Laws Amendment (Energy Price Relief Plan) Bill 2022 was nationalising the gas industry. The National Reconstruction Fund Corporation Bill 2023 represents the government distorting the free market, taking it upon themselves to direct investment in manufacturing, using government money, and to stop key investments in our future. The Safeguard Mechanism (Crediting) Amendment Bill 2022 imposes egregious controls on industry, with ministerial direction to provide all of the details in the future—unfettered power. I'm sick of these bills that are all shopping bag and no shopping.

It's not the purpose of the state to give the government of the day a bill with nothing actually in it so the government can fill in all the important bits later, as it wants. Shame on the Greens and the teals for going along with this insult to the Westminster system of government. It must now be clear that George Carlin was absolutely correct: it's a club, and everyday people, everyday Australians, are not in it. Australians have never wanted the economy to be subservient to its political leaders. We have never wanted that.

Command capitalism is anticompetitive. It allows the Albanese government to decide which Australian businesses get to succeed and which fail. Why does Mr Jim Chalmers feel the need to reinvent capitalism? Why does he feel that he is the first Treasurer in Australian history that must take this step off the cliff into the abyss? I'll tell you why. The free market doesn't like what Labor is selling. The Australian people do not want to spend their money on inferior eco-products and self-serving CEOs who, so long as they achieve their carbon dioxide footprint, would happily see Australian families starve or freeze.

Net zero policies are all fun and games until the lights go off and the bugs are served cold because, well, gas is now selfish and the power has gone off again—so cold it is. Why is it that the only environments the Labor Party doesn't want to help are the investment environment and the human environment? If the market doesn't want Labor's globalist vision, then the Prime Minister and his Treasurer must accept that. They have no right, and they were not voted into power, to dismantle capitalism, reimagine it or duct tape it to a chair in the basement.

It took Mr Jim Chalmers 6,000 words to explain that values based capitalism means, 'You will do as we say.' The Soviet Union fell 30 years ago, but Treasurer Chalmers is doing his best to drape its banners all over our parliament. Treasurer, give it up. Russia has. 'Jimbonomics', as some call it, will harm small and medium-sized businesses and transfer wealth to the people at the big end of town whose market power allows them to comply with the Treasurer's demands. To comply is easy for them: pass the cost on to the consumer. That's all. From the perspective of everyday Australians, green is the new red. From the perspective of the billionaires who shadow-wrote the Treasurer's opus, green is the new gold. The only part of the Treasurer's opus that was not lifted from the World Economic Forum's Great Reset was the part that was deliberately left out: you will own nothing and you will be happy. Who will own what everyday Australians are no longer allowed to own—the houses, cars, furniture and electronics? Why, it'll be the predatory billionaires for whom Jim Chalmers is just a mouthpiece.

Commanding the market during COVID has wrecked the market. Wages are falling, inflation is out of control and economic activity is down. Exports have grown in countries that ran their economies better than we did. They have the demand and the economic strength. Now Jim Chalmers wants to use more command economics to get us out of the hole in which command economics has buried us. Australia will not survive a second round of abuse from a treasurer who is handsy with other people's money. Markets do not belong to Mr Jim Chalmers. They do not belong to the Labor Party. Markets belong to the people and their private businesses. They belong to Australians. The big business investors in whose pockets the Treasurer so often resides, bankers in particular, would like nothing more than to kill off their market competition and to bury the small and medium-sized businesses in a new mountain of controls and regulatory bondage. Their deaths will be celebrated in the name of saving the planet. Make no mistake: destroying small and medium-sized businesses is the goal, not the unintended consequence, of green politics.

For Labor, dealing with a handful of powerful CEOs is easier than dealing with 10 million small directors. But those directors are the ones keeping Australia back from the brink of ruin. The safest economies in history have been the nimble free markets. It has been repeatedly proven. They adapt to disasters, bounce back after injury and seek out the best solutions for the future. Free markets are far smarter than Jim Chalmers. The beauty of free markets is that they are smarter by far than any individual or group, and sensible, honest people know this. Competent people know this. Jim Chalmers and his Soviet counterparts are too arrogant, or maybe too fearful, to understand that basic truth. The secret to being a truly great treasurer is to step back, relinquish power, cut regulation, lower taxes and let Australians do what Australians do best: lift themselves up through their own hard work and enterprise.

Businesses are not ideological vessels to carry Labor's election slogans, tied to the Greens and the teals. Businesses are not fodder in the insatiable thirst for more money, more power and more influence from the billionaires at the World Economic Forum. It is about control. Shame on the Treasurer for reaching well beyond his mandate. Put your greedy paws back in your pockets. It's time for the Treasurer and the Prime Minister to tell their billionaire masters, 'No.' We have one flag, we are one community and we are one nation, founded as a penal colony. I'll be damned if the One Nation party will let you take us back there again.

Senate adjourned at 20:34