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

I rise tonight to speak about the key policies introduced by the People First Party, albeit it's one person. I think it's very important to note that it is a party that actually has some key policies that seek to empower hardworking Australians, the individual, and their families.

If there's one thing I've noticed about politics in this country, it's that we have a three-year cycle of the Punch and Judy show in this chamber, whereby the major parties come in here and criticise each other. Then they'll call an election and spend half of the election campaign being asked, 'When are you going to release your policies?' Finally, about three weeks out from the election, they'll start releasing policies. The election is held, and then they go back into another three-year cycle of the Punch and Judy show.

Let me tell you that, under this party, it's going to be different. In the very first week after my departure from the LNP, I was happy to put out five key policies, and I'm happy to stand by them and to debate them in this chamber or with any other politician in any other media outlet or with the media themselves. I will quote Rob Sitch, from that great show The Hollowmenfor some reason it's been forgotten about; it's been surpassed by Utopia, but I always thought The Hollowmen was the better of the two shows. I well remember the program where he was talking about policies and he came up with this idea that you've got to have a raft of policies. In many ways that's how you would describe the major parties' policies; they're a raft. They're basically drifting around on the ocean with a bamboo pole. There is no rudder or outboard motor powering the Australian people. The Australian people are looking for leadership in politics. They are looking for politicians who have a vision and a way forward as to how their children and themselves are going to get the same opportunities our forefathers gave to us and how they're going to ensure they have a prosperous and comfortable life.

Many Australians are concerned about the direction we are heading in. They are of the view that in the last 40 years we have seen governments sell all the infrastructure they're responsible for—they've privatised that infrastructure. They've walked away from providing essential services and marched into the family home, the classroom, the bedroom, the corporate boardroom and the doctor's waiting room, telling people what to do in their personal lives. We need to reverse that. The process in the last 40 years is that we've effectively nationalised people's private assets and personal wealth, and then gone and privatised public assets by the infrastructure.

My five key policies that I want to promote over the next eight to 10 months of this term are the following. First, I want to lift the tax-free threshold to $40,000. That would give those people who earn up to $40,000 a $3½ thousand tax cut. There is one thing that's always grinded my gears in this country—the fact that low-income earners have to pay tax below the cost of living. These are the people that get out of bed every day and put their nose to the grindstone when in many circumstances it'd be easier to stay in bed or maybe get welfare or give up—and they don't. This country was built by the battlers, and it's those people on low incomes that have to keep going. In all cases, these people are keeping the wheels of industry turning. I started off on a low income myself. I jackarooed; I worked in pubs and bars and picked fruit and whatnot. A lot of that work was often harder than some of the work I did later in my life when I was sitting in an office pushing a pen and shuffling paper. I've never forgotten those people. My first role after I graduated was in public practice. I'd often do the tax returns for these people, and they really relied on getting a tax refund because that was going to be the difference between them getting ahead or falling further behind. We owe it to those people.

We need to call out the Treasury and the way they model the velocity of money, the way they model tax cuts, because they don't assume secondary impacts when modelling tax cuts. That discriminates against tax cuts for low-income earners. Let me assure you; if you give a $1,000 tax cut to someone on $40,000, most of that money will end up in the Treasury coffers within 12 months because those people will go out and spend that money straightaway just to meet the cost of living. I hear some people say, 'Won't that cause inflation?' It'll cause very little inflation for these two reasons. Firstly, elasticity of demand when you're living below the cost of living is very elastic. These people will have to go out and buy things, and they will end up using a credit card to do it. They will use credit and get further into debt just to keep their heads above water. Secondly, who is it that supplies the goods and services in this country? It is the people that get out of bed and put their nose to the grindstone, whether it's workers or small businesses, that actually deliver goods and services. If you cut the tax on the delivery of goods and services, you will increase the supply of goods and services. I don't want to hear any pushback. If anyone wants to debate me on this—that somehow giving a tax cut to working Australians is a bad thing—bring it on. It's not, and we can't afford not to do it.

The second policy that I want to push forward is the fact that we should be paying child care directly to the parents. We have millions of shiftworkers out there. We have nurses and police who work late hours at shiftwork. I know my mum used to come home at 10 o'clock at night and go to bed. She'd get to bed by 10.30 and have to turn around and be up at 5.30 to get back to work at six. They don't have time to necessarily pick their child up at six o'clock at night or drop them off in the morning on their way to work, because the childcare centre isn't open.

We have millions of part-time workers who might work three or four hours a day but pay for 12 hours of child care. Why are we increasing demand on childcare places? To book these places now, often you've got to book a childcare centre for a term or a year to get your child in child care. You're paying for child care often when you don't need it. We have fly-in fly-out workers who might have 10 days rostered on and five days off. That's their weekend, and yet they will have to pay for child care when they don't need it. We have other people who want to work from home and may only need a nanny for a few hours a day. Why do they actually have to take their child to the childcare centre and not let the nanny come to their place? That in itself is creating more stress and time pressures on people that have to meet deadlines. And then we have our farmers who have to drive in and out of work. So we need to provide greater flexibility in child care.

The third thing we need to do is give greater flexibility in terms of superannuation. Superannuation is not working. In 1992, 50 per cent of retirees were on a full pension. Today, 50 per cent of retirees are on a full pension. We have not shifted the dial on reducing the number of retirees on a pension at all, despite the fact that we give $50 billion in tax concessions to the mainly upper 25 per cent of income earners, and the pension costs $54 billion for the bottom 50 per cent on the full pension and the 21 per cent of retirees on a part pension. It is unsustainable. We cannot afford to be paying $30 billion in fees to the white-collar workers in their ivory palaces to manage other people's money. I've spoken about superannuation many times, so I'll touch on that later.

The fourth thing is that there are a number of measures through which I want to pay for these income tax cuts. No. 1 is to remove the duplication of the bureaucrats in the state and federal bureaucracy. No. 2 is that I want to means test the defined benefits scheme. We have over 40,000 retired public servants who get over $75,000 a year. That is estimated by Finance to cost $137 billion. We have 30,000 retired public servants who get between $50,000 and $75,000 a year. That is going to cost the budget over the forward estimates and over the life of the defined benefits scheme $90 billion. Many of these people were on high salaries before they left work. They should have an assets and income test applied to them just like everyone in the private sector. It is ridiculous that multimillionaires are getting gold-plated pensions from the taxpayer, many of whom are on low incomes paying tax above $18,200.

The last policy that I want to talk about is bringing back a public bank. We sold the Commonwealth Bank in 1992 for $8 billion. Today it makes $10 billion a year. We've got branches closing in the regions. We've got a decline in the level of service in those banks. We need to bring back a government insurance office. We've got businesses and people out there in Australia that can't get basic insurance. What we need to do is reform our monetary policy in this country, and the best way to do that is by securing our infrastructure against the need to expand the volume of credit as we have a rise in population. That's not my opinion; that was the opinion of the 1937 banking royal commission.

I look forward to fighting for these policies over the next eight to 10 months.