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

I rise tonight to talk about People First holding the establishment to account with its policies. There is what I would like to call a motorboat of policies that I'm about to discuss tonight, and I will compare those with the major parties who have a raft of policies—thanks Rob Sitch. A raft is something that just floats in the water; you have a little bamboo pole and you're going around in circles at a very slow rate. That's one of the great things about being an Independent, I can get out there and talk about the policies that matter to the Australian people without being shackled down with all the palaver that goes on inside the major parties.

The first policy I want to introduce that will hold the establishment to account is to improve whistleblower protections. If there's one thing that we really need to uphold in this place, it is the brave and courageous public servants and bureaucrats who can see that there's something wrong inside their departments and they want to speak up. I have spoken to a number of whistleblowers throughout my time in parliament. One in particular was with regard to the Leppington Triangle. He was stripsearched by the Federal Police in his own house; he had his computer files and everything raided. This was all over the bogus claim that the Leppington Triangle was purchased for more than it should have been. Of course, that was completely ridiculous because if anyone knows anything about land valuations, 30 acres of land was not worth $3 million. That means one acre is worth $100,000. One acre is 4,000 square metres. So basically, you're saying a 500-square-metre block in Sydney would have been worth 12½ thousand dollars. I don't think so.

There have been other cases of whistleblowers coming to me, in particular from the TGA and also AHPRA. Throughout the COVID period people were very afraid to speak up. I've had people come to me from Home Affairs. Indeed, I had one very brave whistleblower who came to me from Home Affairs with all the posts where Home Affairs basically advised Facebook that they thought that they should be censored. It is absolutely disgraceful that the federal government—a coalition government!—was censoring its own people throughout COVID.

In the end, this whistleblower knew if he did this, he'd lose his job—and sure enough he did—but he said he'd reached a point where he could no longer work within the department anymore. He felt the role of that particular department was to protect the people. They weren't interested in protecting the people; they were only interested in controlling the people. So, the first policy that People First will be advocating for in respect of holding the establishment to account will be to improve protections for whistleblowers so that they can speak up.

The second thing I'm still going to advocate for, even though it didn't get up this afternoon, is that we need an independent judicial commission. The Queensland Law Society says that we need an independent judicial commission. I understand that is the Labor Party's own policy, yet for some strange reason they have not brought that legislation up throughout the course of their time in government, so since May 2022. And that's very disappointing. The question needs to be put: who will judge the judges? Politicians are held to account at elections. Ministers and governments are held to account through estimates. Who holds the judges to account? That's not just in terms of the decisions they make, but, often, in terms of the administration itself. If the administration is inefficient, slow and unwieldy, it costs people a lot of money, and justice should be free for all in a fair and transparent society. So I will continue to advocate for an independent judicial commission. I think we need that as a matter of urgency. I would still encourage Labor to bring that forward before they call the next election—not that I want to help them win an election or anything, or give them any free, gratuitous, advice. But it would look good in the eyes of the public, and that's something that the Labor Party could do with right now.

The other thing we need to do is to introduce cross-media ownership laws. Unfortunately, I think it was the Turnbull government that got rid of the cross-media ownership laws. At the time, people probably didn't foresee what the results of that would be, but today the mainstream media is predominantly controlled by three large media organisations—the ABC, News Corp, and Fairfax and Nine—and we've seen many minor regional newspapers collapse. I know that, when I was a Senate candidate in 2016, I was told by other senators: 'Whenever you go to a small country town, make sure you pop in and see the local newspaper. They're always looking for stories.'

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

And indeed, with my former colleague Senator Scarr—it was one of the first tips I gave him when we hit the road from Townsville to Cairns. We popped in there at Tully and jagged ourselves a story.

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