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

As frequently happens, the Senate is dealing with a tangled mess of legislation that is flawed in design and will have unintended consequences. That's inevitable when pressure groups run the government. It is a process that never involves the word 'no'. Too many Australians think governments should solve all their problems, and too many in government think they can. One would have thought both would have sooner seen this folly.

When Australia federated in 1901, the state ceded only the powers necessary for the operation of Australia as a single country rather than six states. Today's twisted, concocted federalism has given overlapping state, federal and local governments a bureaucratic tangle of incompetence and waste with no accountability and no consequences. It has allowed the Commonwealth government acquisition and abuse of power to go beyond anything our wise founding fathers envisaged. One Nation will honour our Constitution, withdraw the Commonwealth from areas that are none of the federal government's business and return to competitive federalism, as Australia's founding fathers designed.

This week I've called again for the abolition of the Commonwealth Department of Education, a move that will not take a single teacher out of a single classroom. I've called for abolition of the national curriculum, which is riddled with woke virtue signalling, victimhood and social engineering. Headmasters should determine and decide what's best for students, not woke bureaucrats thousands of kilometres away. I've called for abolition of the department of climate change, along with the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, the Clean Energy Regulator, the Climate Change Authority, the Australian Climate Service and the Net Zero Economy Authority. The Clean Energy Finance Corporation will be rolled into a people's bank, and there's more to come. One Nation will shrink government to fit the Constitution and to serve the people.