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

RENNICK () (): I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, despite being the cause of Australia's cost of living, energy, housing and immigration crises, neither the Labor Party or the Coalition have the courage or the solutions to address these problems, preferring to distract from their incompetence by engaging in juvenile behaviour by attacking each other over issues that are of little significance to the Australian people.

It gives me great pleasure today to be able to speak to this motion because, after almost six years in this place, I'm incredibly frustrated at the lack of seriousness that the two major parties take when it comes to dealing with significant issues that concern the Australian people. They are sick and tired of watching the circus down here. It's interesting, now that I'm an Independent—the only senator for People First, but a party all the same—that I sit here and watch the clown show that goes on and the juvenile behaviour between the two major parties. The Australian people deserve better than what we're getting.

This week we've had a focus on issues that aren't of great concern to the Australian people. We've had next to no discussion or debate or any legislation that attempts to deal with the major issue in this problem, which is the cost of living. There's the cost of living, housing and the cost of energy. Yes, I know that the Labor Party want to deal with the cost of energy by providing subsidies to build hydrogen energy, which is only going to be very, very expensive. We've got cheap black coal in the ground that is much, much cheaper. But, rather than do that, we're going to go down some rabbit hole of green hydrogen, as if that's ever going to work!

We've got an immigration crisis. Neither of the two major parties want to get serious about immigration in this country. If we want to get serious about immigration, we need to repeal many of the laws that were brought in by the Hawke-Keating government in the 1980s. We are only weeks away from the campaign for the next election being called, and the Australian people have no idea what the policies of the major parties are because the major parties aren't interested in solutions; they are only interested in power.

Just today, yet again, we've seen laws passed that are going to censor free speech. There's no definition of 'violence' in regard to this free speech. The policing in this country is dealt with by the states. There's nothing in section 51 that deals with the federal government dealing with violence. No-one knows what the definition of 'a terrorism symbol' means. Heaven knows what that's going to be in the future and how that is going to be used against people who want to express an opinion. If you add those laws brought in today to the Online Safety Bill and the misinformation and disinformation laws, we don't know what we can say anymore.

This is typical of the two major parties. When I come down here, I want to provide solutions. I want to put forward bills that are going to deal with the cost of living, deal with energy prices, deal with housing and deal with the immigration issue, and I want to get the government out of people's lives. I want to get them out of the bedroom. I want to get them out of the family home. I want to get them out of the corporate boardroom. I want to get them out of the doctor's waiting room. I want them out of the classroom. But, when we come down here, all we ever get is the major parties trying to impose more control.

Now, I've got to point out that there are a lot of good people in the major parties. Once upon a time, the dominant faction of the old Labor Party was the blue-collar workers, and that was okay because this country was built by and belongs to the battlers, and we've got to look after our workers. It's same for the Liberal Party. It's for small business. Small business is also the backbone of this country. The little guy is the backbone of this country, whether it's the worker or the small business.

That's the great thing with People First. We will put the people first, and we will hold either big governments or big corporations to account. We don't care if it's public or private, because we know that you just can't trust big organisations. From my time in these big organisations I'll tell you what; it's always the yes men—it's always the little toadies—that climb to the top. If you speak out, if you want to push back, you're pushed to the side. I know. That's what happened to me in the Liberal Party. When I stood up for the vaccine injured, what happened to me? 'We've got to get rid of Rennick. We can't control him. ' So what do you do? Rather than go in and actually fight for the people injured by the vaccine, you just remove the messenger. You remove the messenger and protect big pharma and all those industries that made a killing out of the COVID hysteria.

Here we are, three weeks into this parliament—can I say, this term has been dominated by two issues. The first 18 months were all about the Voice, which was one way of segregating the people and fighting each other. The second way to do it has been all about antisemitism and what's going on in Israel. These issues do not belong here in this country. These issues are all emotive issues that should not be dealt with in this manner. We've seen the Liberal Party this week engage in disgusting, inflammatory behaviour in order to stir everything up, with the whole idea that somehow Anthony Albanese is responsible for these so-called explosives in the caravan and the whole idea of, 'When did he find out and why didn't he tell us?' With all due respect, he wouldn't have a clue, because it's being conducted by the NSW Police Force. They're the ones responsible for this.

Some of the stories and the posturing going on around this are a distraction. It's a deliberate distraction because the Liberal Party don't want to talk about their policies. They've only got one business policy so far, and that's a $20,000 tax deduction for entertainment, for businesses with a turnover of up to $10 million, and it's only temporary for two years. Let me tell you, if that's the best that the Liberal Party have got, we're going to see more of the same under a Dutton government that we saw under the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government, where they didn't deal with tax reform.

I'm going to hold this against the Liberal Party because, as secretary of the finance backbench committee for five years, I pushed a lot of ideas and I pushed a lot of tax reform. When we were stuck down here on weekends because of COVID, I'd call meetings about tax policy, and a few of my former colleagues did turn up on Saturday afternoons. I had hours-long meetings—they went for hours, for most of Saturday afternoon—with the former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, and none of these policies that I suggested have ever been implemented. If these people were really serious—if these two major parties were really serious—about tax reform in this country, they could implement them. The policies I'm recommending here are policies that are actually going to tax foreigners more and Australians less. This is the biggest free kick you could ever get. All you've got to do is lower income tax for the hardworking Australians out there.

But the two major parties come in here, and 80 or 90 per cent of what goes on in this place is nothing but juvenile bickering between two major parties. There's next to no government business, and, when there is government business, it's always more control, like we saw today with the hate speech bill, which is designed to censor free speech. Where are the actual, genuine bills that are going to bring in greater efficiency in this country, especially in the government, that look at actually reforming and streamlining the bureaucracy? There is none of it. If anything, it's quite the opposite, where we end up introducing a new agency. We saw that this week with the environment-positive bill, a nature-positive bill. Now, Labor want to bring in a bill that's actually going to create a new, independent department. That is the last thing we need in this country—another independent department, especially with the environment.

At the end of the day, the environment isn't even a responsibility of the federal government under section 51. The only reason why we have a federal environment department was that Bob Hawke went to the High Court in 1983, under the Franklin dam decision, and basically said, 'We are going to use the foreign treaties power to override the plenary powers of the states when it comes to dealing with the environment.' I'm pretty sure, when our founding forefathers wrote the Constitution and said that the federal government should have powers over foreign treaties, they never intended for that power to override the plenary powers of the states. But, because the federal government are linked in through all these treaties, they now have control. There are treaties dealing with the environment. They've now established a federal environment department, which is one of the many duplications of environment departments that we have in this country, as well as education, health, energy and water, just to name a few, and there are a whole raft of others.

Yet again, we've got this debacle this week where all we're doing is looking at adding more bureaucracy, censoring free speech and subsidising green hydrogen. It just beggars belief, and I can't believe you guys in the Labor Party are behind in the polls. I didn't rate Anthony Albanese all that highly, but I did rate Labor as a political machine. And you guys are completely out of touch with reality. You're out here chasing these unicorns of climate change and all these wonderful woke ideas. They might work when you don't have a cost-of-living crisis, but when people are struggling with mortgages and 14 interest rate rises—which, by the way, isn't the fault of the Labor Party. I know that the Liberal Party have done a very good job of pinning all that on you, but it was actually the reckless spending throughout COVID that caused that, as well as 40 years of a slow decline in productivity.

People don't want to hear about fancy woke ideas. They want to know how you're going to implement solutions that are actually going to solve their cost-of-living crisis, because there are people going broke in this country. There are people that are having to sell their houses. They're either having to move back home with mum or dad or actually ending up on the streets in tents, and we can't have that. It's alright if you live in the City of Melbourne and you can sell up, move to Queensland, get a house for half the price and then at least have some money to live on. But, for many people in Queensland and that, they can't sell their houses and move into something lower, especially if they're from regional Queensland. So we need to be dealing with this problem, and we need serious structural and monetary reform in this country.

One of the big mistakes of Keating was that he made the RBA independent. Monetary policy, along with taxation policy, are the two most important issues that government should be dealing with, and we have outsourced monetary policy to an unelected RBA that refuses to hand over the minutes of meetings they have with the Bank for International Settlements. Instead, they have sat there and done nothing about 14 interest rate rises. Let me tell you that changing the price of money is a speculative measure. Mucking around with the price of interest rates on the first Tuesday of every month, or six meetings a year now, is not dealing with the underlying problem, which is that we have a lack of infrastructure in this country. We have a lack of base-load energy. We have a lack of decent dams. We haven't built hardly a dam in this country in the last 50 years. We haven't built enough roads, rail and things like that. If you want a solution to this, we need to start building more infrastructure, and we should fund it via an infrastructure bank. I've spoken about monetary policy and the need to reform monetary policy many times in this chamber, and, of course, we get nothing.

We need to change the standing orders as well. There is too much time in this chamber. We need to get rid of taking note of answers. We don't really need two MPIs a day. We don't really need any MPIs, but let's take it back from one hour's worth of MPI to half an hour of MPI. Those sorts of things need to go. They're just arguing for the sake of arguing, and we need to give the government more time to actually do business, because, yet again, today we've seen more bills guillotined. We saw 30 bills guillotined in the last sitting week, at the end of the year, and these were very, very important bills. I never got a chance to speak on the shuffling of the RBA boards and the fact that we've now got two RBA boards. That's the typical solution to our monetary problem—one bureaucratic department couldn't solve it, so now we're going to create another bureaucratic department. So we're now going to have two boards to sit around and shuffle the price of money, rather than get more people out there in the workforce on the front lines and more people back on the tools actually building dams and power stations.

If you want to deal with the productivity crisis, our productivity crisis and our inflation crisis are actually not caused by too much demand, if you put aside the immigration issue; they're actually caused by a lack of supply. And it's a lack of supply because we haven't built enough infrastructure in this country in the last 50 years. We can blame John Button for that—the former Victorian Labor senator that introduced the Button plan—because he said that Australia can no longer compete in manufacturing, so we're just going to let it all go offshore. Well, how's that turning out for us? Forty years later, we've got a whole generation of university graduates who are broke and brainwashed, feeling sorry for themselves, instead of getting out of school when they were 15 or 16, getting an apprenticeship, getting on the tools and learning the meaning of hard work. It's wealth for toil in this country; it is wealth for getting on the tools and building infrastructure. It's certainly not wealth for the games and the circus that go on in this chamber week in, week out, where you guys, the two major parties, are just bickering between yourselves. So I say to you guys: get busy, come in here next week with some genuine solutions in regard to monetary policy, tax immigration and energy, and stop fighting amongst yourselves.

Maria Kovacic (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to thank Senator Rennick, in his newfound spirit of independence, for bringing forward this motion on the political culture, because it raises so many of the pressing issues confronting decent, honest and hardworking Australians, particularly my constituents of New South Wales: the cost-of-living crisis, which has ballooned so much over the last 2½ years; the energy crisis and the Albanese government's outrageously broken promise to the Australian people; the housing crisis that, despite billions being spent by state and federal Labor governments, is only getting worse; and the immigration crisis, where this government can't help but continue to add more fuel to the fire.

However, I think Senator Rennick has got it wrong in his motion. He is half right: the Albanese Labor government has absolutely no plan to deal with these major crises and in fact has made them worse. But the coalition, on the other hand, has a serious plan to deal with these crises, and we are not afraid to govern. We have a plan to deal with the energy crisis that means being technologically agnostic and not placing a blanket ban on any form of technology. We have a plan to fix the housing crisis that means making the Australian dream a reality again. We are going to break free the critical backlogs that are stopping families from getting into their new homes. We are going to fund the critical infrastructure that is a prerequisite of any new housing development—the commonsense things like water, power and sewerage. We are going to stop union thuggery and intimidation on our building sites by restoring the Australian Building and Construction Commission. We are going to allow people to use their own money to buy their first home, because if Labor's mates and the big super funds can own your home with your money, why shouldn't you be able to do that, too? And we are going to allow separated women to do the same, because women over 55 are the largest-growing cohort of homeless in our country, and that is shameful, and in no way should this government be getting in the way of their accessing their own money to buy their own homes.

We have a plan to rebalance our migration program, because we can't keep taking on the equivalent of a new Adelaide every four years. It is simply not sustainable. The problem Labor has created over the last 2½ years simply cannot continue. We are going to reduce the levels of permanent migration by 25 per cent to a responsible level that recognises the rich contribution of migration to our country and balances it with a sustainable path forward. We are going to reduce the number of international students studying at our metro universities, because right now it is causing too much strain on our housing market, particularly close to our cities. It is locking young Australians out of affordable housing. We are going to re-secure our borders, because that is a core responsibility of any government to keep their people safe. And we are going to strengthen our detention laws, because violent criminals whose visas have been cancelled must be properly monitored and kept off our streets.

Most importantly to everyday Australians, we have a plan to address the cost of living, because nothing is more pressing to Australian families than the financial pressure they are under—pressure caused by this Labor government. We are going to rein in wasteful government spending, because this government has spent over $200 billion more than was budgeted before the election. This has directly contributed to skyrocketing inflation. We are going to provide lower, simpler and fairer taxes for Australians, because tax money belongs to Australians; it does not belong to any government. Personal income taxes are 22 per cent higher since this government was elected. We are going to bring down inflation because inflation is an insidious disease that eats away at the savings of working Australians. The IMF has projected that this year Australia will have the second-highest inflation of any developed country. Under Labor, our economic conditions have deteriorated and Australia is heading in the wrong direction. That is their legacy. Ours will be getting Australia back on track.

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have enjoyed listening to the debate thus far. I haven't pointed this out before, but 'back on track' is an interesting slogan. It was a slogan for the team of the ultramilitant Builders Labourers Federation ticket in the 1980s and the 1990s within the current construction union. It was an interesting ticket and an interesting idea.

Some of the themes that sit behind Mr Dutton and 'back on track' sound like the same things that I used to listen to in the building industry from these unreconstructed Trotskyites. There was a very similar sentimentality about the moribund, shonky leadership that there had been before, which is exactly what we're seeing from Mr Morrison's leftovers in the Liberal Party today. They just want to get back on track to where Scott Morrison had the show, where government efficiency was billions and billions of dollars out the door. At the Department of Veterans' Affairs—some of the senators here were with me in Senate estimates where you'd hear of billions and billions of dollars going to shonky labour hire contractors in Veterans' Affairs. No work ever got done. People's friends were enriched in the process. No work ever got done. Waiting times blew out. There were 45,000 veterans—the people who we should be looking after—just waiting for their claims to be assessed. The minister was just sitting on his hands. Bureaucracy was stuck because it was not focused on its job.

We've come into government and fixed Veterans' Affairs. What do we hear from these characters? They want to get back on track, back to sacking all of the public servants who've been engaged and employed in country towns and regional centres all over Australia, helping veterans get the services that they need. Why would you want to go back to the Morrison show, where Peter Dutton, the Leader of the Opposition, was a sort of leading light and second-string character on the policy front? Why would you want to get back on track to that? It was a road to ruin that we had when Labor took government in 2022. The country was in diabolical trouble. Inflation was higher than six per cent, and it was going up.

I agree with some of what Senator Rennick said—some of it, Senator Rennick.

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

That's better than usual!

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's better than usual, and I'm being kind because we're heading towards the end of the parliamentary term and I've enjoyed your contributions over the years. There's plenty of time, but I get the sense that time goes on, and you get a sense of history about these things.

One of the reasons that the inflation challenge has been tough for Australia is that it came off the back of a trillion dollars in debt with nothing to show for it from the Morrison government. It was a trillion dollars in debt with nothing to show for it. There was no infrastructure, nothing. Secondly, there had been a decade of the lowest ever productivity growth on record. Admittedly, it was sitting against the back of a decade before it that wasn't too flash either. Energy policy was in tatters. Amongst the investment community around the world, Australia was a laughing stock on energy policy. We'd managed to construct an energy policy where four gigawatts of electricity generation were decommissioned and only one gigawatt of generation was introduced. It was a debacle. And everybody wonders why electricity prices have had it tougher from inflationary impacts than everybody would have hoped for. Well, that's what happens when you've got low productivity and you don't build generation capacity. It's cactus. There's a lot of work to do. I don't agree with Senator Rennick's prescriptions for how we deal with these challenges, but I do like his sense of urgency, and I do like the fact that he makes the argument.

There was inflation with a six in front of it; $1 trillion in debt and nothing to show for it and real wages in long-term stagnation. These characters over here pray for real wages to decline. When they were in government, they loved it because it was a design feature of their system. When they're in opposition, they want them to fall so they can make a political point. There are only two things that make these characters smile: (1) when real wages decline and people are impoverished, and they just hope that they can make a political point out of it; and (2), when they're pulling the wings off flies. Misery loves company—well, there they are. If something goes wrong, there's johnny-on-the-spot trying to make the point, the partisanship, instead of focusing on the things that can actually be done to make it better.

Here we are with inflation a third of what it was and falling. Real wages are rising. Living standards are rising. The lowest average unemployment rate of any—

Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Smith, a point of order?

Dean Smith (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is not true. Living standards have fallen.

Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is a debating point, not a point of order. A real point of order, Senator Scarr?

Paul Scarr (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Multicultural Engagement) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Actually, I was going to take a point of order. I didn't think that was a legitimate point of order.

Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you very much for the clarification. We are in firm agreement. Back to you, Minister.

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is exactly what Senator Rennick was complaining about.

Paul Scarr (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Multicultural Engagement) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Humour?

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Sometimes I wonder! We have the lowest average unemployment rate of any government over the last 50 years—1.1 million new jobs, and the fact is that half of the jobs are for women. Interestingly, these characters over here don't really like that very much, either. They complain that many of these jobs are in the private sector but are about looking after people. They don't like that, either.

While I'm interested in Senator Rennick's broader philosophical argument, the people of Australia are confronted with a pretty stark choice this year. We saw it on Sunday on the Insiders program, didn't we? These characters over here and in the other place say that there's $350 billion worth of additional spending. They say that our vision for the economy—a soft landing where unemployment stays low, where people are in jobs, where wages are rising, where living standards are rising, and where people are earning more and keeping more of what they earn—is a bad thing and not their prescription.

Their prescription is the old economics 101 one—they never got to second year, let alone third year—which is cut, cut, cut. You cut public services and you cut expenditure to socially useful things because you want to create unemployment, create misery and drive the economy over a cliff. That is the alternative vision. We saw it from Mr Dutton. He said there will be cuts, but they won't tell you what they will be until after the election. Australians aren't dumb. They are not mugs. They are not going to be taken for mugs. What that is is a prescription for the old Abbott routine. Remember, Mr Abbott said, 'There won't be any cuts,' and then, in 2014, he delivered the most savage budget, with cuts to Medicare, cuts to the ABC and cuts to public services—cuts for all sorts of things that mattered for ordinary people. Well, this will be that on steroids, because Mr Dutton's told Australians that the cuts will come after the election, and they certainly will.

Debate interrupted.