Barnaby Joyce (New England, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

or down to 40! What that means is: it wasn't that a whole heap of first home buyers turned up and—lo and behold!—all got themselves into houses. People just decided not to buy them, and they were just removed from the market. So what you are seeing now is not a more fluid rental market where people are coming in. You're seeing the poor getting pushed out. And you'll pick them up in their cars—that's where they're off to. That's what you've done.

And the reason you've done it—and, sorry, I hate to be trite—is that so few of you have ever been in business, and you just don't get the fundamentals of how businesses work. Paul Keating actually had a crack at this. You should have read your history books, at the very least. We've got a Treasurer who did a PhD on Paul Keating and didn't realise that he'd had a crack at this and it turned into a disaster. After two years, they had to reverse it. Why? Because they were just putting people out into the streets. And it has already started. It's amazing how quickly those in the market react. They reacted within weeks of your budget. They've already reacted.

What you'll see now is just going to be a more inflexible, static market that renters can't get into. Remember: the only reason you have an investment house is so you can put a rental tenant in it; otherwise, you can't claim it—you can't claim a house that you're not getting rental income from. Well, for a period of time you can, but, ultimately, it has to be an asset that is earning money, so you can claim your expenses against it, and, therefore, to claim the interest, you have to have the rent, and to have the rent, you've got to have a tenant—a rental tenant. In looking for that rental tenant, at times the market will drive the rents down so you can get that rental tenant in. This completely and utterly turns the whole logic on its head, because now—seeing I can't negatively gear it—the only way I can get my return is to put up rents. And, if I can put up rents, I don't care about the negative gearing; I've made my money. See if I'm wrong. Let's come back here. But the trouble is, to be proven right means that we've proven that we can really, really hurt people, and the people you will hurt are the poorest.

Now let's go back to another issue. Out in regional areas, where I live, there are people who wouldn't see themselves as poor but, in comparison to what you see around Canberra, they're poor. They have a unique thing, a lot of them. They live in weatherboard and iron houses on what was allotted—five-acre blocks. The magical thing about five-acre blocks is five acres is just slightly bigger than two hectares. What's magic about two hectares? Well, if you're on a block that's more than two hectares, you don't get to see that as your primary residence. Under this rule, the block's too big. A hectare is 2.471 acres, so two times 2.471—surprise, surprise—is less than five. So magically, for all these poor people even their primary domicile is not tax-free when they sell it. Well done—stroke of genius—because there's nothing better than to make poor people poorer. That's how it works when you don't know what you're doing.

We now see the Treasurer in panic mode. It's chaos. We really don't know what's happening. The government is changing it, carving things out. The Prime Minister has come in on the show. He's worried about votes. It's chaotic. They're running around seeing what the Greens will vote for to try and pass the most substantial financial document for the nation responsible for the expenditure of well over $700 billion a year. They're running around talking to the Greens about how they're going to change it all around.

This is quite a remarkable state of affairs we're in. Now, I'm not saying that the coalition hasn't done bad budgets as well. I was present for Joe Hockey's budget. That was a train wreck. This is up there with it—an absolute train wreck. What you hear all the time from wonderful colleagues on the other side are people going through the talking points who have absolutely no idea about how business works. So here's the suggestion: if you want to make the assets on the balance sheet work, you must give a strategic mechanism that gives them an advantage. One of the great strategic mechanisms that gives them an advantage is the price of energy. To get the price of energy going, you have to have a continuous supply that's predictable and reliable, which is coal-fired power. You have to have the brains not to blow up Liddell power station but to actually refurbish it and make it bigger and better and make it work. That's what brains do. That gives you a strategic asset on your balance sheet.

Intermittent power, by its very nature, is unreliable and expensive because you have to get it to match up to 24/7 power, and people will quote you intermittent power prices but they don't quote you the $42 billion for Snowy Hydro 2.0 or the batteries or the transmission lines, or the disruption to rural communities that underpins it. So that's just one thing. If you had the bravery and the brains to make your assets on your balance sheet work better then you would actually earn the revenue to pay for the trinkets on the PNL. But where we are now is you're going to have neither. You're going to go to the prudent and say, 'If you're prudent and succeed, we're going to take half of what you made,' and then you're going to go to the liabilities on your balance sheet and say, 'For what we can't rip off prudent people, we'll just borrow from other people, a lot of them from overseas.' That is an absolute fiasco of a situation you have put the nation in.

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