Question agreed to.
Bill, as amended, agreed to.
Bill reported with amendments; report adopted.
]]>That the Senate—
(a) notes that:
(i) in a February 2017 speech, 'Progressive politics in the age of Trump', NSW Secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, Mr Tim Ayers, who is also a member of the ALP's National Executive, supported the introduction of an inheritance tax,
(ii) in an address to the National Press Club on 15 March 2017, the Leader of the Australian Greens, Senator Richard Di Natale, stated "And speaking of levelling the playing field, if we are going to avoid turning this intergenerational divide into a chasm, it is time we had a debate around inheritance taxes for the super wealthy. Australia is one of the countries who does not tax pre-existing wealth',
(iii) in an article in New Matilda on 7 March 2006, Labor's Shadow Assistant Treasurer, MrAndrew Leigh, wrote an article entitled, Bring Back the Inheritance Tax, in which he stated "From a pure economic rationalist perspective ... what is often not recognised is that inheritance taxes are also an efficient form of revenue raising", and
(iv) farming families are especially disadvantaged by an inheritance tax, with much of the wealth of their farms tied up in land – this means that when heirs do have to pay inheritance taxes, there is often a need to sell-off land (or other assets to pay off the death tax; and
(b) rejects any introduction of an inheritance tax, which only serves to punish the hard work, risk-taking and success of families and individuals who have built small businesses and family farms.
]]>Question agreed to.
Bill read a second time.
]]>A couple of times today, as I've been listening to these wonderful contributions, I've felt like it feels when you're at a funeral and you're listening to the eulogies and you've actually got to look down at the pamphlet to see that you're at the right event—you have to check the photo! That's because it hasn't been some of my experiences where Wacka's concerned, having sat beside him. I've had to endure weather reports from up on the farm about every 15 minutes as if somehow the weather's going to change—the anticipation of rain or a change in temperature. I've had to endure every photograph ever taken by Wacka, and there are thousands of them, of the progress of the sorghum, the hay or the mung beans that he's planted. I heard Senator Fierravanti-Wells talk about the cats. I've seen all the cats, I've seen the dogs and I know why they were named. I've had to endure this for four years.
I don't have a lot of time, but can I just say that I think everyone here recognises his strengths. I remember being at a public hearing in Townsville where there were 300 or 400 sugar farmers who were attending the hearing. We had a references inquiry, chaired by Senator Sterle, into the marketing arrangements around sugar, and I can remember Wacka opening with a question, saying, 'When I was a pig farmer,' and you could actually feel this room made up of farmers come with him. There was immediately this affinity. They'd straightened up to listen to what this fella had to say, because they knew for sure that he knew them.
Then we had a rally here in Canberra about the setting of rates for transport workers, and Wacka was sent in to prime the crowd before the Prime Minister arrived to speak. Wacka opened with 'when I was a truck driver'. Then, on another occasion, he was a shearer. Over those five or six years I spent with him, Wacka had a lot more occupations than he confessed to in his speech today. But each of them cleverly drew on the affinity of an audience, because Wacka knew the value of trust. That's how Wacka operated. He operated his friendships on the value of trust, he operated in this chamber on the value of trust and he operated in all the inquiries that he participated in, he particularised today, on a question of trust. He is the sort of guy that people very quickly come to trust.
What I do know is that, of all the things that are important to John Williams—and he spoke about many of them today—his love for his family and his agrarian lifestyle are way up there at the top of the list. If there's anything anyone wants to know about Nancy, what she is thinking, what she has said, what she has bought or what she has done on the farm, just come and see me after this, because I got Nancy from daylight to dark, right here, in this spot, next to Wacka. His love for Nancy is enormous. Of course, for those who are close would know that Nancy got quite badly injured when one of those scooter things with a flag, which was being driven along the footpath, bowled Nancy over, outside of her newspaper office. So, of course, Wacka immediately launched an inquiry into these mobile scooters. I thought at the time this would be a complete waste of time and life, but in fact it turned out to be quite an important inquiry. I didn't realise how many people in the country had been exposed to that situation. That's the nature of Wacka. When he sees a problem, he'll go after it, endeavouring to try and create a solution.
He is very much like Senator Boswell in another way. I remember when Boswell rang me one day and said, 'You've got to stop the importation of ginger from Fiji.' I said, 'Why, Ron? ' He said, 'Because they've detected nematodes in it.' I said to him, 'What's a nematode, Ron?' because I didn't know what it was. He said: 'I don't know, but it can't be good. You've got to stop the ginger coming in.' In some ways, Senator Williams has that really primal, gut feeling about things that affect people and what the solutions need to be. He will tell you himself that he's not big on the detail of how to get from here to there. He relies on his relationships with people in this place and the staff, particularly those who support the committee process. He knows where you need to be, and he knows where the starting point is. In all the inquiries that I shared with him, he had a very disarming way in leading the witnesses and breaking down what they had to say into some plain English statements, which were always captured in the reports and which underpinned the principles of the recommendations.
I've had quite literally thousands of hours sitting here talking with Wacka, as you do with your bench partners in this place. His conversations, apart from being dominated by the weather and the sorghum almum crop which he has just put in and which has come up one centimetre in the last hour and a half, were about his boys, his grandchildren, his wife, his livestock and his pets. They were about the people who had been affected by issues which he had taken up, and they were about his staff. He valued those relationships. They were about the people in here. He was right to say that he had made some very strong friendships across the chamber. I suspect that, with really one or two remote exceptions, Wacka would be regarded very, very favourably by everyone in the chamber. Sadly, I'm not going to be able to make that expression when my time comes to leave—and many of us won't—but it's certainly true of John Williams. Indeed, that's the experience that we have in our party room. He has a very unifying effect. Sometimes when some stresses have occurred, he was like Senator Boswell and Warren Truss before him. He was a unifying force and brought those relationships back together.
So he'll be remembered fondly by many of us. He'll be missed by many. I'm not sure that we're going to see personalities like his in the future. We've been watching some trends over the last couple of decades on how people make their way to this place, and, as Warren Truss said, he's not sure that someone who didn't finish grade 7 will make it to here. I'm not sure that some burned out, old busted-arse shearer who had done a bit of truck driving and had gone bankrupt would make their way here as frequently in the future as we might have seen in the past. I suspect, I'm at time, Mr Acting Deputy President, so I thank the chamber for the opportunity to reflect on John.
]]>To anybody listening, sadly—I hope that most Australians have a life and are not sitting glued to a television set listening to the tripe that comes out of our colleagues here—all I ask them to do is this: go back over the contribution of Senator Waters or Senator Di Natale or Senator Whish-Wilson or any one of the clan and pick three facts that they've stated in their contributions. They could be today's contributions, yesterday's or those from a week ago. If you're having trouble, contact my office and I'll provide you with both their contribution, their statements of facts, and the science that they plead about so frequently. And you can do your own comparison. I'm not here to tell you what to think. I'll provide you with the facts and you can make your own decision. I promise you that you'll arrive at the same place as so many in this place and so many in the electorate have—that this is nonsense and hogwash.
The problem is that their resistance to these matters, I believe, inhibits the ability for governments to properly engage in the debate around some of these issues and settle at some middle ground with respect to some of the policies—not just of the government but when and if, at some future time, the opposition takes government. So I urge people to watch and listen, and I urge them to be very careful. This tail over here, this tail of the Greens, is going to wag this Chihuahua over here if the Australian people make the mistake of putting them back in to govern this nation. I call on people to be very careful with how they apply their vote.
]]>The fact of the matter is the Greens can't get the electorate to support them. They can't get the electorate across the country to support them. They can't get the Senate to support them. In the electorate, certainly in my home state of Queensland, there is an absolute wake-up to them. They can't get the Supreme Court to support them, and there have been 12 actions—not one or two or three or four but 12 actions. Their problem is the fact that they are not an honest cohort of people. They are a dishonest political party. For example, the other day we heard Senator Waters talking about the ILUA. We know that the Wangan and Jagalingou people in Queensland voted—listen carefully; I'll give you a second to pick your pen up—294 to one to sign the ILUA for the operation of these mines in the Galilee Basin. But if you go to the Hansard for Senator Waters's contribution the other day, you'll hear a different expression on it. Her contribution to it indicated that the native title, the people of that area, did not support the development of the mine.
They know what we know, they know what the Queensland electorate knows and they know what the national electorate knows—that the development of this mine and the movement of this coal will have zero impact on carbon emissions in the world. For the closing of the mine to have an impact, they would have to prove—and the proof, as presented by Senator Williams, is to the contrary—that these mines would stop, that these power generators overseas would stop. We know that is not true. What we do know is that they would rely on inferior coal that emits more carbon into the atmosphere than the high-quality coal that will come out of the Galilee and what already comes out of the Bowen Basin.
The fact is that when colleagues from the Greens party make their contributions they really think that everyone is as dumb as dog-doo. They just sit there, listen to this persistent drone that comes into their ears and think, somehow, that if they say it often enough, if they make misrepresentations frequently enough, people will adopt it as being the truth. The electorate and the chamber haven't been tricked on this.
One of the things that always amuses me with the contribution from the Greens is the fact that they ignore what might be the alternative for 186,000 jobs that rely either directly or indirectly on the coal industry and the 40,000 or 50,000 more that will come with the development of Galilee.
]]>Let's look at the impacts of what the Greens are having to say. They want to close down the entire coal industry in my home state of Queensland and, in fact, across the country—in fact, across the world; they'd be happy to do it across the world. Yet they have gone back to their offices now to work under the illumination of energy created by coal. It was overcast outside earlier, so solar wouldn't have been able to provide them with that energy. Of course, if the wind stops blowing, they'll be sitting there in the dark, which I don't think would necessarily be a bad thing for the nation.
Nonetheless, the contributions by the Greens around these matters are hypocritical. We have got a Greens senator who had their Senate office refurbished, and it was reported publicly that nearly $200,000 was spent on a timber floor in their refurbished office—not a tofu floor; not an old, dry, compressed grass floor; not an old leaf floor; not an urban floor but a timber floor. Both the electorate and chambers like the Senate are alive to this complete nonsense expressed by the Greens, and that's why they can't get anywhere. They can't get their motions supported here. Their motions fail one after the other.
I see three Greens senators here. My understanding of the polling is that only one of them will be here come a few months time.
]]>Pursuant to standing order 75, I propose that the following matter of public importance be submitted to the Senate for discussion:
Fully funding public schools, including funding for extra teachers and resources; more individual attention for students; and extra support for kids with special needs.
Is the proposal supported?
More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—
I understand that that informal arrangements have been made to allocate specific times to each of the speakers in today's debate. With the concurrence of the Senate, I shall ask the clerks to set the clock accordingly.
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