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

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia I wish to make a few remarks about Senator Gallagher's motion—firstly, her opening paragraph. Let's be clear that mining, and particularly China, carried Australia through the global financial crisis, and Labor destroyed our cash balance. We may point to rosy employment numbers, but what about the underemployment that's going on right now? What about cost of living and stagnant wages? These are the result of past neglect by both the Liberal Party and the Labor Party. Growth now is due to past productive capacity, and our low growth now is due to lack of investment and destruction of our productive capacity in the past. Under the Liberal-Labor duopoly, in rural Queensland, for example, where primary agricultural industries are very important—forestry, fishing, farming, grazing—property rights were stolen by the Howard federal government in 1996, working with the Rob Borbidge National Party government, then the Peter Beattie Labor government and then the Palaszczuk and Trad government—and the Newman government did not rescind it. The rural sector lost its property rights—fundamental to productive capacity.

We've seen a lack of investment in essential water assets. A friend of mine was talking to a prominent Liberal leader—I won't mention his name—in this country just a couple of weeks ago at a meeting and asked him, 'Why didn't you invest in dams 10 years ago?' He replied, 'Because we didn't need them 10 years ago.' This is the thinking that is stopping our country. Then we look at the self-destruction of our energy sector. We went from the lowest electricity prices in the world to the highest under both the Liberals and Labor. It started with the National Energy Market, which started before John Howard, but John Howard's government put in place the Renewable Energy Target and the stealing of property rights without compensation, and was the first to put in place a policy invoking a carbon tax, a carbon dioxide trading scheme. I'll talk more about those energy prices in a minute.

We've also seen in Queensland soil runoff legislation, supposedly to protect the farmers, but it's based on nonsense. It is hurting the farmers and will seriously suffocate the farmers in the near future. Our fishing industry has been decimated by UN guidelines adopted by both Labor and Liberal. Our forestry industry is being decimated now—people with the axe hanging over their head. This is what's happening to the productive capacity in our rural sector. What about our manufacturing sector? Car manufacturing has been shut down. Steel mills are declining. We have two left now. Mining is under the gun. Mining is being choked. Manufacturing was sent overseas under both the Liberal Party and the Labor Party. Our economic productive capacity has been decimated. This is not growth for the future. People are choked by cost-of-living rises and stagnant wages. We see higher house prices. We now live in a country that has just been through the world's greatest-ever resources boom, and our young people can't afford to buy houses. We see shops shut, as I said the other day, from Bamaga south, right through to Burleigh, and west. We see it right across Queensland. We see shops being shut and we see businesses being shut—particularly in the rural areas.

So let's have a look at some of the policies put in place by the Liberal-Labor duopoly. Let us look at energy policy—and, by the way, electricity and energy are primary assets; they're primary to everything that happens in our society. The No. 1 factor that has caused our dramatic increase in material wealth in our society in the West over the last 170 years has been the relentless decrease in electricity prices. In the last 10 years, we've seen a doubling of the price of electricity. We've gone from having the lowest electricity prices in the world to now having among the highest—or, in fact, the highest. And that's been driven by Labor-Liberal-Green policies.

We currently have a renewable energy target, which requires the subsidy of renewable energy—or so-called renewables, that are really intermittent. We see that decimating the electricity sector. It's currently at 14 per cent. The Liberal-National party want to double it to 28 per cent. That is suicide. The Labor Party wants to increase it to 50 per cent—almost quadrupling it. As I said, energy is the gateway to manufacturing. Energy is the gateway to agriculture. Energy is the gateway to tertiary industry. The primacy of energy must be understood. Yet both parties are destroying it, in a mad rush to appease the Greens on climate. So their policies are similar there. It's just a matter of grade.

Then we have immigration. Both parties believe in big numbers of immigrants coming in. We see hospital-bed availability almost halved. We see water supplies now being choked and restrictions being put on, and our sewage water being treated and recycled as drinking water. We see restrictions on showering now being mooted by the authorities in Sydney. How can we keep living like this? We're a first world country, and we're going backwards to being a Third World country.

Let's talk about tax. Both the Liberal Party and Labor refuse to tackle the problem of multinational tax. They talk about it, but they don't do it. It's a very simple exercise, as we have pointed out. We've got the solutions. Instead of pretence, we need to tackle multinationals head on.

The fourth issue is economic management. We see the Liberal-Labor duopoly doing the same thing again—playing the same games and bribing people at every election. But nowadays it's not just the election cycle that matters; it's the 12-month budgetary cycle—bribing people to get their votes.

As to infrastructure, both parties are refusing to build significant, visionary dam projects that could green Queensland. And why? Because the Greens are holding over them that you can't build dams. Both the Liberal Party and the Labor Party follow the Greens' policies on energy, immigration, tax, economic management and infrastructure; they follow the Greens' policies, to get preferences.

I don't see a plan. I do not see a plan from either party in the Liberal-Labor duopoly. There is no concrete plan. So, when Senator Gallagher's motion says:

… the Morrison Government has no plan to deal with the domestic economic challenges—

I agree—

leaving us unnecessarily exposed to global shocks—

I agree—

and to support Australians struggling to meet their weekly costs …

I agree. And the Liberal-Labor duopoly has done that. There is no plan other than: 'Follow the Greens. Build facades. Pretend to be doing things: put on a hi-vis vest, put on a hard hat, put on safety glasses and pretend you're doing something.'

Of course, the Liberal and Labor parties share preferences. They share preferences with each other because they'd rather put their opponent, or supposed opponent, ahead of the One Nation party. So that tells you that these people are just about ready to merge—and maybe that's what they're thinking of doing!

Let's have a look at building productive capacity.