Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is great to stand up here today and respond to Senator Sterle's idea that we are planning to cut pay, because there is no greater example of how pay is cut in this country than superannuation. It takes 9½ per cent of somebody's wage, rips it out of their pocket, sends it to some big city somewhere to some unaccountable person who doesn't have to repay it to the person when they are 60. There is no capital guarantee with superannuation. We are going to go to 12 per cent here, so that is another 2½ per cent that could go into someone's pocket. The workers are going to miss out on that because it isn't going to go into their pockets; it is going to go to some blowhard in some ivory palace somewhere.

I have a lot of time for Senator Sterle. We struck a real chord in the year before last when we were down in Wangaratta when he said that he grew up on his father's lap driving a truck, and that is how I grew up. I grew up on a farm. I can remember as a young child sitting on my father's lap, sitting behind the wheel of big truck as well. At the end of the day, what we share in common is the spirit of the battlers. This is the problem with superannuation: the battlers don't get to see it. The battlers don't get to see any superannuation; it goes to the blowhards in the ivory towers. I don't know why blue-collar workers support superannuation. I don't know why they want it to go to these ivory towers. If you want to support workers' conditions, let them have control of their hard-earned wages.

But it doesn't end there. Labor have got this crazy scheme now where they are going to increase what they call portability. They are going to rip out 25 per cent of casuals' loading. They are going to say, 'Don't worry about that. It isn't going into your pocket, no. Let us look after it for you.' Here we go again. It is the same old theme of collectivism, the same old theme of command and control that says: 'No, you don't know what you are doing with your money; we know best.' This is typical Labor, through and through—command and control, don't let the casuals have their money.

It is estimated that $8,000 a year will get ripped out of workers' pockets. Labor are going to reduce the loading for casuals. A lot of people in casual labour actually want to be in casual labour. They might be the secondary breadwinner in the family and might want to work around the primary breadwinner, so they may only want to work Saturday or Sunday. They might like the flexibility of coming and going and not being locked into a fixed contract. They might be students who occasionally get a bit of extra work on the weekend or get a bit of extra work over the holidays but don't want to be forced into permanent work, and they sure as hell don't want to lose their loading. They don't want to lose their loading. But, of course, Labor cannot help themselves. They have to take that money and look after it for themselves, because that is the way they get to clip the ticket and that is the way they get to exert more command and control over the worker. They want to deny the worker individual freedoms.

Then, of course, the greatest threat to working conditions in this country is the cost of energy. What Labor want to do is go to unreliable, non-recyclable energy. That is right. This is the crazy thing: they call this energy renewable energy. You can't renew lithium batteries. You can't renew solar panels. You can't renew windmills, mate. These lithium batteries are one per cent ore body. You've got to mine a hundred tonnes of the stuff just to get to the ore, and that's before you bring in stripping ratios. Sometimes stripping ratios are 10 to one. How much dirt are we going to have to dig up in this country to get one battery? It's exorbitant, and that is going to drive the price of energy up.

Of course, Labor think it's great to have more people in energy creation. But this just goes to show that they don't understand business. You don't want to increase the number of workers involved in the input costs of a business; you actually want to increase the output. We on this side of the chamber want more people in manufacturing producing outputs, not producing inputs. We've seen that up in Queensland, where the Queensland Labor government have been subsidising foreign companies to basically produce energy at the expense of our own coal-fired power stations, which meant that last year they made a loss for the first time ever.