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

I look at these figures and I ask myself, 'Where will we end up? The other thing we haven't spoken about—and I must touch on this—is their influence on the childcare industry. I've often said that you only have to look at the union movement in this country, which is down to 10 per cent of the workers. The reason why the unions grasp onto our children in child care is that the only growing union in this country is the United Voice, because of the rapid increase in child care. These people say that they want to look after our children; I don't want the government looking after our children. I want that childcare payment going directly to the parent and letting the parent choose. Just like when it comes to the transgender stuff, let the parent decide. When it comes to our space in this country, the government doesn't invade our personal space and there's too much of that happening with big government. I've seen that since I've come down here, whether it's in child care or how we look after our health, you name it, or how we save our money; the unions, big government and the bureaucracy are the true shadow government of this country and they have no accountability.

This is the hypocrisy of this bill. When we tried to move amendments to get greater transparency over costings on reaching the 43 per cent target by 2030—don't have a clue. Senator McAllister doesn't have a clue how many kilometres of transmission lines we need to reach that target by 2030. They don't have a clue how many batteries and how much energy needs to be stored, and they certainly have no idea about costings. We've done the same for the pharmaceutical contracts. I'm about to bring up another OPD on the Auditor-General. Another ex-Labor staffer didn't declare he was an ex-Labor staffer when he applied for a job. He seemed to think that was 30 or 40 years ago, so it didn't matter. Yet again, it matters because a leopard doesn't change its spots.

If you want to get all this stuff and tamp down on donations, I think every bureaucrat in this country should be made to declare whom they vote for at every election, so we know whether or not they're impartial. They shouldn't be allowed to vote. That would be the best way. Once you become a bureaucrat, you've got to be completely impartial. Don't let them vote, or we can make them disclose which way they vote, so we know how they think. For too long these guys have been running a protection racket for the left side of politics. We had one public servant in estimates start saying, 'We're the government,' and Senator Hollie Hughes very quickly picked up on the fact that he should've actually been impartial.

As I said, if you want to know who really controls this government, it's the bureaucrats, the unions, the super funds, the big end of town and the inner-city elites. It is not the battlers. They're out there. They're voiceless. Most of them are too busy working. Whether you like it or not in this country, politics is followed by only a very small sliver of people in this country, and most of the reason why is that they're too busy working. Some people, when they get later in life and they have a bit of money, might want to donate to the party, but this bill will destroy their right to participate in democracy, because they don't always have the time of young uni students. That's how Josh got rolled. Basically the teals got a couple of thousand people to go doorknocking and paid them $40. Is it going to apply to the teals, who pay their volunteers to go doorknocking? Is this bill going to apply to that? This says non-volunteer labour; how does it work out when the teals and the Greens pay their volunteers to go doorknocking?