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

Let's start off with the smear about child care that we just had from the other side. As a stay-at-home parent I'm very passionate about child care, and that's why I want child care to be optional, not made compulsory—that you only get child care if you put your child in a childcare centre. I say let's pay the childcare payment to the actual parents and let the parents decide how they spend it on child care. For example, nurses, the police and all those people who work shiftwork can't pick their child up at six o'clock at night. There are other people who work part time, and they may only want to use child care for three or four hours a day and not have to drive 40 minutes to a childcare centre, just like all those parents in regional Queensland that have to drive 40 or 50 minutes off the farm. I don't want to hear from Labor, who only use child care as a means to pay the childcare centres so they can clip the ticket on union fees. No, no, no—our children are much more important than that. They are not a means by which you collect union fees, thanks very much.

Let's go to the issue of the trillion-dollar debt. We actually had $800 billion in debt, and can I say that we were tracking very well. I know that in my first year here as a senator we had a deficit of less than a million dollars, and we had the debt back down to $500 billion after Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard's crazy expenditure. But, unfortunately, we had state Labor premiers create a wall of hysteria. It was like a raging bushfire that they just couldn't control. There were COVID press conferences day in, day out—one at 9, one at 10, one at 11 and one at 12. They were scaring everyone about COVID and wanting more and more money. We still haven't got an audit yet on all that money paid by the federal government to the state governments for COVID cases in hospitals. If you look at the NSW Health data last year, they had more deaths from COVID than what the ABS recorded nationally. So you've got to ask yourself: what type of bookkeeping went on during this COVID hysteria, and was it just a means for these autocratic state health bureaucrats who were locking people down and collecting the money in their back pockets?

That's not to mention the billions of dollars spent on vaccines that all of the premiers mandated on people. It was, basically, you've got to take this vaccine that costs a lot of money, which we're going to pay a foreign multinational for, and it didn't even stop transmission or infection. We found out just this week from ATAGI that, for young people under 30, there's actually greater risk of myocarditis from the vaccine than from the virus. This was what I stood up for, and no-one listened. Not only did we not get bang for buck, but those people over there, the other side, Labor, have the gall to accuse us of racking up debt, when they were fuelling the fire day in, day out with daily press conferences.

But let's focus on the cost of living, shall we? Heaven knows, all we've been doing this week is talking about identity politics yet again. This is the great distraction for that side of the chamber. These people are only ever interested in command and control. They do that by dividing the people based on identity politics. We've had enough of that, and we've heard that here today in the chamber. We're talking about the cost of living, and suddenly we pivot to identity politics. Do you know why they pivot to identity politics? Because they have no idea how to manage an economy. I know that in my home state of Queensland the Bligh-Beattie government sold all of our infrastructure. I'll tell you how you control costs. If you want to control costs you build infrastructure, and you build power stations—power stations that provide cheap reliable energy that drive down the cost of electricity. That's how you do it. You build dams that provide irrigation to more farmland so you can have cheaper food, and you build better roads. You do it through good economic management and sound monetary policy.

We know that the other side of the chamber aren't focused on the things that matter. They aren't focused on people. That is who put us here: the people. They are focused on empowering their bureaucrats, their superannuation fund managers and their corporate executives. They've taken over the big end of town on that front as well, now, through superannuation. If they were really worried about the cost of living, they would make superannuation optional. Let the workers keep their wages. It's their money. Let them pay off their mortgages. Imagine if we could give that access to the workers. They could access their super, pay down their mortgages and not have to pay these high interest rates. That's the way you deal with the cost of living.

Question agreed to.