Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Here we are on the eve of the budget and the Australian people are clueless. They are clueless. They are out there hoping that the Albanese government may be able to provide some solutions to the economic malaise that we have found ourselves in thanks to two decades of reckless economic management by both of the major parties. If what we've seen so far is anything to go by, it looks like it is just going to become a spend-a-thon by the two major parties—being led, I might add, by the Labor Party, and then the Liberal Party is pretty much just rolling over within minutes, matching every spending announcement by the Labor government. This sort of reckless expenditure has to stop, because the Australian people can't afford it and, more importantly, our children can't afford it.

In 2007, when John Howard left office, the Australian government had no debt, yet here we are, 18 years later, and we have $1 trillion in debt. Of course, that excludes the liability for the defined benefits scheme for retired bureaucrats, and it also excludes, I might add, the $482 billion sitting in franking accounts that no-one seems to want to talk about anymore. We have got a great deal of economic reform ahead of us if we want to provide our children with the same opportunities as our forefathers gave to us. It's a very sad day when a minor party like People First, for example, has all the major solutions, because we know that the major parties only have minor solutions. Of course, those minor solutions are just spending more of taxpayers' dollars without any real long-term economic benefits. These little sugar hits are like giving a child candy all the time. You are not going to breed good behaviour. What you need to be doing is actually looking at developing and building and tapping into the great untapped wealth of this country.

We at People First have a great vision for this country. We know how to get the country back on track, and that is by building infrastructure in the same way that our forefathers did. When they came here, there was very, very little in the way of economic opportunity, but our pioneering forefathers had great vision. They knew that with seven million square kilometres of abundant land, massive rainfall—albeit, some of that rain needs to be redirected into drier locations—a beautiful coastline, and millions of acres of fertile, black soil you can build a prosperous country. We've seen that happen over the last 200 years. We saw a prosperous country built, yet in just two decades we've seen the two major parties squander it through nothing but fearmongering and lies. We saw the fearmongering through COVID and the lies about climate change.

We've seen the constant repetition of these two major parties putting foreign interests and the interests of multinationals in front of the Australian people. I literally just got off the phone with a constituent that works in outsourcing, and he was saying that the banks are outsourcing thousands of jobs to the Philippines and India. They can pay people in the Philippines and India $15,000 and save $150,000 here, and our governments do nothing about taxing the wealth that is being transferred offshore. They do nothing about it. I literally just refreshed myself on the 2018 paper that I got the Parliamentary Library to write up about the petroleum resource rent tax and how we are letting billions of dollars go offshore for our gas, yet the two major parties do nothing about it. Likewise, with renewables, we import foreign made renewables. Seventy per cent of renewable energy companies in Australia are foreign owned, yet we close down our own homegrown industries, like coal—not so much gas—in favour of foreign renewable companies. When are the two major parties going to bite the bullet and start to put Australians first?