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

Thank you, through you, Madam Acting Deputy President, to Senator Tyrrell for her motion on productivity. It's a previously uncontroversial aspect of economic theory which last week was beaten and hacked to death in a politically inspired talkfest that was designed to get everyone sick of talking about productivity and to deceitfully raise the issue of increasing taxes. I can understand why this government wants to avoid discussing productivity. It's because productivity is the inevitable victim of the measures this government is pursuing. Net zero is the primary culprit and rampant immigration is also a main culprit, along with excess regulation and giving large union bosses more power to control businesses, workers and workplaces.

At the recent tax summit, Treasurer Chalmers attempted to frame productivity as taxation. Taxation is the enemy of productivity. When you raise taxes, you reduce productivity. He had the intent, it seems, of using taxation as a blunt instrument for social engineering, such as using a new 'bedroom tax' to throw elderly Australians out of their homes into a single room in a retirement home so they can fill that family home with foreign families arriving to take advantage of this beautiful country. Our elderly who are choosing to stay in their family homes for as long as possible are not the enemy of productivity. Australian parents keeping a spare bedroom for when the children come to visit are not the enemy productivity. Australians using their spare bedrooms for work from home or to run a small business are definitely not the enemy of productivity. Indeed, the reverse is true, unless the Treasurer is suggesting working from home reduces productivity.

Before Labor start whingeing, Senator Gallagher and Senator Wong were given opportunities in question time to rule out the new bedroom tax, and they did not. Why else would the government have allowed others to float an idea that's monstrous, if not that they knew it would be unpopular? They left others like the SBS to find out how unpopular it turned out to be. The answer is simple: this government is desperate for new revenue. In fact, this government is desperate to pretend they know what they're doing.

Every Australian's share of the national pie shrinks every time a new arrival comes here and takes a slice of Australia for themselves. The only way this is not an accurate comment is if every new arrival contributes more to the economy than they take out for themselves and if they create the wealth to pay for the $11 billion a year they send back to family overseas. On Monday's Notice Paper is a motion from One Nation to refer immigration to a Standing Committee on Economics inquiry. It's time to talk about the effect of immigration on productivity, inflation, housing and wages. It's time to get to the truth and to let those cards fall where they may. One Nation are prepared to hear the truth. Are you?

One Nation believes high immigration, record mass immigration, excessive mass immigration, is affecting productivity. Workers need housing. They need transport. They need education and health care to be the best they can be, to work at their highest level of efficiency, to work healthy and work happy and work safely. Immigration is forcing up housing, clogging up transport, reducing education, reducing education outcomes because entire classes don't have English as a first language, and hospitals are overwhelmed. These are facts.

These are the same Australians who feel the talk of productivity is about workers being made to work harder. It's not about workers being made to work harder. It's the opposite. The Liberal Party might use that definition; One Nation does not. Australians in the workforce are working hard enough. Responsibility for productivity is not on the workers' shoulders. I agree with Senator Dowling.

One Nation understands that one way of raising productivity is through infrastructure, and we're advancing projects to build Australia's future. As an example of infrastructure, Sydney University estimates the failed NBN will ultimately cost $50 billion, yet the Productivity Commission only values the NBN at $20 billion. The productivity loss here is more than $30 billion of taxpayers' money. It's the lost productivity the NBN is causing. It's not just the loss of value of the NBN; it's the loss of productivity across the economy due to a faulty NBN. The government has shut down its 3G network, reducing communication; with that, productivity in the bush has decreased. Although, in the finest tradition of free enterprise, Elon Musk's Starlink has come to the rescue of our rural community—no government needed and a better solution. If he could work on GPS that uses Starlink so that tourists are not getting lost in the long black spots between country towns, that would be welcome.

When it comes to productivity, net zero is the worst offender. Look at the Labor Party, the Liberal Party and the Greens. There's a direct correlation between increases in electricity and energy prices and business bankruptcies. Even the ABC is reporting that business failures have hit their highest levels since COVID, with the hospitality and construction sectors seeing the most insolvencies and the main causes being rising rent, electricity prices and increases to the minimum wage.

Electricity prices are costing productivity. The Tomago Aluminium smelter in the Hunter employs 1,000 people directly and supports 5,000 jobs in the local community. It uses 10 per cent of New South Wales's power supply, which was not a problem when it was being supplied with cheap, reliable and affordable baseload power from the Lidell coal power station down the road in the Hunter. Now, though, with Lidell closed and the last two coal power stations keeping the lights on in New South Wales, the ACT and Victoria, the cost of power is about to cost one-quarter of Australia's aluminium capacity. It's a threat to Tomago's viability. Incitec Pivot closed its Gippsland facility in Queensland in 2022 and its Geelong plant last year, costing 200 Australians their jobs directly and close to a thousand jobs lost across the local community. Now fertiliser is more expensive and less reliable in supply. Productivity is lost across the country. This scenario is being repeated across the economy.

Data from IBIS provides the following projections: factory and industrial building construction, down 18.6 per cent; nut, bolt, screw and rivet manufacturing, down 14.5 per cent— that might sound boring or trivial, until we realise every piece of construction in our country uses one or all of these right across the economy—petroleum refining and petroleum fuel manufacturing, down 13.1 per cent; road and bridge construction, down 12.6 per cent; nickel ore mining, down 10.6 per cent; commercial building construction, down 9.7 per cent; coalmining, down 9.8 per cent. Tens of thousands of jobs are gone. Tens of thousands more jobs in local communities are gone. Breadwinner jobs, union jobs—gone. Thanks, Prime Minister Albanese. How can businesses pay higher wages when their output is falling, their profitability is falling and they are continually battling red, green, blue and black tape? They can't. It's impossible.

In particular, coal is a key input in steelmaking and energy generation. I'll say it again: coal is a key input in steelmaking, and steel is in everything! It touches everything, transport included. And coal is a key input in energy generation. Australia is one of the world's lowest cost coal producers. This is a key industry that provides critical export earnings—significant royalties to pay for Labor's wasteful handouts to renewable energy and entire towns relying on coal.

Net zero energy costs are driving up electricity bills for everyday Australians right across the country, forcing small, medium and large businesses to close, decimating communities and reducing our productivity. These are facts happening in front of our eyes. Productivity increases come from investment. Whether investment is from government and business—investment in infrastructure, communications, technology and R&D—that's how everyday Australians get sustainable pay rises, from better investment. Everything this government invests in decreases productivity and sabotages sustainable pay rises for Australian workers.

Ironically, before Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, former Labor prime ministers and a former Labor treasurer, productivity was a dirty word in the Labor Party. The term 'productivity' was misunderstood, but Bob Hawke and Paul Keating fixed that. Before them, it was thought that increasing productivity needed workers to work harder or cut conditions or be exploited. That's the reverse of improving productivity. That's reducing productivity. Labor's Bob Hawke and Paul Keating changed all that, because they understood that higher productivity was the way to increase wages, to increase the standard of living, to reduce prices and the cost of living, to creating wealth for the nation and for all Australians, to reduce inflation, benefiting retirees and everyone on fixed incomes and offering consumers greater choice, more options and more leisure.

Why? How does this happen? Productivity is not about working harder. Raising productivity is about working smarter. At its core, productivity is about producing more with less input, or more output for the same input, increasing infrastructure, increasing technology and working more cooperatively, more easily. Higher productivity is the worker's best friend and saviour. Higher productivity is the family's friend. Higher productivity is the consumer's friend. Higher productivity is the employer's friend. Higher productivity is the business's friend. Higher productivity is the owner's friend.

As an underground coalface miner, I felt satisfied, happy and proud when we, as a crew at the coalface, produced more with less physical effort. As a coalmine manager, I felt satisfied, happy and proud when we, as a mine, produced more with lower costs, no safety incidents, higher bonuses to workers and lower turnover of people due to people being satisfied, happy and proud. Everyone wins from higher productivity, providing it's achieved properly. People working smarter, easier and safer to produce more and at higher quality comes from people working together with discipline and responsibility and from the sharing of ideas, open communication and real respect and trust. One Nation will build infrastructure; terminate net zero; get red, green, blue and black tape off the backs of businesses; and restore wealth and opportunity for all, especially hardworking Australians.

Question negatived.