Ralph Babet (Victoria, United Australia Party) | Hansard source

Great speech, Senator Hanson. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I agree with everything you said.

For my entire life, we have been promised smaller government, lower taxes and more freedom. Yet, year after year, election after election, the government—it doesn't matter which side of this chamber and it doesn't matter which government—has delivered the exact opposite of that: higher taxes, more debt, more regulation, more bureaucracy and less freedom. That's what I keep getting.

In Australia, we don't have a cost-of-living crisis because ordinary Aussies just forgot how to budget, we don't have a housing crisis because young Australians suddenly stopped working hard and we don't have an energy crisis because Australians started using too much electricity—not at all. We have all of these crises because the government has become too large, too expensive and too intrusive. The establishment constantly tells Aussies that it has the answers, but most of the problems that Aussies face today were created by these very same people who always somehow have the answer but can never solve the problems.

Housing affordability has collapsed, government debt has exploded and energy prices, as we all know, have soared. Trust is basically non-existent in the major parties of the left and of the right as well. The bureaucracy has expanded beyond recognition, now reaching into every corner of our lives. Australians are working harder than ever before, and we're getting less and less in return. At some point we've got to ask a simple question: if many of you in this place were going to solve these problems like you always claim that you're going to do, wouldn't you have done it by now? You've had your shot, and you've blown it time and time again.

In Australia, we now have hundreds of agencies, commissions, authorities, boards, advisory councils and bureaucratic empires. Too many of these paper pushers are paid more than the Prime Minister himself. The worst part of it all is it doesn't matter who sits in that big office, the PM's office, in Parliament House. These shadowy bureaucrats never go anywhere. They are the permanent power structure that underpins all of the waste. Each agency has executives, managers, consultants, communications teams, compliance officers—all this stuff. What do they want? All they want is more staff, more power and more control over the lives of ordinary Australians, who just want to be left alone. These people are bleeding us dry.

At the federal level alone, Australia has more than 1,200 acts of parliament on the books. Just think about that. That's 1,200 federal laws. In the last parliament, what did you guys pass? You passed 355 bills and then added thousands more regulations, legislative instruments, rules and compliance requirements. It just never ends. Every single one of these things is another burden on business, on workers, on families and on people just trying to build a better life for themselves. It's no wonder productivity is stagnant, housing takes years to approve, business spend too much of their time filling out forms rather than serving their customers and morale is just so low.

I understand something that the professional politicians, the professional political class, in this building refuse to acknowledge. I understand it, and it's this: government is not the source of prosperity; people are, businesses are, workers are, families are and entrepreneurs are. Prosperity comes from human freedom, not bureaucratic overmanagement. Instead of constantly creating new departments, new agencies and new regulations, why don't we make a decision to see which departments we can abolish instead? Which agencies can we merge together? Which programs can be eliminated altogether? Which laws can we repeal? We should not be asking, 'What can we pass this week?' That is rubbish.

We need to reduce the size of government, not constantly expand government. We need to cut red tape, not make more of it. We need to lower taxes, not find new ways to extract more and more money from Australians. The primary point of government is not to control every aspect of our lives. The primary point of government is to protect our freedoms, to defend liberty and to get the hell out of the way of ordinary Australians.

We're not looking for another sales pitch from Labor. We're not looking for another sales pitch from the Liberal Party. What are we looking for? We're looking for a different direction. We want less government. We want less regulation. We want lower taxes. We want less bureaucracy—because the path that we are on right now is simply unsustainable. This is why both of you major parties are declining in the polls. This is why you're going nowhere fast. Everyone is sick of you, least of all me! I know half of you better than the people on the outside do, and I don't even like you!