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

I would like to share some stories and some experiences about travelling amongst constituents in south-western Queensland a few weeks ago. I can remember coming to the town of Mitchell. That is where we got to with the last update on this for our constituents. In the town of Mitchell, there is a wonderful bakery. It is a little town. We met a man called Rob who is trying, and has tried for many years, to start businesses and has had some success breaking into export markets but nowadays he finds it frustrating with all the red tape, not to mention the blue tape from the UN. He and the others in the town of Mitchell really glorified and appreciated the many benefits of country living.

Then we went on to the station of Bonus Downs, a cattle station, a farmstay—wonderful people, Madonna and Lyle Connolly and their son Grant, working a cattle property. What amazing things I saw there! They were amazing people. Property rights—they have a friend, Sharon Lohse, who has worked on recovering property rights for the last 12 years. Here is what I learned. The property rights are being stolen by governments of the LNP in Queensland and the ALP-Greens, and of course the ALP does it to steal votes from the Greens or to get their preferences. Sharon has been fighting this for 12 years.

We have been told by the people in Brisbane and Canberra that what we need to do is make sure trees grow and stop the grass and let the trees regrow. Of course when you go there what you see is little grass under the trees, the 'woody weeds' as they call these little trees, and no grass and the erosion really accelerating because there is a lack of grass roots to keep the soil bound. So it is actually the opposite of what we are being told. The grasslands stabilise. In fact many of those areas were grass originally. The original vegetation and the trees have been imported and run riot. They are not allowed to clear. They are not allowed to even clear regrowth without someone in Brisbane telling them that they can or cannot do it.

The point there is that it comes home really strongly that farmers are the best for looking after the land, yet they have been burdened with extra costs imposed on them by state governments and the Greens in Brisbane and people who do not really know about the environment. They have been saddled with extra costs and have had their property rights destroyed so they cannot use the land they bought. This is destroying rural areas. So we need to restore the property rights of farmers. Our farmers in Australia are competent, highly innovative. Grant, their son, flies an aircraft to muster the cattle. They use various highly trained dogs, trucks, science—very careful with the use of the science. This property is all family run. Many of the properties are run only by families because regulations are so onerous that they are destroying employment there.

They are a wonderful family. They called the locals in. They had a wonderful barbecue at night. They were very great hosts. The next day they showed us around the property. Bonus Downs farmstay is a wonderful place, a lovely old Queensland property, very well maintained and very friendly—Madonna and Lyle Connolly and their son Grant.

The next day we moved on to Nigel and Rosemary Brumpton's sheep property, where they produce wool and meat. They also found it very difficult to comply with tree-clearing regulations. They actually contradict the stereotype that people are told in the city about farmers. Nigel and Rosemary told us that drought handouts are not the answer, and that proper land management is the answer. And that means leaving farmers to have the rights to do with their property what they need to do to manage their business and their land. They said that drought handouts simply raise the price of land.

I can remember Peter Walsh, a true ALP minister in this parliament, many years ago—from your own state, Mr Acting Deputy President Back. He was highly regarded because he told the truth and stood up to both sides of politics. Nigel Brumpton told me quite clearly, 'This land does not need to be subsidised'. What a refreshing approach from a farmer! It echoed the farmers at Mondure on the same trip. The grassland as far as you could see on his property was good; the grass was in very good shape, with no erosion. It was a wonderful farm and very successful. He also mentioned that tax had been a serious burden to their business.

These were the things that were echoed throughout south-western Queensland: property rights, energy costs, tax and regulations—red tape, green tape, which is pseudo green tape, and also blue tape coming from the UN. Nigel said these words: 'Accountability. Nothing works without accountability.' What we need to do is to get rid of most of the regulations—and I mean most of the regulations—and hand back accountability to the farmers. They are the ones who want to minimise their costs, so they will not waste fertiliser, they will not waste pesticides and they will not waste chemicals. They are the ones who want to preserve their land to hand down to their kids, or to sell when they want to retire. We need to get government out of their business, out of their lives and off their backs. This is especially so when there are so many changes happening in the farming industries because of technology and market changes. The best people to handle changes are the farmers, who keep track of the market and the trends.

Then we moved on to Charleville. It is a lovely, tidy town of about 3½ thousand people in far western Queensland. We went to the large and very lively RSL—as professional as any RSL in the city. We met Annie Liston, the mayor of Murweh Shire and Neil Polglase, the chief executive officer. He was originally born and raised in Brisbane, I think—certainly in one of the large cities. He loves it out there. And that is what we heard all through Charleville—people love the town. The Brisbane girls in the hospital love the town. They love the social life.

Campbell McPhee is the owner and developer of Western Meat Exporters, a sheep and goat abattoir. Here is a business developed by someone in western Queensland, and yet the mayor told us that he is beset with high electricity prices and a lack of supply that is stopping another abattoir from being developed as quickly as it needs to be. They are desperately waiting for more power. And here is Queensland—they are in Queensland!—where we have some of the best black coal in the world. It is the cleanest black coal in the world, with cheap, clean energy—we used to have it. But due to the Greens policies, the ALP's policies and, sadly, the LNP's lack of any courage to address these policies, January prices were 2½ times the average for the last 12 months.

There is a wonderful Vietnamese community there. It is needed because they cannot get Aussie workers with special skills to work in the abattoir. These Vietnamese workers are on 457 visas. The mayor very quickly said to me that these are wonderful people. They have settled in and integrated. As we have said in this chamber, we not only need to discuss the quantity of immigration but the quality of immigration, which we have defined as the willingness and ability to integrate and assimilate. All the way out at Charleville, we saw and heard people talking about the privately-owned Wellcamp Airport at Toowoomba. It is a private initiative, and they are looking at it in Charleville as a way of improving their exports.

We went to Charleville Hospital—sadly, I had an injury. But I was treated very well in this country hospital. It was very clean and it is a very friendly town. Sadly, I learned from the mayor that Charleville Hospital is being run increasingly from Roma. They have lost some of their services at Charleville. It was a health care hub, and now that hub is Roma. That has led to a reduction in services and employment, and a decrease in the quality of care and services—although I was very impressed with the way the nurses and the doctor took care of me. The hospital is now smaller; they have more administration and fewer services. But the services they do have are excellent because of the quality of the people.

It was very interesting for me to learn that the shire council had produced some figures. They are a shire council, not a regional council that was the amalgamation of many shires. The shires out there are large and they cannot be amalgamated because the amalgamated area would be huge and beyond management. So their shire area is too big for amalgamation. They gave me some figures, because they like it the way it is. They do not want amalgamation. They said that before amalgamation there were 126 councils, with some very large councils across the state not viable. After amalgamation there are only 77 councils, with 45 not viable. The larger councils gobbled up the other shires' assets and dragged down the smaller councils.

Amalgamation is something that has not worked in some areas of Queensland, and I believe—I have not done the research so I cannot say it unequivocally—it has not worked in most areas of Queensland. There are serious doubts about it because although people talk about the theory of economies of scale there are the diseconomies of information. By just walking down the street a councillor or a council employee knows what is needed. They do not have to call up to get someone in from 200 or so kilometres away, all adding to the cost.

It is clear that the control of communities and services is more effective within the communities themselves, because there is ownership. As a business manager I have found the same. It is essential to give people authority and to give people responsibility. The economies of scale in these areas are offset—more than offset—by the diseconomies of information flow and the inaccuracies of information flow due to a growing bureaucracy. They are yet again failed state policies of the LNP, and especially of the Beattie and Bligh ALP governments.

What we have seen is that many of these towns and shires are beset with increased bureaucracy, increased interference from the state and increased interference from the Commonwealth government, and that local councils are not able to display the initiative that the West is so famous for. One of the things I have noticed is that the people out west are so amazing. The people in the South West are creative and they have enormous initiative, but they are being choked and stifled by energy prices, taxation, regulations and the destruction of their property rights that have been stolen. Governments—increasingly, sadly, it is Commonwealth governments—of both sides of politics and also the state government are dead weights. They are putting in place severe obstacles to progress for councils and towns.

As I have said, the four big issues are taxation, energy prices, over-regulation and property rights. I note that we cannot make the poor rich by making the rich poor. We have to—as Senator Hanson said today—sort out the tax system in this country. We have got to face up to the inefficiencies and inequities in our tax system that are destroying our country because foreign companies, which dominate our economy, are not being taxed. Both the Labor Party and the Greens—when they were in coalition with Julia Gillard as Prime Minister—and the Liberal-National coalition have ignored these severe issues, the most pressing issues facing our country.

I want to come back to the fact that these people out west are being crippled by regulations and, despite the heavy hand of government, they still have that spark and that desire to help one another, to innovate and to be creative, and they are doing so much. We need to give them all the support we can. So stop the window dressing, get down, roll up our sleeves and help them, because all they want is a fair go. That is all people want right across Queensland: they just want a fair go. And that is particularly important in a world of rapid change. Thank you.

Senate adjourned at 22:01