Exercising his independence since leaving the Liberal Party, Senator Rennick, (People First Party) lambasted the Libs and Labs as 'not serious' about pressing problems like the high cost of living, housing challenges, energy issues, and excessive immigration, but only 'serious about getting more power.' He criticised new censorship legislation, calling for less intrusion into people's personal lives and freedoms. He pointed at 50 years of failure to provide necessary infrastructure and called for an update of the 1980s immigration laws. (Note policy on his website for less than 100,000 p.a.) He said there need to be changes in monetary policy to boost productivity and control inflation. In addition, he criticized 'green hydrogen' projects as more fictional than practical and suggested that coal might be a more effective alternative. Although not explicitly stated, reducing population growth could potentially lead to a slowdown in energy demand, thus reducing emissions-growth, and lessen the pressure for additional infrastructure. [Headings inserted by candobetter Editors.]
Some highlights:
'It’s always the Toadies that rise to the top. That’s the great thing about People First - we will hold both big government or big corporations to account - we don’t care if it’s public or private because we know you just can’t trust big organisations. Because my time in these big organisations, I’ll tell you what, it’s always the yes men that climb to the top, it’s always the little toadies that climb to the top. Toadies indeed and there’s nowhere more infested with toadies than Parliament House. Both major parties are fighting for themselves rather than the people. Sucking up to their mates in the establishment. It’s time to take out the trash and vote for People First to solve the problems in this country so Australians can get back on their feet.'
Full Transcript of Rennick's speech, "Only the People First Party has solutions to Australia's problems," - Senate 6.2.25
"It gives me great pleasure today to be able to speak to this motion because, after almost six years in this place, I'm incredibly frustrated at the lack of seriousness that the two major parties take when it comes to dealing with significant issues that concern the Australian people. They are sick and tired of watching the circus down here. It's interesting, now that I'm an Independent—the only senator for People First, but a party all the same—that I sit here and watch the clown show that goes on and the juvenile behaviour between the two major parties. The Australian people deserve better than what we're getting.
This week we've had a focus on issues that aren't of great concern to the Australian people. We've had next to no discussion or debate or any legislation that attempts to deal with the major issue in this problem, which is the cost of living. There's the cost of living, housing and the cost of energy. Yes, I know that the Labor Party want to deal with the cost of energy by providing subsidies to build hydrogen energy, which is only going to be very, very expensive. We've got cheap black coal in the ground that is much, much cheaper. But rather than do that, we're going to go down some rabbit hole of green hydrogen. As if that's ever going to work!
We've got an immigration crisis. Neither of the two major parties want to get serious about immigration in this country. If we want to get serious about immigration, we need to repeal many of the laws that were brought in by the Hawke-Keating government in the 1980s. We are only weeks away from the campaign for the next election being called and the Australian people have no idea what the policies of the major parties are because the major parties aren't interested in solutions; they are only interested in power.
Just today, yet again, we've seen laws passed that are going to censor free speech. There's no definition of 'violence' in regard to this free speech. The policing in this country is dealt with by the states. There's nothing in section 51 that deals with the federal government dealing with violence. No-one knows what the definition of 'a terrorism symbol' means. Heaven knows what that's going to be in the future and how that is going to be used against people who want to express an opinion. If you add those laws brought in today to the Online Safety Bill and the Misinformation and Disinformation laws, we don't know what we can say anymore.
This is typical of the two major parties. When I come down here, I want to provide solutions. I want to put forward bills that are going to deal with the cost of living, deal with energy prices, deal with housing and deal with the immigration issue, and I want to get the government out of people's lives. I want to get them out of the bedroom. I want to get them out of the family home. I want to get them out of the corporate boardroom. I want to get them out of the doctor's waiting room. I want them out of the classroom. But when we come down here, all we ever get is the major parties trying to impose more control.
Blue collar workers and small business
Now, I've got to point out that there are a lot of good people in the major parties. Once upon a time, the dominant faction of the old Labor Party was the blue-collar workers, and that was okay because this country was built by and belongs to the battlers, and we've got to look after our workers. It's same for the Liberal Party. It's for small business. Small business is also the backbone of this country. The little guy is the backbone of this country, whether it's the worker or the small business. That's the great thing with People First. We will put the people first, and we will hold either big governments or big corporations to account. We don't care if it's public or private, because we know that you just can't trust big organisations. From my time in these big organisation, I'll tell you what, it's always the yes men—it's always the little toadies—that climb to the top. If you speak out, if you want to push back, you're pushed to the side. I know. That's what happened to me in the Liberal Party. When I stood up for the vaccine injured, what happened to me? 'We've got to get rid of Rennick. We can't control him. We can't control him.' So what do you do? Rather than go in and actually fight for the people injured by the vaccine, you just remove the messenger. You remove the messenger and protect big pharma and all those industries that made a killing out of the COVID hysteria.
Anti-semitism and Israel
Here we are, three weeks into this parliament—can I say, this term has been dominated by two issues. The first 18 months were all about the Voice, which was one way of segregating the people and fighting each other. The second way to do it has been all about antisemitism and what's going on in Israel. These issues do not belong here in this country. These issues are all emotive issues that should be not dealt with in this manner. We've seen the Liberal Party this week engage in disgusting, inflammatory behaviour in order to stir everything up, with the whole idea that somehow Anthony Albanese is responsible for these so-called explosives in the caravan and the whole idea of, 'When did he find out and why didn't he tell us?' With all due respect, he wouldn't have a clue, because it's being conducted by the NSW Police Force. They're the ones responsible for this. Some of the stories and the posturing going around this are a distraction. It's a deliberate distraction because the Liberal Party don't want to talk about their policies. They've only got one business policy so far, and that's a $20,000 tax deduction for entertainment, for businesses with a turnover of up to $10 million, and it's only temporary for two years. Let me tell you, if that's the best that the Liberal Party have got, we're going to see more of the same under a Dutton government that we saw under the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government, where they didn't deal with tax reform.
Taxation
I'm going to hold this against the Liberal Party because, as secretary of the finance backbench committee for five years, I pushed a lot of ideas and I pushed a lot of tax reform. When we were stuck down here on weekends because of COVID, I'd call meetings about tax policy, and a few of my former colleagues did turn up on Saturday afternoons. I had hours-long meetings—they went for hours, for most of Saturday afternoon—with the former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, and none of these policies that I suggested have ever been implemented. If these people were really serious—if these two major parties were really serious—about tax reform in this country, they could implement them. The policies I'm recommending here are policies that are actually going to tax foreigners more and Australians less. This is the biggest free kick you could ever get. All you've got to do is lower income tax for the hardworking Australians out there. But the two major parties come in here, and 80 or 90 per cent of what goes on in this place is nothing but juvenile bickering between two major parties. There's next to no government business, and, when there is government business, it's always more control, like we saw today with the hate speech bill, which is designed to censor free speech. Where are the actual, genuine bills that are going to bring in greater efficiency in this country, especially in the government, that look at actually reforming and streamlining the bureaucracy? There is none of it. If anything, it's quite the opposite, where we end up introducing a new agency. We saw that this week with the environment-positive bill, a nature-positive bill. Now, Labor want to bring in a bill that's actually going to create a new, independent department. That is the last thing we need in this country—another independent department, especially with the environment.
Bureaucracy duplicating state departments at federal level
At the end of the day, the environment isn't even a responsibility of the federal government under section 51. The only reason why we have a federal environment department was that Bob Hawke went to the High Court in 1983, under the Franklin Dam decision, and basically said, 'We are going to use the foreign treaties power to override the plenary powers of the states when it comes to dealing with the environment.' I'm pretty sure, when our founding forefathers wrote the Constitution and said that the federal government should have powers over foreign treaties, they never intended for that power to override the plenary powers of the states. But, because the federal government is linked in through all these treaties, they now have control. There are treaties dealing with the environment. They've now established a federal environment department, which is one of the many duplications of environment departments that we have in this country, as well as education, health, energy, and water, just to name a few, and there are a whole raft of others.
Chasing Unicorns & Energy policy
Yet again, we've got this debacle this week where all we're doing is looking at adding more bureaucracy, censoring free speech, and subsidising green hydrogen. It just beggars belief, and I can't believe you guys in the Labor Party are behind in the polls. I didn't rate Anthony Albanese all that highly, but I did rate Labor as a political machine. And you guys are completely out of touch with reality. You're out here chasing these unicorns of climate change and all these wonderful woke ideas. They might work when you don't have a cost-of-living crisis, but when people are struggling with mortgages and 14 interest rate rises—which, by the way, isn't the fault of the Labor Party. I know that the Liberal Party have done a very good job of pinning all that on you, but it was actually the reckless spending throughout COVID that caused that, as well as 40 years of a slow decline in productivity.
Fancy woke ideas
People don't want to hear about fancy woke ideas. They want to know how you're going to implement solutions that are actually going to solve their cost-of-living crisis because there are people going broke in this country. There are people that are having to sell their houses. They're either having to move back home with mum or dad or actually ending up on the streets in tents, and we can't have that. It's alright if you live in the City of Melbourne and you can sell up, move to Queensland, get a house for half the price, and then at least have some money to live on. But, for many people in Queensland, they can't sell their houses and move into something lower, especially if they're from regional Queensland. So we need to be dealing with this problem, and we need serious structural and monetary reform in this country.
Monetary policy and infrastructure
One of the big mistakes of Keating was that he made the RBA independent. Monetary policy, along with taxation policy, are the two most important issues that government should be dealing with, and we have outsourced monetary policy to an unelected RBA that refuses to hand over the minutes of meetings they have with the Bank for International Settlements. Instead, they have sat there and done nothing about 14 interest rate rises. Let me tell you that changing the price of money is a speculative measure. Mucking around with the price of interest rates on the first Tuesday of every month, or six meetings a year now, is not dealing with the underlying problem, which is that we have a lack of infrastructure in this country. We have a lack of base-load energy. We have a lack of decent dams. We haven't built hardly a dam in this country in the last 50 years. We haven't built enough roads, rail, and things like that. If you want a solution to this, we need to start building more infrastructure, and we should fund it via an infrastructure bank. I've spoken about monetary policy and the need to reform monetary policy many times in this chamber, and, of course, we get nothing.
Parliamentary Standing orders redundant
We need to change the standing orders as well. There is too much time in this chamber. We need to get rid of taking note of answers. We don't really need two MPIs a day. We don't really need any MPIs, but let's take it back from one hour's worth of MPI to half an hour of MPI. Those sorts of things need to go. They're just arguing for the sake of arguing, and we need to give the government more time to actually do business because, yet again, today we've seen more bills guillotined. We saw 30 bills guillotined in the last sitting week, at the end of the year, and these were very, very important bills. I never got a chance to speak on the shuffling of the RBA boards and the fact that we've now got two RBA boards. That's the typical solution to our monetary problem—one bureaucratic department couldn't solve it, so now we're going to create another bureaucratic department. So we're now going to have two boards to sit around and shuffle the price of money, rather than get more people out there in the workforce on the front lines and more people back on the tools actually building dams and power stations.
Immigration causes too much demand
If you want to deal with the productivity crisis, our productivity crisis and our inflation crisis are actually not caused by too much demand, if you put aside the immigration issue; they're actually caused by a lack of supply. And it's a lack of supply because we haven't built enough infrastructure in this country in the last 50 years. We can blame John Button for that—the former Victorian Labor senator that introduced the Button plan—because he said that Australia can no longer compete in manufacturing, so we're just going to let it all go offshore. Well, how's that turning out for us? Forty years later, we've got a whole generation of university graduates who are broke and brainwashed, feeling sorry for themselves, instead of getting out of school when they were 15 or 16, getting an apprenticeship, getting on the tools and learning the meaning of hard work. It's wealth for toil in this country; it is wealth for getting on the tools and building infrastructure. It's certainly not wealth for the games and the circus that go on in this chamber week in, week out, where you guys, the two major parties, are just bickering between yourselves. So I say to you guys: get busy, come in here next week with some genuine solutions in regard to monetary policy, tax, immigration, and energy, and stop fighting amongst yourselves."
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