Abundance is not a dirty word, it is a blessing to be celebrated. It is time to return to the Australia we know and love.
Transcript
As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I note that we are living through a time of great civil disturbance. The media have chosen to fill our screens with exaggerated horror and fear. As a result, families are turning against families, neighbours against neighbours, and employers against employees. At this difficult time, we cannot lose sight of the good in this world. While it is daunting for some, we benefit from counting our blessings and looking forward to again becoming the Australia we all know and love. My message tonight is simple: ‘abundance’ is not a dirty word; it’s a blessing to be appreciated.
Australia is blessed with natural diversity in climate and soil. Somewhere on our continent exist the conditions necessary to grow any crop to rival the world’s best. Whether it’s olives in Inglewood or cashews at Dimbulah, Aussie farmers will always step forward to have a go. As 42 countries slip into food deficits, Australia’s agricultural output is at record highs. We’re literally feeding the world right now, and more water for our farmers will feed more of the world’s hungry. Our entrepreneurship lifted Australia from a prison colony to a top-10 world economy. Australians invented the black box flight recorder, heart pacemakers, the electric drill, bionic hearing, wi-fi hotspots and even Google Maps. This flow of innovation has not stopped. It continues. The University of Queensland has pioneered a world-first tissue culture system that can produce up to 500 avocado plants from a single cutting. This gives Australian producers the ability to bring new cultivars to market, faster, cheaper and using fewer chemicals than anywhere else in the world. The world avocado market is valued at $20 billion, and Australia has only $500 million of that so far.
Let’s look at mining. An Australian invention called the Reflux Classifier allows for the recovery of minerals that normally run to waste in the processing of ore. The University of Newcastle pioneered this recent technology, returning $1.5 billion in royalties to Australia every year. The University of Newcastle recently registered a patent on a new type of low-cost thermal storage called miscibility gap alloy. Miscibility gap alloy raises the promise of storing energy from non-baseload power sources, to be fed back into the grid at times of peak energy demand. This has the potential for a multibillion dollar export and licensing industry. I certainly hope so, because that may stop some arguments about the proliferation of unreliable renewables—what I call ‘intermittents’. Miscibility gap alloy could not exist without carbon and without mining. The economic powerhouse that is Australian mining has kept Australia out of recession these last two years. At one point, we had the world’s largest value of stored natural resources. If we were still exploring for the bounty this land has given us, we may still be the richest country in the word. It’s not too late. We need to reject the black-armband view of our history and, by extension, our future. We need to embrace entrepreneurship, to defend the inalienable right of everyday Australians to lift themselves up through hard work and enterprise, and we need to make sure the benefit of that hard work accrues to the Australians doing the work, to everyday Australians, not to foreign corporations. Let me explain.
The wealth each Australian creates every year, called the gross domestic product—per capita and inflation adjusted—increased from $41,000 per person in 1980 to $77,000 per person in 2019. Do we feel almost twice as wealthy as we did 40 years ago, though? No, definitely not. Median or mid-point wages have not increased in this period. The spoils of the hard work of everyday Australians have not gone to everyday Australians. Instead, this wealth has gone to foreign multinational corporations and to the administrative class. Public Service wages are growing at four per cent while private enterprise wages grow at less than one per cent, and that’s just not right. What’s needed in the short term is the removal of all COVID restrictions so the economy can open up and the Australian entrepreneurial spirit can repair the damage of COVID lockdown mismanagement. Then we need to remove green tape so farmers can farm and miners can mine. Instead of unelected, unaccountable foreign bureaucrats dictating to us, we must start making decisions for ourselves. Government does have a role to build the roads, the dams and the railroads. We need to restore our productive capacity to support this growth. Tax and finance reform are necessary to ensure that Australians can access the capital to expand and ensure that the profits from that expansion stay here.
We have one flag. We are one community. We are one people. We are one nation. Abundance is not to be ashamed of. Abundance is a blessing to celebrate.
