The Labor-Liberal UniParty’s massive immigration is driving up house prices, making mortgages bigger and unaffordable, and “risky.”
This is a misleading attempt to mask six quarters of negative per capita economic growth, which has turned into overall negative growth (recession).
It’s a dishonest manipulation of the numbers, leading to a human catastrophe where thousands of families are left without a roof over their heads.
A Ponzi scheme is a scam that can only continue as long as new victims sign up. Eventually, the scam falls down under its own weight.
The major parties’ “Big Immigration” plan for Australia works the same way.
Politicians have relied on ever-increasing levels of immigration for decades.
Immigrants grow the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The GDP is a measure of all the economic activity happening in the country. Every purchase, sale and government dollar spent counts towards the total GDP.
Every new immigrant that arrives needs to spend money to survive, as we all do. This spending on food, housing and other essentials all adds in to the total GDP of the country.
Politicians want higher GDP numbers. If total GDP shrinks for two quarters in a row, the country is defined as being in a recession. Going into a recession is a political disaster for government. They want to avoid it at all costs.
The government’s solution to avoid an ugly recession is easy: just keep immigration levels high and the total GDP will keep going up!
The problem is, total GDP doesn’t measure how good our lives are. It doesn’t measure affordability, access to services or happiness. The average GDP per-person (or per-capita) tells us more.
In fact, before COVID, Australia was in a “per-capita recession”.[2] This means that while the total GDP was still going up because of immigration, the average GDP per person was actually getting worse.
Everything seemed fine to the government. On paper, total GDP was going up so we weren’t in an official recession. Out in the real world, the economy was getting worse on average for every individual Australian.
Like any Ponzi scheme, the immigration scam will eventually buckle under its own weight. As more immigrants arrive, they put more pressure on our hospitals, roads, housing and rental markets and other infrastructure. The pressure builds up far quicker than we can build infrastructure to catch up to the population growth.
With more pressure on essential services, Australia is less productive, dragging down the average GDP. The Government notices this and has to increase immigration even more to keep the total GDP up, yet this immigration puts even more pressure on our essential services dragging the average GDP down again.
This continues in a vicious cycle. The total GDP keeps going up and life for the average Australian keeps getting worse. Increasing immigration is like pouring fuel on a fire that immigration started. As the problem gets worse, the government needs to bring in more immigration to cover it up.
At least 650,000 immigrants will arrive in Australia over the next two years, a surprise increase of more than 50 percent on forecasts in the October 2022 Budget.[3]
If this exponential increase is allowed to continue, eventually the economy and our essential services will buckle. We are already seeing the signs of Australia bursting at the seams.
Australia is already in the middle of a housing and rental crisis. Many young first-home buyers are completely priced out of the market. Desperate tenants continue to tell horror stories of unaffordable rent increases.
Every single one of the 650,000 arrivals will need to find a home, meaning the horror stories of today are just the start of the pain to come. We can’t build the houses quick enough, especially if the government locks up everyone’s’ land to save the Koala trees. The increased demand will skyrocket rents and make houses even more unaffordable.
The immediate decision we need to take as a country is clear. We must immediately cut immigration to net-zero. That means that Australia only takes the same amount of arrivals as people who depart the country.
We must use this time to build essential infrastructure. We need to allow essential services time to catch up to our current population level.
Most of all, we need the government to stop doing things to make themselves look good on paper, and actually look after Australians.
A big immigration plan hurts Australians. Tell the government no and stop the immigration ponzi scheme.
[1] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/migration-australia/latest-release
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-06/gdp-q4-2018/10874592
[3] https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/its-a-major-problem-mark-bouris-warns-government-over-massive-surge-of-650000-new-migrants-in-next-two-years/news-story/0d82bb48d3de996c2e602091115b54db
I speak as a servant to the many different people who make up our amazing one Queensland community. I have not yet had a chance to make fun of Treasurer Jim Chalmers’s ode to soviet glory titled ‘Capitalism after the crisis’, so let me start there. A Treasurer with no real-world business experience, no firsthand knowledge of free markets and no life outside the machine of politics has decided to tear down Australia’s economic system and rebuild it—hammer in one hand and sickle in the other. Reinventing capitalism is not visionary, as Jim Chalmers hopes; it’s a cliche.
The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT (Senator Cox):
Senator Roberts, can I just remind you to address people in the other place by their correct titles.
Senator ROBERTS: Mr Jim Chalmers?
Senator ROBERTS: Worse, it confuses political theory with economics. The Treasurer has studied only one of those, and it’s not economics. Mr Jim Chalmers has studied political science and now sees every problem as a political one. The Treasurer knows nothing about economics and clearly dismisses the need for it. How ironic that Mr Jim Chalmers’s now legendary article opens with a quote from the Greek philosopher Heraclitis, when he says:
No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.
What? It’s not without merit that Heraclitis is known as the ‘obscure philosopher’. This nonsense may make the Treasurer sound smart at a dinner party for pseudo-intellectual lefties, yet, to everyday Australians struggling with the rising cost of living, falling real wages and a housing shortage, it’s nothing more than intellectual masturbation.
When you hear ‘command capitalism’ from the Treasurer, what he’s really saying to the Australian people is this: ‘I don’t trust you. I don’t respect your choices. I don’t recognise your freedom. Everything you have belongs to the state, and you will do as we command.’
Commentators refer to this fantasy as Jimbonomics. That’s their view. In reality, it’s about threat, force and regulation designed to herd businesses into supporting fringe activism that rewards the elites at the expense of everyday people. It’s about control over ‘we the people’. Rather than the state owning everything directly, all the wealth in the Treasurer’s economy will be owned by the billionaires that own the UN and the World Economic Forum.
Already, woke politics has engineered a rapid descent of employee privacy, with governments ranking businesses based upon the race, religion, sexual preference, gender and disability of their staff. Human beings have become commodities in the implementation phase of the great reset, the new world order.
The recent Workplace Health and Safety Amendment Bill 2023 from this government actually requires an employer to know the vaccine status of their employees and to bar those people from the workplace if they are not vaccinated—inhuman. Pfizer says, ‘Cheers for that bill. Thank you.’ Treasurer Chalmers has lit a fire at the heart of parliament that seeks to destroy everything good and prosperous that everyday Australians, across the 235 years of Western settlement in Australia, have built.
As many have said in criticism of the Treasurer’s treatise on communism, there can be no democracy without capitalism, and there is no capitalism without the free market. It’s time we started asking if Labor is planning on reimagining democracy itself. Is it? The Albanese government have introduced legislation that clearly shows this is their intention, so at least the Treasurer has been honest about his intentions.
Listen to this. The Treasury Laws Amendment (Energy Price Relief Plan) Bill 2022 was nationalising the gas industry. The National Reconstruction Fund Corporation Bill 2023 represents the government distorting the free market, taking it upon themselves to direct investment in manufacturing, using government money, and to stop key investments in our future.
The Safeguard Mechanism (Crediting) Amendment Bill 2022 imposes egregious controls on industry, with ministerial direction to provide all of the details in the future—unfettered power. I’m sick of these bills that are all shopping bag and no shopping.
It’s not the purpose of the state to give the government of the day a bill with nothing actually in it so the government can fill in all the important bits later, as it wants. Shame on the Greens and the teals for going along with this insult to the Westminster system of government. It must now be clear that George Carlin was absolutely correct: it’s a club, and everyday people, everyday Australians, are not in it. Australians have never wanted the economy to be subservient to its political leaders. We have never wanted that.
Command capitalism is anticompetitive. It allows the Albanese government to decide which Australian businesses get to succeed and which fail. Why does Mr Jim Chalmers feel the need to reinvent capitalism? Why does he feel that he is the first Treasurer in Australian history that must take this step off the cliff into the abyss? I’ll tell you why. The free market doesn’t like what Labor is selling. The Australian people do not want to spend their money on inferior eco-products and self-serving CEOs who, so long as they achieve their carbon dioxide footprint, would happily see Australian families starve or freeze.
Net zero policies are all fun and games until the lights go off and the bugs are served cold because, well, gas is now selfish and the power has gone off again—so cold it is. Why is it that the only environments the Labor Party doesn’t want to help are the investment environment and the human environment? If the market doesn’t want Labor’s globalist vision, then the Prime Minister and his Treasurer must accept that. They have no right, and they were not voted into power, to dismantle capitalism, reimagine it or duct tape it to a chair in the basement.
It took Mr Jim Chalmers 6,000 words to explain that values based capitalism means, ‘You will do as we say.’ The Soviet Union fell 30 years ago, but Treasurer Chalmers is doing his best to drape its banners all over our parliament. Treasurer, give it up. Russia has. ‘Jimbonomics’, as some call it, will harm small and medium-sized businesses and transfer wealth to the people at the big end of town whose market power allows them to comply with the Treasurer’s demands. To comply is easy for them: pass the cost on to the consumer. That’s all. From the perspective of everyday Australians, green is the new red. From the perspective of the billionaires who shadow-wrote the Treasurer’s opus, green is the new gold.
The only part of the Treasurer’s opus that was not lifted from the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset was the part that was deliberately left out: you will own nothing and you will be happy. Who will own what everyday Australians are no longer allowed to own—the houses, cars, furniture and electronics? Why, it’ll be the predatory billionaires for whom Jim Chalmers is just a mouthpiece.
Commanding the market during COVID has wrecked the market. Wages are falling, inflation is out of control and economic activity is down. Exports have grown in countries that ran their economies better than we did. They have the demand and the economic strength. Now Jim Chalmers wants to use more command economics to get us out of the hole in which command economics has buried us.
Australia will not survive a second round of abuse from a treasurer who is handsy with other people’s money. Markets do not belong to Mr Jim Chalmers. They do not belong to the Labor Party. Markets belong to the people and their private businesses. They belong to Australians. The big business investors in whose pockets the Treasurer so often resides, bankers in particular, would like nothing more than to kill off their market competition and to bury the small and medium-sized businesses in a new mountain of controls and regulatory bondage.
Their deaths will be celebrated in the name of saving the planet. Make no mistake: destroying small and medium-sized businesses is the goal, not the unintended consequence, of green politics.
For Labor, dealing with a handful of powerful CEOs is easier than dealing with 10 million small directors. But those directors are the ones keeping Australia back from the brink of ruin. The safest economies in history have been the nimble free markets. It has been repeatedly proven. They adapt to disasters, bounce back after injury and seek out the best solutions for the future. Free markets are far smarter than Jim Chalmers.
The beauty of free markets is that they are smarter by far than any individual or group, and sensible, honest people know this. Competent people know this. Jim Chalmers and his Soviet counterparts are too arrogant, or maybe too fearful, to understand that basic truth. The secret to being a truly great treasurer is to step back, relinquish power, cut regulation, lower taxes and let Australians do what Australians do best: lift themselves up through their own hard work and enterprise.
Businesses are not ideological vessels to carry Labor’s election slogans, tied to the Greens and the teals. Businesses are not fodder in the insatiable thirst for more money, more power and more influence from the billionaires at the World Economic Forum. It is about control.
Shame on the Treasurer for reaching well beyond his mandate. Put your greedy paws back in your pockets. It’s time for the Treasurer and the Prime Minister to tell their billionaire masters, ‘No.’ We have one flag, we are one community and we are one nation, founded as a penal colony.
I’ll be damned if the One Nation party will let you take us back there again.
The greedy major banks have closed more than 70 branches in rural, regional and remote Australia in just 42 days.
The banks are looked after by the Australian government extremely well, so they have a responsibility to serve Australians.
It’s another reason why we need a people’s postal bank.
Since 2019 the RBA created $508 billion out of thin air through electric journal entries. I have been warning the RBA directly that this money printing will contribute to the inflation we are experiencing.
What did Governor Phillip Lowe say? He acknowledged I warned about creating money, he acknowledged it was a mistake and he also said nation building projects like Iron Boomerang would help fix inflation.
Senator ROBERTS : Thank you both for being here. Dr Lowe, in 2016, I had my first Senate estimates session. I asked the Treasury secretary, who at the time was John Fraser, a question about the huge increase in money supply. He pretty much dismissed me and said, ‘No, don’t worry about it.’ At the next Senate estimates session, he said yes; he acknowledged it. In the third one, he said, ‘Yes. The theory is that it will lead to inflation, you’re correct, but we haven’t seen it yet and we don’t know why.’ So I understand that it’s a vexing problem. You said that one of the solutions is to make the pie bigger. You are saying that the answer to the government’s funding dilemma is to grow the economy and, as a result, the tax base. Have you heard of the project Iron Boomerang? We’ve got the world’s best metallurgical coal for making steel in the east coast and the best iron ore in the west coast. It would build a railway line fully funded. The investors are ready to go. There is a Senate inquiry taking off on it pretty soon. It would take coal to the west and iron ore to the east. There would be massive steelmaking complexes both in the east coast and the west coast. It would remove shipping and road transport. It would be a huge investment. It would add $100 billion to our GDP, which is five per cent. It would open up the north and all of central Australia for the Indigenous living there and rural communities and agriculture. Is that something that we should be thinking about?
Mr Lowe : If the rate of return on that investment is as you describe it and both the financial and social returns are as you describe them, it is something to think about. There may be other projects that have better returns. I don’t want to endorse it, because I don’t know anything about it. But, in principle, we should be looking at the financial and social returns we get from these projects. If they are greater than the cost of funding and the economy has enough resources to do it, then certainly we should be thinking about it.
Senator ROBERTS: We’ve got investors, we’re told, from overseas lining up and also from within. I will come back to the formal questions I had. The Reserve Bank spent the COVID years increasing the money supply, as Deputy Governor Debelle said at the time, by electronic journal entry; they are his words. It is commonly called printing money. At an earlier estimates, I was given a figure of $508 billion as the total for electronic journal entries since 2019. Can you update that figure, please?
Mr Lowe : That’s still roughly the same. I think our balance sheet is a bit over $600 billion at the moment.
Ms Bullock: It is about $600 billion. Exchange settlement account balances are probably around $450 billion or something like that.
Mr Lowe : Our balance sheet has roughly $100 billion of banknotes on it. That is still $100 billion of banknotes. That is $4,000 for every person in the country, which I find extraordinary. That is one of the elements on our balance sheet. We have these exchange settlement balances, which is the electronic money that you talked about.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. So inflation has gone from not a problem to a 30-year high, 7.8 per cent in the December quarter. On 2 February 2022, Dr Lowe, you said that inflation had surprised on the upside. In March 2022, you predicted inflation would peak at 4.2 per cent. That was at the ABA, Australian Banking Association, conference that we both attended. Why were you surprised, Dr Lowe, when many, including myself, had spent 2020 and 2021 warning the Reserve Bank and the government, including at Senate estimates, that the sheer volume of this money expansion would inevitably cause significant inflation?
Mr Lowe : You were one of these people who were making the argument that the money supply expansion was ultimately going to be inflationary. That has played a role. As we were talking about before, at least half, maybe three-quarters, of the increase in inflation is due to what went on in Europe and the supply-side disruptions. The expansion of money supply, the low interest rates and, I would say, the government support during the pandemic have driven inflation. But it’s not the full story.
Senator ROBERTS: Is 7.8 per cent inflation the price the public is paying for the Reserve Bank supporting the government’s wasteful mismanagement of COVID using lockdowns and other restrictions, leading to JobSeeker, JobKeeper and mismanagement that the government caused, which is what necessitated the money creation? Did you even consider saying to the government, ‘No, I’m not going to print the massive amount of money, so perhaps reconsider your COVID strategy’?
Mr Lowe : No. We did not do—I want to be very clear about this—the money creation at the request of the government. The nine people who sit on the board of the Reserve Bank decided to do this. We had meetings with the government and we understood—
Senator ROBERTS: Was it because the government had put in place so many onerous restrictions?
Mr Lowe : No. It is easy to forget this now. In early 2020, we were being told by the health people that tens of thousands of Australians would be dead within months. Remember that there were preparations for, including in the Reserve Bank, temporary morgues in our cities. Our borders were closed. We were told the vaccine was maybe three years or longer away. This was going to be something that would take the society a long time to get over. That is what we were being told. That was the information—
Ms Bullock: And we were observing what was happening overseas.
Mr Lowe : And we were seeing what was going on in New York and Italy. It was really terrible and scary. People were locked in their homes. That was the base upon which we made the decision to go on this route. It turns out that the scientists developed a vaccine much more quickly and the economy was more resilient and we did too much. But we didn’t do too much because the government told us to or we wanted to; we thought it was the right thing to do given the information we had at the time.
CHAIR: We’re out of time for this line; sorry, Senator Roberts.
While rate rises may have been foreseeable, they are only happening because of the Government’s incompetence causing inflation in the first place.
The government printed hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air, leading to massive inflation which the RBA is trying to bring under control with a sledgehammer.
Australians who bought a house under the RBAs promise that rates wouldn’t rise until 2024 are struggling with more pain to come.
In a recent economic essay released for weekend newspapers, Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers has cobbled together some cliches about how best to run the world’s 13th largest economy. To summarise, it is a blueprint on how to destroy a $1.3 trillion dollar economy. Of course, Doctor Chalmers has learnt from a master at economic shrinkage, his PhD dissertation was on the economic and social legacy of Paul Keating.
Unfortunately for the Treasurer, his blueprint was released on a weekend when news hit that his tax on beer is set to rise sending the price of beer towards $12 a schooner. Just for the record though, and I’ll get to details soon, Chalmer’s blue print will surely classify your beer as a ‘bad’ investment, because it is full of carbon. Prices will get even higher.
We have to take our hats off to the spin doctor in the Treasurer’s office who released the essay to coincide with the increase in beer prices.
Schooners of beer are exactly what the Treasurer’s blueprint boils down to. Prices of goods are inflating exponentially, and it is the main topic for discussion at kitchen tables right across Australia. Families are now having to choose between new school shoes or eating; getting the roof fixed or having a holiday at the beach.
A basket of goods that only cost $100 in 1990 set you back $217 in 2022. With sky high inflation, that $100 basket now costs us an eye-watering $234 in 2023, a nearly 8% increase in just one year. Unfortunately, prices will continue to go up. Much of Australia’s price rises in groceries and the bills we can’t avoid are even worse than the headline inflation rate.
Meanwhile in Canberra, the Treasurer is writing new short stories about how to add more pressure to our inflation cooked economy and what he can do to make life even harder for Australians.
Chalmers references the polycrisis of converging pressures. What we really have though in Australia is a pollie-crisis, due to politicians in Canberra making terrible decisions .
Australia’s inflation hasn’t been this high since the Keating days. Families should be terrified, because for those of us who can remember, Paul Keating sent mortgages to 19% and much of the country went broke.
The Treasurer’s neo-Marxist catch-phrase ‘sustainable finance architecture, including a new taxonomy’ to label the climate impact of different investments, has been a topic of much discussion in recent years. Soviet extremists on the left argue that this system is necessary for their fight in the climate change scam and promoting ‘sustainability’. Others, including One Nation, argue that it is misguided and ultimately harmful to economic growth and people’s prosperity.
First and foremost, using a ‘new’ taxonomy to label the climate impact of different investments is the worst and most damaging form imaginable of government intervention in the market. In short, Chalmers says he wants to classify all investments made, including in your superannuation, into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Ergo, beer full of carbon will be a ‘bad’ investment and need a higher price, while a tree (which is actually made of carbon like much of everything else) will be ‘good’.
This market intervention is the most serious and concerning idea that a government has offered since Ben Chiefly dabbled with communism in the late 1940’s.
The federal government classifying an Aussie family’s assets into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is a terrifying intervention. Firstly, it creates a level of uncertainty for investors, including you, as they may be unsure of how investments will be classified under the new system. Labor has a track record of changing the goal posts at any minute to suit any Greens, union or factional deal on the table. The classification system is purely subjective and cannot be based on evidence or data.
Secondly, it will lead to market distortions, as certain investments are favoured over others simply because of their classification as good or bad, rather than any economic, financial or productive merit. This will lead to a misallocation of resources, as investments that may not be the most economically efficient or profitable are chosen simply because they are classified as more ‘environmentally’ friendly. For example “this model of car (an Electric Vehicle) is ‘good’, while that diesel 4WD is ‘bad’”, even though Australia is not a country suitable nor ready for the forced uptake of 100% electric vehicles in any way.
The good or bad decisions are made based on the Treasurer’s mood as he gets out of bed in the morning. It is simply a chaotic system that is being proposed. The Soviet-level bureaucracy necessary to write, disseminate and enforce this controlled economy will result in significantly higher taxes and lower economic growth – an inevitable result of bigger government. Higher taxes and debt will continue to be the Labor way.
These plans will trash our economy. When the Government tries to pick winners, the country loses.
All realistic thinkers will reject and debunk the idea that we can accurately classify and label the ‘climate impact’ of different investments . Any policy setting Australia makes with the aim to ‘adjust’ the world temperature will barely be a drop in the ocean, even if you believe we need to do anything, which the science clearly says is neither necessary nor possible.
The emphasis on ‘sustainable finance’ and labelling the climate impact of different investments as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ misses the point that the issue confronting Australians is inflation and a lack of economic advancement. Controlling and directing the economy to favour only climate-friendly projects from ALP donors will not deal with inflation. Instead, concentrating economic power in the hands of a woke few, it will increase inflation.
One Nation proposes, and has always advocated for, systemic economic reform with the primary objective of reducing government waste to reduce the tax burden on families and eliminate government debt.
If Australians think it’s a rough deal that the Treasurer must raise tax on beer this weekend because beer is ‘bad’, they are best reminded that the cost of beer will be small fry compared to other cost of living pressures Chalmers will soon unleashed
The Treasurer can take away one important lesson from this battle, One Nation will fight the Labor party every step of the way. We will fight for lower prices, better working conditions and a safer economy. The Liberals may have abandoned the field to socialism, but we haven’t. When I ran on as a rugby and league halfback as a teenager and young adult, the job was clear; get that ball and drive it up the middle.
So Labor had better realise it won’t get away with trashing the economy just because of a fractious, demoralised Liberal party destined to become totally irrelevant. The Australian political landscape is now far more pluralistic as One Nation’s continuing growth demonstrates.
The Orwellian use of catch phrases like ‘sustainable finance architecture’ and a ‘new taxonomy’ to label the ‘climate impact of different investments’ is designed to hoodwink the public while winning back Labor’s Green voters, who already exist in this world of doublespeak and concocted reality.
Chalmers is proposing an unnecessary and frightening intervention in our economy that has already been screwed over thanks to years of government COVID restrictions. These measures have had questionable impact on our health, and have certainly decimated our economic well-being. Investors can no longer invest with certainty. Banks have introduced their own version of the Treasurer’s “worthiness” index that is forcing the closure of critical industries in mining, agriculture and manufacturing.
Chalmers is promising more of the same. More wealth reduction, more employment loss, more unemployment and more misery for everyday Australians.
One Nation is having none of this Soviet-style economic management. Let businesses get on with what they do best – creating jobs, creating wealth, and creating a future for workers and for all everyday Australians.
In our beautiful country the best method of providing a future for everyone has always been personal enterprise.
This budget will jack up power prices, keep inflation roaring to new heights and do nothing to help you from day to day. I joined Sky News the night it was delivered to talk about my initial reaction.
Welcome back to our coverage of the budget. Tonight the Treasurer has laid out his economic plan, and while Labour has the numbers in the House of Reps, the Senate cross-bench will be critical for whether the government can pass its various measures. Here’s a reminder of the state of play: 39 votes are needed to pass bills into law. The government has 26, meaning it needs another 13 to get its agenda across the line. The Greens have 12 of those, with another five Senators representing minor parties, and one independent. Joining me live on the desk, is three of those crucial cross-benchers that could make or break the Labour budget. Senator Jacqui Lambie, One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts, and Greens Treasury spokesman, Nick McKim, great to see you all. Senator Lambie, let’s start with you. What did you think of Jim Chalmers’ first budget?
Oh, I have to say, they’ve played it very safe, haven’t they? It’s really is a mini budget. They’ve got five months up their sleeve, they’re buying time here. They’re gonna have to make some tough decisions by May. We’ve got a massive blowout in the NDIS. We’ve got the cost of living pressures out there, and I think we’ve just, I’ve just seen on the TV in the last five minutes, the gas prices are gonna go up 20% in two years. I tell you what, we are really under the pump in this country, and then we have a major deficit we’ve gotta payoff. That’s where we’re at, some tough decisions. They need to go back to the drawing board. It’s lovely, it’s all been touchy-feely. Let’s see what the May budget looks like, but they’re gonna have to make some cuts, and they’re gonna have to be tough.
Nick McKim, what’s your take on Jim Chalmers’ first effort?
Oh look, there’ll be a lot of disappointed people in the country, I reckon. I mean, this budget’s got more than a width of austerity about it. The government, and the Treasurer, have acknowledged the challenges, and Jacqui talked a little bit about those. I mean, they say they want wages to go up. Wages are gonna go down, then they’re gonna flat-line. They say they want employment to go up, but actually unemployment is going up. They say they want to be fair to people, but actually they’ve got stage-three tax cuts, which give a quarter of a trillion dollars in tax breaks, overwhelmingly benefiting the top end of town. And people who are really struggling to make ends meet, are not getting much assistance at all in this budget.
Malcolm Roberts, is it a budget for the times, as Jim Chalmers argues?
[Malcolm Roberts] It’s a budget for the continuation, and falling off a cliff I think, because workers have already gone backwards 10%. Anybody who earns a wage or salary is going back 10%, and will continue to go back because we’ve got rapid inflation. Wages won’t move anywhere nearly as quickly. We’ve got high cost of living pressures. We’ve got high energy prices. Prices are forecast to go up 50% next year Kieran, and 50% the year after. People can’t handle that. That’s a doubling of prices. 100% increase over two years, that’s a doubling. We’ve got a climate change, there’s very few specifics. The housing, we talk about a million houses.
[Jacqui] Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I can see you nodding your head Jacqui, a million houses, how? Where’s the provision?
Yeah.
[Malcolm Roberts] We can see 20, $25 billion on climate. Well, 20 of it is on poles and wires. It’s just gonna increase the cost of electricity from far-flung areas. We’ve already got the poles and wires we need from coal-fired power stations. This is absurd.
With that rewiring the nation, that project that Malcolm Roberts is alluding to there, it’s $20 billion. A lot of challenges in terms of workforce and supplies in getting that done. Does that mean that power prices rise at least in the short term until that’s all established?
Well, this budget makes it very clear that, retail electricity prices will go up 56% in the next two years. So there is no doubt that we are facing massive pressures on household bills. I wanna talk a little bit about the housing announcement.
[Kieran] There were those numbers there. So you have 20% this year, 30% next year-
[Nick] That’s right, they have compounded.
[Kieran] -for electricity and gas. Yeah, that’s 56. And then the gas 20 and 20.
[Nick] That’s right.
[Kieran] As Jacqui suggested.
[Nick] That’s right.
[Kieran] So, we’re talking a massive hit to-
We are talking massive hits on household budgets, and what the government could have done is walk away from the tax cuts for the top end, and put in place genuine cost of living measures. They could have put dental into Medicare, mental health support into Medicare, done more on childcare, built more affordable homes, wipe student debt. Like there’s plenty the government could do. And the money was there. A quarter of a trillion dollars, $250 billion over 10 years overwhelmingly favouring the top. We’re all gonna get a 9,000; Jacqui, Malcolm, and I will all get a $9,000 a year tax break, and there is nothing in that package for minimum income.
Do you think there should have been direct support on power prices? Because obviously there’s this challenge with the inflationary environment right now, that if they write checks,
Yeah, the challenges.
they could have a counterproductive effect.
The challenges with this country over the years of both major parties have sold us out. We no longer own things. This is the problem. So, we’re relying on other people to generate our power for us, and that cost us a lot more money instead of leaving it in the hands of what we should have been as private investors. That’s where we were at in 2021. And that’s been really unfortunate. I don’t know what you do about those power prices, ’cause quite frankly, we have no control over the companies that run them. They can pretty much run amok all they like, and that’s where we’re at.
Should there be price caps or something of that sort?
Something needs to be done, whether it’s price caps or, I think Daniel Andrews is buying his lot back. Isn’t he in Victoria? He’s worked out, it’s costing them a fortune. He’s got no control over it. He’s buying it off. We have control over ours in Tasmania. We’re very lucky the state government owns ours, and they could give us, they could relieve that pressure as well by giving us cuts. They don’t do that, that is their choice. We pay a little bit less than the rest of you, but I can tell you now, this is where the state government of Tasmania is really gonna feel it, because there’s no way Tasmanians can afford for our power prices to go up 5%, let alone 20.
We’re talking of massive impact. What do you think? Should there be price signal or price cuts?
[Malcolm Roberts] No, definitely not. If you look at childcare, it’s increasingly getting more and more subsidies. The prices go up, whenever you subsidise something, people charge more for it. I mean it’s that simple, this is basic economics. Manufacturing will get really decimated by this. First of all, the cost of electricity is now the number one cost category in any manufacturing, any manufacturing. It used to be labour, labor’s not anymore. It’s electricity. What we’re doing is, we’re subsidising the Chinese to instal these parasitic mal investments. They’re kamikaze investments, solar and wind, to raise the price of electricity, everywhere in the world, where they’ve increased solar and wind, they’ve increased the price of electricity, startlingly. Manufacturing will be driven out of the country yet more.
What’s your read on that? Because obviously in the short term, there are challenges with transmission. The poles and wires that we spoke about, they need to be done to accommodate.
Absolutely.
But Malcolm Robert’s argument there, that it’ll just simply continue to drive prices up, renewables.
Oh no, I mean you could legislate to put in place price caps. I mean there’s a very common thing to do around the world, and I don’t accept Malcolm’s argument there. I mean ultimately…
[Malcolm Roberts] It’s in the figures, empirical figures all around the world. Every country, Spain, Germany, any country that goes heavily into solar and wind, it increases their prices of electricity.
I know Malcolm doesn’t believe in climate change, but the sciences-
[Malcolm Roberts] I believe in climate variability Nick.
absolutely have to to rapidly reduce our emissions in this country. And the best way to provide the cheapest power is more investment in renewables, and less into propping up the dirty, old coal-fired clunkers because they are unreliable. They’re old infrastructure, building new fossil fuel plants, including gas, is more expensive than putting in place distributed generation of renewable energy close to the centres of demand, supported by battery store.
The challenge in the the short term obviously, workforce shortages, supply shortages, these are all bottlenecks,
[Nick] They are.
in terms of that process, aren’t they?
Yeah, absolutely they are. And, now there was some welcome investment in the budget into TAFE and vocational education. I think that’s a good thing, but that does take obviously time to flow through.
Do you see Jacqui Lambie, I think you alluded to it earlier, but with this spending approach, Jim Chalmers says it’s 99% of the additional commodities, and tax revenue has been banked. Is this an attempt to say, “Okay, we’re not doing a Liz Truss budget, we’re gonna be responsible, and this is almost like a stepping stone to the May budget, where those broader changes might eventuate.”
Well, I think if you follow Liz’s Truss’s track, you’re not gonna last very long. That would be my my first point. But look, we’ve been really, really lucky with our commodities in this country. We’ve made a lot of money outta them. We don’t know if we’re gonna do that next year, the year after. We don’t know whether there’s gonna be a call for as much of those resources as around the rest of the world. I wouldn’t think there will be. We’ve had a really great year on that. That’s great. And we’ve all got a little bit GST extra outta that for our states, that’s a fabulous thing. We’ve seen that, I’m sure $360 million extra in Tasmania is gonna help us a lot. We’re only a small state, and that that will go to fixing things. But we cannot rely on this. We really need to look at those stage-three tax cuts. I believe that, those people in those lower incomes, certainly give them a tax cut, give them a bit of a break. It’s gonna be tough for them over the next few years. There’s no doubt about that. But people on the 120, a 100 or 1,000, where’s the cutoff to say, “You know what? We can’t afford to give you a tax cut at this point in time. Something needs to be done.” We can save billions of dollars there. There’s no doubt about that. I have to laugh about their TAFE, when they, they’re gonna chuck a billion dollars back into TAFE, Kieran, which is lovely. I’d remind the Labour Party, they cut $4 billion outta that education fund about three years ago alongside the Labour Party. So good on you for putting it back. Better late than ever. And I’ll be very grateful for that. But right now, we have a deficit and we cannot ignore that. And we have to start paying that back. We also have to pay up there for that NDIS, and something has to give here.
Malcolm Roberts, the Treasurer says that we need to have a conversation, a national conversation, and the tax needs to be part of that conversation. Where should we head in terms of the debate about the structural deficit? Because quite clearly, he’s identified the illness, not necessarily the entire cure this evening.
[Malcolm Roberts] Good question. First of all, we need the end, I’ll get into tax in a minute, but we need to end the black armband view of mining. Mining has pulled this country out of a mess for the last two years. And the coal prices were forecast in last budget are around about $60 a tonne. They’re $400 in actual fact, iron ore similarly, very much higher than they were forecast be. If it wasn’t for mining, we’d be well and truly deeper in the brown stuff. Now, tax, we need to make it simple. We need to make it, so that the multinationals automatically pay their tax. They’re not doing it at the moment. The Liberal Party in 1953 put in the Double Taxation Recognition Act, which basically made large foreign multinationals, not pay company tax, that’s absurd. The petroleum resources tax, that Bob Hawke’s Labour Party brought in the ’80s, made sure that the largest tax evader in the world, Chevron, pays not a cent, while they export billions of dollars worth of our natural gas. And we’re the largest gas, we’re the largest exporters of energy in the world. And we get bugger all for it here. We have the highest gas prices, we have the highest-
So do you think a profits tax, a super profits tax or something like that?
[Malcolm Roberts] I think you get back to basics, and you actually tax multinationals on the widgets they make. That’s an interim one. But we’ve gotta have a simpler tax system, bring it back to basics. We’ve got way outta kilter. It’s far too complex. The GST was supposed to-
New mines, new gas projects and so on. But this remains a lucrative transition fuel, does it not?
We have argued consistently for a corporate super profits tax. We have argued consistently for super profits taxes particularly targeted at fossil fuel companies. And I wanna make this point about taxation. In this budget, it was revealed tonight, that the petroleum resource rent tax is gonna bring in $450 million over the forward estimates, less than what we were told it would last year. We are in the middle of a so-called gas boom, and the big gas companies are gonna be paying $450 million bucks less tax along with the other companies. The petroleum resource rent tax targets less tax than what they were forecast to last year. It’s an absolute roar.
So obviously that’s your,
And it needs to be fixed.
that’s your thinking, in terms of where the Treasurer should start this conversation.
He could do that. He could walk away from the quarter of a trillion dollars, the $250 billion in stage-three tax cuts. That’s what they will cost over the next 10 years. Negative gearing, reform capital gains tax reform, which would stop these spiking house prices, which are pricing too many people out of a home. And meaning that at the moment, homes are like an investment class, rather than a human right. There’s so much we could do, and so many levers at Jim Chalmers’ disposal, and he’s basically pulled none of them.
[Malcolm Roberts] I think we might have found something that Nick, and I agree on, because the government is talking about, housing price is a simple matter of supply and demand, right Kieran?
Is is that a first by the way? I think it might be.
[Malcolm Roberts] Yeah, no, no. Nick and I have helped each other-
I’m worried, I’m worried.
[Malcolm Roberts] on quite a few things. Housing prices are a matter of supply and demand. The supply is up to the local governments, and some extent the state governments. Federal government’s got nothing to do with that. The demand, the federal government’s gonna shoot up by increasing immigration, 180,000 net, permanent.
No, now, just to be clear, we don’t agree on that. And I just wanna say about housing, the headline from the government is a million new homes. When you look at the fine print in the budget, it’s 10,000.
We’ve got two and a half minutes left, before we cross over to Paul Murray and his special tonight. Let’s get some final thoughts, overarching thoughts if we can, Jacqui Lambie to you as we wrap up this evening. What would you like to leave our viewers in terms of your assessment? Obviously, you believe that this is really a stepping-stone budget in many respects, and a lot of work to come over six months.
Yeah, I think it is a stepping-stone budget. They’re just dipping their toe in the water at the moment. They’ve got some big decisions to make over the next six months. And-
And is it largely around the NDIS? Is it your view that that’s the role?
I think it’s around everyone, everything. I am just gonna step forward here, and say that they’re giving the GST to the states, because they’re gonna expect those states to start giving some heavy lifting and they’re gonna say, “Hey, we gave you extra GST. You go fix that.” I reckon that’s exactly what they’re doing. It is not going to be enough. Our people are really hurting out there. It’s gonna get worse before it gets better, especially if we do go, we’re already heading into recession. If we hit a recession, we’ve got interest rates going up out there. Houses are losing their value. We’ve got many young kids that invested in them. We’re in dire straits going in, into the next 12 months, and they’re gonna have to make some really tough decisions for that May budget. And you know what, this is what we’re gonna say, “Is Labour made of the steel that it thinks it is?”
Malcolm Roberts, your final assessment as we wrap up?
[Malcolm Roberts] Yeah, they’ve completely missed the major points, A paper presented, I’ll read these figures. A paper presented to Cabinet, calculated the value difference in exporting bauxite, the ore, versus processed aluminium in ’19, $70. Just imagine what these figures would be today, exporting 1 million tonnes of bauxite, the raw material earned $5 million. Processed one step into alumina, earned $27 million, more than five times as much, processed again into aluminium, earned a $125 million, and processed finally into aluminium products, earned $600 million. If they’re fair thinking about manufacturing, they need to fix electricity prices and get on with the tax reform.
Malcolm thank you, and Nick McKim finally to you as we wrap up.
Yeah, sure. Look, I’ll be brief ’cause I know we’re nearly outta time, but in one word, disappointing. People voted for change at the Federal Election this year. They didn’t get much change in the budget tonight. It was pretty bland, pretty disappointing. It’s left an awful lot of people behind, but the top end of town are pretty happy with it.
Greens Treasury spokesman Nick McKim, Malcolm Roberts of One Nation and Jacqui Lambie, great to see you all. Thanks for joining.
Thank you.
Thank you Kieran.
Thank you for your company at home, here on our Sky News.
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