Government is failing to maintain the internationally mandated 90-day fuel stockpile, currently holding less than 30 days of reserves.
Senator Ayres is misrepresenting statistics, claiming “115% capacity” when it actually means only 26 days of supply. A deliberate deflection of accountability.
Depleted fuel reserves put the nation’s daily transport, defense, mining, and agriculture sectors at severe risk, threatening to grind the country to a halt and fuel inflation.
Australia needs long term fuel security – not short term band-aid fixes.
For decades Senator Hanson has suggested a pipeline to convert domestic natural gas into liquid fuels (diesel and petrol) for major cities.
The United States has dropped net zero and the Paris agreement and is now producing more hydrocarbon fuels. Why? Because they are essential for human life as we know it.
One Nation calls for an immediate parliamentary inquiry to reveal the truth, address price volatility, and secure Australia’s fuel supply chain.
Transcript
Senator Roberts: This matter is urgent for three reasons. Firstly, the truth is not coming out. We want it out. It has to come out immediately before more people die. Secondly, fuel security—the people are getting ripped off at the bowser because of fuel volatility in prices and supply. I want to correct the record here, and I also want to point out, yet again, how urgent this is.
This is from Senator Hanson, Leader of One Nation, from a Hansard from 2021:
“I rise to speak on the Fuel Security Bill 2021. When I came into the Senate in 2016 I raised the importance of fuel security for all Australians.“
For a decade, she has been on about it, and I have been hearing her for that full decade and before. She goes on to say:
“This and previous governments have continually failed to meet the internationally mandated 90 days stockpile of fuel for the people of this nation. That means this government has put at risk—“
that was the Morrison government, but you’re doing the same now—
“the fuel security of our daily transport needs—”
daily transport needs of the people watching this at home—
“our defence, our aviation industry, our mining and our commuter needs. Without this internationally mandated 90-day stockpile of fuel, Australia risks coming to a grinding halt. My concerns were echoed by Senator Jim Molan when he entered the parliament in … 2017.“
Not only has she done that, but she’s advocated for a pipeline across the country to bring some of the world’s largest gas reserves to the east coast cities of Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney and get fuel from gas to liquid fuel, diesel and petrol, conversion. And what have you done? Nothing
What Senator Ayres did, through you, Chair, on Monday, when I asked this question and started this talk about fuel security—which we must discuss—is try to conflate it by saying he had 115 per cent, 120 per cent, 150 per cent. Forget the arithmetic; he was misleading, because, when we went and did our research, we found out he had 115 per cent of 24 days, which is about 26 days. We realised he was misleading the people of Australia and misleading the representatives in this chamber, because he was saying we had 115 per cent of reserves when we had less than 30 per cent of reserves, according to the International Energy Agency. Then, when he was caught out by my question on Monday, what did he do? He focused entirely on Angus Taylor, who has nothing to do with this at the moment.
This is what the government try to do. They try to deflect, denigrate and mislead, and they try to hide it. That’s why we need this, if I follow Senator McKenzie’s call—I’ll read clause (b). It calls on the government to take ‘urgent action to avoid a fuel crisis that will add to Australia’s already existing, home-grown inflation pressures’. Fuel stocks are low. We are not arguing they are low under Mr Taylor as the energy minister. That’s for another day. We want to sort the problem out now. We need truth, we need security, and we need absolute facts out in the open. That’s why we need this inquiry. We can’t get the answer by asking the minister, Chris Bowen, or Senator Wong.
Volatility of fuel prices is cut by having reserves at 90 days. That is a fact. The people of Australia will pay through the neck. The other thing is security. The whole country stops when we run out of diesel—farms, mines, transport. Every single thing in this country relies upon transport indirectly or directly, and, when the trucks stop, Australia stops. You should know that from listening to Glenn Sterle, a truckie himself. This is about security. It’s also about long-term security, getting a pipeline across the country, as Senator Hanson has requested and suggested for decades now, to convert our gas fuels into liquid fuels, diesel and petrol in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. We also note that the United States has dropped net zero and the Paris agreement and is now producing more hydrocarbon fuels. Why? Because they are essential for human life as we know it.
In February I questioned the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) on the surge in early-onset breast cancer, with diagnoses in women in their 20s, 30s and 40s rising sharply over two decades.
When I asked whether they’d cross-referenced these cases with lifestyle factors, or with COVID vaccination status, they admitted they haven’t done that work.
To me, that’s a glaring failure.
COVID injections were the biggest health intervention in our history, yet no one is checking for possible links to adverse outcomes. Australians deserve transparency, not avoidance.
If there’s no connection, proper research would reassure thousands of worried people. Instead, all we get is deflection.
I will continue to push for answers.
— February | Senate Estimates
Transcript
Senator ROBERTS: My question is to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. The Cancer data in Australia 2025 report emphasises that cancers, including breast cancer, are being diagnosed more frequently in people in their 30s and 40s, with the share of all breast cancer diagnoses rising about 50 per cent over the last 20 years, which is stunning. Breast cancer is now the most commonly diagnosed cancer for women aged 20 to 39 and 40 to 59, which is surprising as well. Have you undertaken any analysis to cross-reference breast cancer in this younger cohort with lifestyle factors—drinking, prescription medications and so on?
Dr Bolevich: We do indeed produce the report you’re talking about and have a unit within the institute that specialises in cancer data—its collection, national consistency around it and various types of analysis. We often make the data available to researchers. For the specific question you’re asking, I will defer to my colleague.
Ms Gates: As you said, we produce that information about cancer. We sometimes look at lifestyle factors. Specifically, it depends on what information we have around the connection between having a lifestyle factor, such as risk factors around smoking or other risk factors—I haven’t got to hand anything directly that we’ve done in relation to breast cancer.
Senator ROBERTS: Could you take it on notice, to give us a range of what you provide in terms of lifestyle factors like drinking, prescription medications and so on?
Dr Bolevich: We can take that on notice.
Senator ROBERTS: We’d just like to see what you’ve got available; thank you. The American Cancer Society call this ‘early onset breast cancer’. Specifically, have you cross-referenced breast cancer in this younger cohort with COVID vaccination status?
Dr Bolevich: No, we haven’t done that kind of work.
Senator ROBERTS: Why not?
Dr Bolevich: I think we have provided updates to this committee on previous occasions about the work we’ve done to create some data infrastructure that will enable various types of research to occur. That infrastructure is now largely in place, and we would expect that over time people will undertake various types of analyses using that data and other data that’s available to them. But the institute itself has not undertaken that specific type of research.
Senator ROBERTS: You’re more the constructor of the database and the ability to cross-reference, but it will be up to someone else who wants to do that to do it?
Ms Hermann: Cancer Australia is undertaking a piece of work at the moment, directed by the minister, to look at the impacts of early onset cancer, including looking at lifestyle factors and other factors that may be influencing earlier rates of cancer in Australia.
Senator ROBERTS: What about COVID vaccination status?
Ms Hermann: I don’t think that’s included in what they’re looking at.
Senator ROBERTS: I’m surprised, given what’s in the public domain about that. Have you cross-referenced COVID vaccination status with any health outcome and any demographic?
Ms Gates: We have looked at vaccination status in terms of rates and that sort of thing, but, no, we haven’t looked at that in terms of any associations.
Senator ROBERTS: I’m surprised, because of the news that’s travelling around about that, including from many scientists. COVID injections were the most significant health response in Australian history, coming at a significant cost to the taxpayer and involving a significant level of coercion which, in hindsight, was not justified by the risk. The news about AstraZeneca and even the Pfizer shots, and the concerns, came out very early. There’s a widely-held belief that the vaccines caused adverse events, and nothing but denials has come from the government—and not just this government but the previous government as well. If you have nothing to hide, Minister, why are you not doing the research which would confirm or disprove the link between COVID vaccination and adverse events, which would put a lot of people at ease?
Senator Green: The department and the officials have explained to you that there is work being undertaken on a range of research projects that look into trends in health care. Whether or not that’s post COVID-19, there’s a lot of time still to go before we see what that research might be. But the systems are being set up, and I’m sure that if there are any updates they’ll give them to you first and foremost.
Senator ROBERTS: That’s most unlike you, Minister, because it sounds like a lot of fluff. Is your government afraid of confirming that COVID shots cause early onset cancer? To me, people who have got cancer have got that thought in their mind; it’s right through the community. People are worried, and if there is no connection it would be wonderful to take that off their burden. It sounds like, ‘Bugger the people; just get on with the job and keep hiding it.’ Senator Green: I think the most important thing to do is to listen to the experts.
Senator ROBERTS: And common sense and what people in the street are saying.
Senator Green: And the health experts—particularly the health experts.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/bBfq5xjEDQY/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2026-08-26 13:43:322026-08-26 13:43:36Avoidance on Rising Breast Cancer Rates
Mainstream media is manufacturing outrage for clicks to compensate for its declining influence. They’ve taken my past comments out of context, and in one case, edited them to mean the exact opposite of what was said.
TV audiences have halved, newspapers have lost billions, and one in three Australians now openly distrust the news. Instead of fixing their credibility crisis, they’ve doubled down on woke propaganda, false reporting and partisan hit jobs on One Nation.
I laid out the hard numbers in Parliament last week – from the media’s market freefall to the truth about COVID policies, excess mortality and the fear campaigns they helped sell. When I ask data-based questions, they smear me as a “conspiracy theorist” because they can’t defend their own record.
Australians deserve facts, not fear porn. And as One Nation’s support grows, the media attacks will only get louder. We won’t be backing down.
Transcript
It’s obvious the media recently declared war on One Nation, and tonight I ask the obvious: what’s really going on? Over the last 20 years, the mainstream media’s market penetration has crashed. Broadcast television fell from a peak of 56 per cent of adult TV usage in 2006 down to just 20 per cent today. For young adults aged 18 to 35, it’s even lower, at just 12 per cent. Many still watch their favourite program online, mostly sporting telecasts. What they don’t watch are commentary shows, social engineering and opinion for hire.
The last five years have seen the cancellation of commentary programming: 10 News+, The Project, 7NEWS’s, early and late editions, SBS’s The Feed and ABC’s Q+A. The Q+A format, where one leftist host and four leftist talking heads invite a conservative to be ritually sacrificed each week no longer resonates. This is why the media’s woke agenda has now been injected into sport, usually through welcoming the audience to their own country, men in women’s sports and woke commentary talking points. No opportunity is lost in the media’s quest to replace balanced, factual reporting with woke propaganda, at dramatic cost to the media’s shareholder value.
In 2006, Channel 9 was worth $7.5 billion. Today, Channel 9 is worth just $960 million—less than a billion. Channel 7 fell from $4 billion 20 years ago to just $115 million today. For accuracy and fairness, by the way, both values are inflation adjusted. Channel 10 was worth $1.5 billion 20 years ago and today is on the books of owner Paramount at just $20 million.
Movies suffered, with theatre attendance over the last 20 years falling 50 per cent—an inevitable outcome of gender and race swapping of lead roles; the compulsory inclusion of a gay storyline and a transgender character; the endless negative portrayal of men; the refusal to show a happy, loving nuclear family; and generally propagandising the woke agenda while pretending it’s entertainment.
Let’s move on to newspapers. News Corp was valued 20 years ago at $85 billion worldwide. Today, it’s worth just $14 billion, including REA Group and Dow Jones. Fairfax Media was valued at $9 billion in 2006. Twenty years later, it was forced to sell to Channel 9, whose value of $960 million today includes Channel 9, Fairfax Media, Stan and Domain Real Estate. Again, I’m using inflation adjusted figures to compare 2006 with 2026 for fairness and accuracy—things Fairfax does not extend to us in One Nation.
Last week saw what is a low point for Australian journalism. The Sydney Morning Herald falsely reported Senator Hanson had used party funds to keep a luxury hotel room vacant for six days while visiting Italy and played up the waste of donations. This ignored the facts. Firstly, the $5 million donated in the Fire the Liar campaign has gone into a term deposit, gathering interest until it’s needed for the next federal election. Secondly, the story was false. Senator Hanson immediately provided receipts to show the room was not booked in this period and cost One Nation nothing. Rather than admit its mistake, the Sydney Morning Herald replied with a headline saying ‘Hanson feuds with media, concedes using party funds for luxury hotel’—no apology and no correcting the record, just a story and a headline which doubled down on their lie. This is not journalism; it’s partisan propaganda. If this continues during the next election, it will clearly and patently be election interference.
What was a scandal was Minister Bowen spending $345,000 of taxpayer money in the last 12 months alone on junkets to Brazil, Denmark, Finland, USA, Germany and Fiji—and on and on the list goes. How does a minister with a domestic portfolio spend $100,000 more on overseas trips than the Minister for Foreign Affairs and $110,000 more than the Minister for Trade? How? These trips were designed to promote Minister Bowen’s personal gains on climate change and, in part, his attempt to chair a UN climate change group. Instead of questioning this expense in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis and a budget deficit, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a story portraying Minister Bowen positively for not claiming any family travel as part of these junkets. Fairfax Media has lost 90 per cent of its market value and still can’t help itself. A company that was properly run would not be allowing injection of journalists’ personal and political vendettas into a supposed news story. It would have presented the facts without partisan attacks and left the public to make up their own minds.
Our media have skipped the whole balanced and impartial part and gone straight to telling you who to vote for. Conservatives make up 50 per cent of their potential audience. One Nation alone is 30 per cent. To alienate, ridicule, insult and lie to half their potential audience at a time of falling market share, falling profits and eroding shareholder value is business suicide. The fable of the scorpion and the snake was written for the Australian media, hopelessly ensconced in their urban bubbles, preaching to an ever-shrinking base of champagne socialists raging at the dying of wokeism, a perfect demonstration of the classic logical fallacy: they do not see the world as it is; they see the world as they are. Conservatives can turn, by the way, to the Spectator and the Epoch Times for accurate news and current affairs. If you haven’t discovered these publications, have a look.
Meanwhile, a casualty is media’s credibility. The Australian Communications and Media Authority says the proportion of Australians who explicitly distrust the news rose from 25 per cent in 2016 to 32 per cent last year. That’s a huge proportion of Australians—one in three—who do not believe what the newspaper or television tells them. This figure will grow as the truth around Australia’s COVID response emerges. The media went all in on promoting baseless COVID policies, using what can only be described as ‘fear porn’. I called for caution in Australia’s COVID response in a letter to Prime Minister Morrison in April 2020, pointing out the fatality rate was simply not what the Chinese suggested. At that time, Anthony Fauci, in his private diary, recorded his comments to the American CDC saying COVID was ‘acting like a bad influenza in its transmissibility’ and would have a fatality rate of between 0.2 per cent and 0.3 per cent, not the two to three per cent publicly claimed. Zero point two per cent to 0.3 per cent is in line with the 0.1 per cent fatality rate of an average influenza. It’s 0.13 per cent for a more serious flu. The current known fatality rate of the original COVID strain from 2019-20 worldwide is between 0.2 per cent and 0.3 per cent, exactly what Fauci privately predicted in February of 2020.
Fauci was called last week to testify to the US Congress as to why his private diaries had the correct appraisal of COVID while his public pronouncements were entirely the opposite, whipping up unfounded terror and fear, and to inquire why he advocated measures like social distancing, masking, lockdowns and screens at check-outs, all which had no scientific basis. He pleaded his fifth amendment right to not answer based on his fear of self-incrimination 113 times. Nothing says ‘I am guilty and will lose my immunity if I lie to you’ more than what he did. The committee has now held Fauci in contempt. This he would rather than to admit under oath that the actions he took, the same actions the Australian media enabled with their fear porn, had no scientific basis. Fauci knew that at the time. These were actions taken to sell pharmaceutical products which were disproportionate to the health risks of COVID but which made big pharma rich. There was an opportunity to wind all this back in November 2021, when the omicron virus arrived in Australia and the fatality rate from COVID fell. The omicron fatality rate was between 0.03 per cent and 0.1 per cent; that’s way less than the flu. Nonetheless, at the time, the excess mortality rate was going through the roof—and we know it was not due to COVID.
The unfounded fear that Fauci fomented meant that advocating for the cessation of vaccination would have been hard to explain, despite the fact that American and Australian health regulators knew that Pfizer had misled the public on its shoddy, skimpy, faulty testing that proved fatal for 1,230 people. Only a royal commission can deal with the critical point here: if the omicron fatality rate was as low as 0.03 per cent of infected persons, and most people had been infected and, at the time, had natural immunity anyway, why was excess mortality running at a staggering 13 per cent? It’s impossible for that mortality rate to have come from the COVID virus. What could it have been? Only one thing, it seems: COVID injections.
Even now, five years later, Australia’s excess mortality rate is running at five per cent. This represents 10,000 additional people dying each year with no explanation. I asked about this in Senate estimates and was told it was the lockdowns delaying medical treatment. It was psychological trauma, despair and loneliness: ‘It’ll pass.’ It has not passed. Why is the media falsely labelling me a conspiracy theorist, and why is it lying about me for asking these questions based on hard data? The answer is that the media took their 30 pieces of gold in the first three years of Australia’s COVID response. The media banked over $600 million from COVID— (Time expired)
What wasn’t said because of Time Expired:
related advertising from State and Federal Governments.
That’s what’s going on.
Only a Royal Commission can investigate Australian governments’ COVID response, the media’s role in this and the reason for excess deaths still occurring.
The Greens have shown their true colours with calls to nationalise essential services, a pipe dream that our economy simply cannot afford.
Government-run industries and state-owned supermarkets sound like a fantasy, yet we all know that when politicians try to control everything, everyday Australians pay the price through total government overreach, inefficiency, and incompetence.
Imagine if you will a Greens-run government supermarket: no plastic packaging (bring your own bags and scoop out your purchase), Aboriginal Australians would shop first, then migrants with brown skin — Senator Faruqi’s description, not mine — then gay and bi folk, then men dressed as women, followed by actual women, and then straight white men last, if anything is left.
The shelves will carry only brown onions (white onions are cancelled), staff are color-coded by hair dye, green in produce, blue in cleaning aisle, and meat rations are down to one lamb chop or one cockroach per week, WEF-style.
Bags of coal will make fart noises when touched and the store is only open for 20 minutes on Friday morning because employees are absent on paid leave for everything from stress to gender reassignments to union meetings, or annual leave from having leave. Not to mention – working from home.
If this sounds ridiculous, that’s because extreme government control always is!
We’ve already seen the disastrous results of trying to nationalise the energy market under the guise of saving the planet: skyrocketing bills and sheer incompetence. The private sector belongs in business; government belongs in governance.
One Nation supports strategic public infrastructure, like rail and a government owned bank, to ensure a fair go for everyday Australians.
One Nation will always stand against extreme, far-left overreach.
Transcript
I thank Senator McKim for this motion. The Greens have finally shown their true colours: ‘Let’s nationalise essential services.’ From their website, those would include power, water, telecommunications, education, transport, health care and labs, which are industries that collectively hold $3 trillion in assets. No government could afford to pay just compensation at that price, which section 51 of our Constitution requires. Any attempt to nationalise these industries will fail on that basis. Greens party policy calls for a national chain of government owned supermarkets, so perhaps add a few hundred billion dollars more for those.
Actually, let me pause and focus on a government owned supermarket in the hands of the Greens for a moment. What would it look like? No plastic packaging, of course—former senator Whish-Wilson’s contribution—in fact, very little packaging at all. Customers would need to bring their own bags and scoop out their purchases, just like in The Handmaid’s Tale. When a new shipment arrives, Aboriginal Australians would shop first, then migrants with brown skin—Senator Faruqi’s description, not mine—then gay and bi folk, then men dressed as women, followed by actual women, and then straight white men last, if anything is left.
Brown onions are available; white onions, not so much. Staff can be organised by hair colour: green hair in produce; blue hair in cleaning goods, just like toilet ducks; and red hair in hot food. Pricing is based on genetics. Please share your Ancestry DNA results in order for us to decide how much loading you will be charged for your white privilege. Staff dress is strictly pants and shirts for the women and skirts and blouses for the men. The Greens have of course built their supermarkets without walls, so the checkouts aren’t very busy. Following World Economic Forum guidelines, meat is restricted to one lamb chop per week or one cockroach per week, and shopping trips are limited to one visit per person per week.
Senator McKim interjecting—
I’m glad the Greens can see the sense of humour. The bags of coal on display are empty and make fart noises when you touch them. Stores are now only open every Friday morning because staffing has been affected by the Greens’ four-day working week and working from home, plus leave for maternity, paternity, sickness, bereavement, bad periods, stress, gender reassignment, domestic violence, study, union meetings and, of course, annual leave from having leave. I’m pretty sure I missed a few there!
The Greens’ economic justice policy calls for the nationalisation of all natural monopolies and essential public services, which reflects the wording in Senator McKim’s motion. Natural monopolies include water, rail, roads, sewerage and electricity, so I’m really not exaggerating my comments here at all. To be conducted under government ownership is property development and housing—but not all of it, since paying for $11 trillion in real estate might tire out their magic money fairy.
In other words, this motion is a Greens wet dream—total power and control in the hands of a government that will then make decisions based on victimhood and feelings. If this sounds like I’m having a lend, I’m having no more of a lend than the Greens and Minister Bowen have been taking at the taxpayer’s expense in the name of saving the world from the sky god of warming. The government’s attempt to effectively nationalise the power market to promote so-called renewables has resulted in a bill of hundreds of billions of dollars. It has shown the sheer incompetence of government when asked to perform tasks which are best left to the private sector.
Let’s be clear. One Nation is not opposed to government-private partnerships which are part of our energy policy. We believe, though, that some infrastructure, including rail, should be publicly owned. Banking must have a government owned bank to provide a fair go for everyday Australians, which our banks stopped doing years ago.
Senator McKim interjecting—
Just one out of others. The real reason for the motion is simple: the Liberals moved to the left, and the Nationals followed them. Labor moved further to the left, and the Greens move so far left they’re sitting in totalitarian territory. One Nation opposes this motion.
The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT (Senator O’Neill): Before I call Senator Shoebridge, I’ve counted three terms about body parts and body motions already in this debate. I remind senators to think carefully about the language choices they make that bring respect and order to the Senate rather than descend into inappropriate language that I think is less than satisfactory for this place. I look forward to your contribution, Senator Shoebridge.
The media tried to smear me to weaken One Nation and they failed.
Their pile-on was nothing more than a distraction from the truth now spilling out in the United States. Anthony Fauci’s — a primary face of the federal COVID-19 response in the US — own dairies and phone records expose the lies, the cover-ups, and the man-made origins of COVID.
These documents show exactly what I’ve been saying for years. COVID was engineered, the public was misled, early treatments were suppressed, and the injections were pushed despite known failures and risks.
While the media called me a “conspiracy theorist”, Nobel-willing scientists and US defence officials were confirming the same facts.
Every Australian was lied to, jabbed or unjabbed. Every one of us!
This is why we need a full royal commission into COVID.
No more cover-ups. No more corporate influence over public health.
Justice for those harmed and accountability for those who orchestrated this scandal.
Transcript
In the last few weeks, the media have tried to drive a wedge between me and Senator Hanson. The journalists’ plan was simple—take statements I’ve made over many years out of context, misrepresent them, falsely portray me as a conspiracy theorist, tell blatant lies about me and invite Pauline to sack me, thereby weakening One Nation and returning power to the Liberal-Labor uniparty, who have exercised that power to advance and enrich their benefactors for decades. They failed. In my adjournment speech last week, I detailed the reason why the media would behave in this manner. I invite everyone to catch up with that speech. I note Karl Stefanovic and now Kyle Sandilands have apologised for being sucked in with the COVID scandal. I thank Karl and Kyle for their honesty in apologising and note it only came after they ceased working for the mainstream media propaganda machine. Honesty is easy when it carries no cost.
The timing of this failed media pile-on was designed to distract from revelations in the United States relating to the COVID scandal. This includes the role of former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci. The worm has turned against Anthony Fauci. His formerly private work diaries have been subpoenaed and released. His government-issued phone has been subpoenaed, and the contents have been released. The result is a very clear picture of his lies to hide the man-made origin of COVID. Even worse, it proves a criminal conspiracy to cover up adverse events from the COVID vaccines, the injections. Note that in order to call these injections ‘vaccines’ they had to change the definition of ‘vaccine’. Changing the name doesn’t change the outcome. Death, injury, misery—crimes which may never see Fauci before a court of law, given that President Biden granted him a full pardon for all the crimes he committed going back to 2014. There are, though, many others who could and should be charged.
The Fauci papers prove COVID-19 was a man-made virus whose development commenced in the United States against the law and then moved out of the public eye to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, with American funding from Fauci. The final product, SARS-CoV-2, combined the original and man-made SARS virus with elements of the AIDS virus and a bat virus that was previously unseen in humans. The zoonotic origin of COVID—suggesting a bat virus somehow jumped to humans in the wet market in Wuhan—was made up to mislead the public, frontline health officials and professionals. This was known publicly almost from the start. Many scientists rejected the theory including the late Luc Montagnier, a Nobel Prize winning virologist, who sequenced the COVID DNA in April of 2020. He concluded the presence of a furin cleavage site and the inclusion of segments from the AIDS virus could only be the result of human intervention.
For those without a crash course in virology, I’ll explain. Furin is the name of the protein used to cut a DNA sequence in order to insert a new piece of DNA. A furin cleavage site is the location of the cut. These can occur naturally. Montagnier, though, concluded the nature and location of the cut and of the material inserted was not natural. He’s right, and I was right to call COVID man made from the start. The number of lowly qualified health professionals and journalists with no medical training who did no research of their own and who tried to debunk the theory is a frightening indictment on the medical profession and on journalism. They ignored the work of a man who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the AIDS virus. I listened to the one man on the planet most qualified to sequence and analyse the COVID DNA. Why didn’t our health professionals and the media?
The man-made nature of the virus was proven when the US defence department released a report into COVID in August 2021. The author was Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Murphy. He was formerly a fellow at America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, and was the inspector-general of the department of defence at the time—someone else that I listened to. The report states the virus is an American created, deliberately humanised virus that was developed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with the developer being American Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, who received financial grants from Anthony Fauci. For saying exactly that and for telling the truth the media called me a conspiracy theorist.
The report shows why non-medical interventions like masks and medical countermeasures—that is, vaccines—do not work well against coronavirus. That’s something else I’ve been criticised for saying. America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, rejected funding this project for ethical reasons, so Anthony Fauci funded the research, and the rest is history. The US military document confirms the date of the COVID virus’s escape: August 2019. This was prior to three researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology presenting to Wuhan hospital with a previously unseen respiratory virus. I was right about COVID being a lab leak and about when it escaped.
What that means is that Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum ran Event 201 in October 2019 to simulate the outbreak of a deadly virus three months after the virus escaped. That’s something they must have known. They lied about that and still do. Plus, it’s interesting to see the defence report, inter alia, say:
The reason the disease is so confusing is because it is less a virus than it is engineered spike proteins, hitching a ride on the virus part of the disease.
COVID-2 was a delivery mechanism for spike proteins. The report continued:
COVID is readily resolved with early treatment that inhibits the viral replication that spreads the spike proteins around the body.
Those spike proteins cause a harmful interactive overactive immune response to try and clear the spike proteins from the ACE-2 receptors.
The spike protein in the COVID virus and in the deadly vaccine stop the ace 2 receptor from doing its job, which is fighting cancer. So they leave us vulnerable to cancer. The source of the spike protein can be from the virus or from the injections. The more injections there are, the more spike protein there is in your body and the lower your defenses are against cancer. It’s no coincidence that Pfizer released a new cancer drug in 2020 and then engaged in a massive scale-up into cancer and cardiovascular portfolios, with the $43 billion acquisition of Seagen in late 2023. They created the problem; they created a solution from the same bloody company. What a great business strategy. It’s a shame about the ethics. It’s a shame about the people who died—who had their health destroyed and their lives destroyed.
And the report clearly states Daszak knew in 2018 that ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and interferon inhibited viral replication. Did our health authorities promote these treatments from the start of the outbreak? No. They banned these safe drugs they knew to be effective treatment. When doctors around the world used ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to successfully treat COVID, they were threatened and many had their registrations revoked and their livelihoods taken away. In Australia, these included courageous doctors Mark Hobart, My Le-Trinh, David Currie and Paul Oosterhuis—doctors of courage who put their patients’ welfare ahead of their own. Their hero, Anthony Fauci, explained the reason our health officials took a decision that can only be described as criminal malfeasance. According to his diary at 12.30 pm on 27 July 2021, Fauci advised President Biden: ‘The level of virus in the upper throat of vaccinated people with a serious infection was the same as the level in unvaccinated persons.’ The only conclusion from that statement is the vaccine did not stop ‘serious breakthrough cases’ any more than natural immunity did, and they knew it in July 2021, based on research from Israel. Nonetheless, Australian health authorities kept lying to you. On 25 August 2021, Fauci secretly admitted the truth—mRNA COVID jabs failed against hospitalisation and not just infection. Why was this failure not made public? Fauci’s diary from 13 August 2021 states: ‘The CDC’s statement the vaccines were not effective at all in preventing infection and transmission must be rescinded because it would undermine the Department of Justice’s efforts at mandates for vaccines.’ There you have it. The CDC then actually wound the statement back.
So there you have it. They lied and they covered up a vaccine which at the time they publicly accepted caused myocarditis and was killing people—in order to prevent critical scrutiny, to enable compulsory vaccination and to protect their power, their credibility and their jobs and to avoid the inevitable legal action for malfeasance. There’s so much more to the Fauci papers. They’re public and I’ll put the link on my website. The world suffered because of our health professionals’ self-interest. Jabbed or un-jabbed, we’ve all been lied to. This is why we must call a royal commission into COVID, to ensure public health is never again sacrificed on the altar of corporate profits and industry self-interest. Those who died and those harmed or bereaved must be granted justice.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/Ojt6PThp9pE/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2026-08-26 12:11:452026-08-26 12:11:48Every Australian Was Lied To
One Nation stood with Senator Lambie to call out Labor’s disgraceful treatment of Australian veterans
These men and women put their lives on the line for our country. Their lives. And Labor repays them by forcing them into a broken system where claims drag on for a year, 103,000 cases sit in limbo, and veterans are denied any choice of provider. And now, as if they haven’t suffered enough, Labor wants to slap a $5,0000 cap on their allied health care on top of all that.
Enough is enough.
Veterans deserve respect, not bureaucratic cruelty. They deserve proper care, not a cap that cuts off physio, OT, psychology and rehab halfway through the year. They deserve choice, not a government-paid assessor who cuts corners.
Labor’s waste, hypocrisy and deceit have left veterans abandoned, ignored and disrespected. One Nation will not stand for it.
When in government, One Nation will scrap the cap — and restore the dignity our veterans earned.
Transcript
One Nation supports Senator Lambie’s matter of urgency.
The Albanese Labor government is again denigrating and mistreating our honourable and deserving Australian veterans, the people we rely on to keep us safe; who put country first, ahead of their own lives and safety; and to whom every Australian owes a huge debt. These are our finest—decent, caring, disciplined, noble—and, in serving Australia, some have been injured or damaged. This government is now treating these women and men with a contempt that should be called out for the shame that it brings on all Australians.
I recently met with yet another group of veterans, the Coalition of Veterans Voices, concerned about Labor’s interventions into veterans rights and care. These men and women are genuine, sensible and intelligent Australians alarmed at Labor’s imminent curbing of veterans rights to essential allied health care needed as a result of their services to Australia. They said the minister, the Hon. Matt Keogh, who begrudgingly met with the veterans, declined to even shake their hands. What’s wrong with Labor politicians? The group told me of the broken DVA claims processing—the uncaring system that hinders rather than helps—that seems not to have performance standards—and if it does, it rarely meet those standards. I was told that veterans are being denied their choice of provider. They’re funnelled to a single provider contracted to the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, where claims are then underestimated and delayed. DVA’s own figures reveal that last year the average time to determine an initial claim took 364 days—virtually a year!—of wait time. As at 30 June 2026, the department had 103 outstanding claims. This system is clearly broken and needs to be reviewed and rebuilt. By the way, Senator Grogan mentioned that when her government came into office the backlog was 42,000. It’s now 103,000. The changes will not assist veterans. They callously short-change veterans. Labor now has an upper limit cap of $5,000 on allied health services and treatment for conditions and injuries that occurred because of defence service. Doctors and our veterans are worried, and have every right to be worried.
Labor claims that this cap won’t hurt veterans with complex cases, and yet admits that a system to apply the funding has not even been designed. The cap is contrary to recommendations by the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide. It’s callous disregard for the health and wellbeing of veterans and is highly disrespectful. Physiotherapy, occupational therapy, psychological services and other rehabilitation services are not discretionary needs—they’re vital means to support vets to regain their health—and they need to be continuous, not capped and then having six months of no care before they’re renewed. Veterans should be able to choose a practitioner who knows their care needs. A $5,000 cap is not a budget efficiency; it’s a barrier to treatment. The cap must go. Scrap the cap. In sync with this is the need for Labor to restore a veteran’s right to choose their assessor and not be restricted to a government paid contractor likely to want to cut corners. Our relatively small Defence Force plays a vital role in defending the security of 28 million Australians, yet Labor fails to support vets under attack. When the ABC grossly misrepresented and harmed distinguished veteran Heston Russell, Labor did nothing despite the ABCs use of taxpayer funds. ABC lost a court case and failed repeatedly to apologise to Heston. And former commissioner Paul Brereton undermined accused veterans, including our most decorated soldier, Ben Roberts-Smith. Brereton’s inaction reflected Labor’s failure to assist and support veterans. Diggers went to Iraq on the basis of weapons of mass destruction and then, two years later, we found there were no weapons of mass destruction. That was a lie, but no-one apologised. Why would anyone seriously wish to join the military if they knew that they would be thrown on the scrapheap or ignored and disrespected if they left the service through service related injury or conditions? Are Labor’s imminent caps on care the result of Labor’s wasteful spending in other areas that’s sending our country broke? Is this the Albanese government’s trademark deceit and hypocrisy? Three words frame Labor: waste, hypocrisy and deceit. This inept Albanese government tries to look good, not do good—words, no substance. Yet, despite Labor’s hype, misinformation and propaganda, Australians are waking up. One Nation and I completely support this matter of urgency.
During this session with NDIS officials, I questioned them on their progress in tackling fraud within the scheme.
Here’s an overview of how non-compliance and fraud are being tackled:
👉 29,000 tip-offs received annually, though not all represent actual fraud, with issues ranging from accidental errors to organised crime.
👉 Thousands of Australian Business Numbers are currently placed under manual payment controls and enhanced automated screening.
👉 400 active NDIS investigations are currently being handled by the NDIS Commission and taskforce partners out of 660 total taskforce cases.
👉 25 convictions have been recorded with sentences including up to 6 years in prison. Dozens of more cases are currently in the prosecution phase or awaiting final court sentencing.
Mr Dardo stressed that regulatory oversight relies on a full spectrum of interventions from automated payment blocks to criminal prosecutions to plug integrity leaks effectively.
Every step must be taken to ensure the NDIS remains financially sustainable and accessible for Australians that genuinely depend on it.
Transcript
ACTING CHAIR: Welcome back, everybody. We are on outcome 4, and we will start our questioning with Senator Roberts.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for appearing again today. What is the amount forecast to be saved by the proposed cuts to the NDIS program?
Mr Comley: The number in the budget is $37.8 billion over the forward estimates.
Senator ROBERTS: Is that for four years?
Mr Comley: Yes.
Senator ROBERTS: Shouldn’t the priority be to stop wasting money and stop the criminals defrauding the service?
Senator McAllister: We had quite a long conversation about this earlier in the day. To put it briefly, our priority is to stop the criminals defrauding the NDIS. The budget contains very significant investments in the capability of the agency to disrupt fraud, including continuing funding for the Fraud Fusion Taskforce that we’ve spoken about before. The point I was making earlier is that we see some savings to government when we disrupt fraud, but, historically, we’ve seen the vast majority of the money that we identify as going to bad actors returned to people with disability. So, yes, our priority, absolutely, is intervening to stop fraud—non-compliant claiming and other integrity leakage—but whether that is a source of savings to government is a different question.
Senator ROBERTS: What is the answer to that one?
Senator McAllister: The answer is that historically, when we have disrupted providers who are defrauding the NDIS, they are taking money from disabled people. We disrupt it. The money goes back to that person who acquires the services that they need from a legitimate provider. So it’s not a source of savings to government, but it does improve the functioning of the scheme. I’ve said it on many occasions: this scheme has to operate with integrity. Over the period that we have been in government, we have made very substantial investments to lift the capacity of the NDIA and the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission to make sure that that is so. There is still more to do, and it’s why there is significant investment—further investment in the budget—that we’ve just brought through.
Senator ROBERTS: So rather than cutting services, you’re cutting fraud?
Senator McAllister: The reform package as a whole seeks to make sure that the scheme is sustainable. Minister Butler has talked about stopping runaway cost growth. He has talked about tackling fraud. He’s talking about reshaping markets so that they deliver good value services and quality services to people with disability. The whole package is about making the NDIS stronger and better so it is here for the long term. It’s not a choice between dealing with runaway cost growth or tackling fraud. We actually have to do both.
Senator ROBERTS: Who are the people whose services will be cut then, if it’s not just fraud?
Senator McAllister: I’ll ask officials to talk you through some of our expectations in terms of the approach that we are taking.
Mr Comley: Perhaps the easiest place to draw from is the public disclosure of information and the lines there where it runs through the composition of the reductions across the forward estimates. I also note in reply to your earlier comment, Senator, that that production of documents includes—as does the budget—the savings measure on both a fiscal balance and underlying cash balance basis. I gave you the underlying cash balance. The equivalent number on fiscal balance is $38.1 billion, so they’re both around $38 billion. There are 10 aspects outlined in that production of documents.
Ms Long: That’s correct.
Mr Comley: I’ll hand over to Ms Long.
Ms Long: The reforms cover a range of areas. That includes addressing fraud, compliance and integrity, but it also includes measures around eligibility and participants’ budgets. Would you like me to go across—
Senator ROBERTS: Yes, please.
Ms Long: As Secretary Comley said, the total impact of the reforms is $38.1 billion over the forward estimates. That can be broken down into a number of components. The first component is around strengthening guidance on what is reasonable and necessary, and that has an impact of $2.9 billion over the forward estimates.
Senator ROBERTS: Is that tightening up on who should get it? I’m using that word ‘tightening’ constructively.
Ms Long: It’s around what is considered reasonable and necessary and how that is applied in terms of the determination of budgets.
Mr Comley: To be clear, that measure is for people that are in the scheme, once they’re in the scheme, on what is considered the right level of support. There are other measures Ms Long will come to that go to the question of who should be in the scheme in the first place.
Ms Long: There’s another element around resetting social, community and civic participation and capacity building budgets, which has an impact of $13.2 billion over the forward estimates.
Senator ROBERTS: What do you mean by that?
Ms Long: There are two particular budget categories. The first one is the social, community and civic participation budget. That’s a type of support that is provided. Another type of support is capacity-building daily activities. Those two types of supports, through a ministerial determination, will have budgets reduced. The social and community budgets will be reduced by 50 per cent. The capacity-building daily activity budgets will be reduced by 10 per cent.
Senator ROBERTS: What do you mean by community activity? What is the scope of that?
Ms Long: It’s quite a broad support category. It provides supports to participants to go out and engage in the community. It might involve having a support worker take them out to engage in some form of community activity, for example.
Mr Comley: It could be as simple as going to a park, maybe having a walk around or feeding the ducks, or it could be a sporting event. It could be a whole range of things. That’s community participation.
Ms Long: Another element of the reforms is around commissioning plan management and support coordination, which would deliver an improvement of around $1.4 billion over the forward estimates. Also, there has been quite a lot of plan inflation that has been observed, so there are a series of reforms that are aimed at addressing that plan inflation. That includes tightening the criteria around unscheduled reassessment requests and ending plans rolling over and funds being rolled over alongside. The total impact of those reforms is $3.1 billion over the forward estimates. There are also a range of access changes, as Secretary Comley referred to. In particular, in introducing an objective test of substantially reduced functional capacity, that would look to tighten eligibility for the scheme in order to focus that back on significant and permanent disability but also to have a focus on substantially reduced functional capacity rather than disability type. That change would have an impact of $9.3 billion over the forward estimates.
Senator ROBERTS: So it’s going to tighten and be more specific?
Ms Long: That’s correct. There will need to be a range of consultation and engagement on how that’s applied in terms of the threshold, the definition and how that’s done in practice, but, yes, the intent is to focus in eligibility on significantly reduced functional capacity. To date, access to the scheme has commonly been done through access lists that relate to your disability type. This would mean that we would no longer need to use those access lists and instead eligibility would be focused on a substantial reduction in functional capacity. If you’d like, I could keep going through a number of the other elements of the reform package, if that’s helpful.
Senator ROBERTS: How many more are there?
Ms Long: There are probably a couple more that I could mention if you like. Another one that might be worth highlighting is there’s a measure for mandatory registration for high-risk providers, which is around, obviously, having registration. That would deliver savings of $0.2 billion over the forward estimates.
Senator ROBERTS: High-risk providers?
Ms Long: That’s correct.
Senator ROBERTS: How do you identify high risk?
Ms Long: I might need one of my colleagues to talk to the detail of how that will be applied.
Ms Alisa Chambers: High-risk supports as imagined through the budget is an extension of mandatory registration that we’re moving through at the moment with supported independent living and platform providers, in the new category of advanced registration. Those high-risk supports relate to daily activities—things like catheter care or really intimate personal care—and closed settings, like respite settings, where we see really significant risk to people with disability, particularly people with significant support needs.
Ms Long: Overall, as a result of the reforms, it’s projected that average growth in the NDIS will be 1.7 per cent over the forward estimates and five per cent over the medium term. Five per cent per annum growth for the NDIS is broadly in line with Medicare and aged-care growth rates. It also means that the scheme will remain steady at around 1.6 per cent of GDP over the medium term on the current projections that we have.
Senator ROBERTS: I had a question about how those people whose services will be cut will be identified. It’s basically through tightening up the eligibility criteria, which is something that we’ve been talking about for a while. That’s good to see, Minister.
ACTING CHAIR: You’ve got about another two minutes, Senator Roberts.
Senator ROBERTS: I’ve got questions for quality and safeguards. We’ve identified several fraudsters who need to be investigated and moneys chased down. Is this where most effort should be used to seek restitution?
Mr Comley: I think the Quality and Safeguards Commission is dealing more with participant safety. The NDIA and Mr Dardo‘s area are more in the area of fraud and misuse of funds. Mr Dardo might want to comment.
Mr Dardo: Overwhelmingly, our focus is on preventing the money going out in the first place so we can prevent the money leaving the system when it shouldn’t be. The beauty of that is you’re not trying to chase a debt. You’re not trying to chase the money after it’s gone. That’s our overwhelming focus, and we’ve done a really, really good job in identifying problematic providers and stopping the funds leaving before they should. When the money has gone, there are different ways that we might recover it. Raising a debt might be one way. Asking the courts for reparation, like an order to repay, might be another. Another way that we’ve done it is we’ve worked with state or federal policing authorities to seize assets or freeze assets. In one recent case, we froze $5 million in assets and had them confiscated by the Commonwealth. In another case, we’ve frozen $40 million in assets. In a recent case, we’ve frozen another $4½ million to $5 million. It’s really important that we send the message that, even if the money has gone and somebody thinks they’ve gotten away with it, we will actually pursue the assets. There is another avenue that we’ve been using, which is to get the tax office to go after them from a tax perspective and raise taxes and attack the problem from that direction. Overwhelmingly, designing a system to stop the money going out in the first place is our mission, but we do have avenues to try to recover money when it gets to the serious end of fraud.
Ms Wade: Secretary Comley mentioned that the commission’s focus with respect to fraud is firmly on the behaviour of providers in the market. In addressing that, in addition to penalty frameworks for providers, we have the registration scheme, and we’ve strengthened our approach to the registration scheme to ensure that it detects fraud in more sophisticated ways through recent reforms. As those registration groups grow, which we just spoke about, that strengthened response for fraud detection continues to be enhanced as well.
Senator ROBERTS: It’s multipronged.
Ms Wade: Yes, absolutely.
Senator ROBERTS: I’ll ask my last question for this bracket. I’ve still got more when we come back. How many cases of fraud are being reported? You said that, if you took them all to court, they’d be clogged.
Mr Dardo: The way we look at it is that it’s about stopping the integrity leakage whether it’s accidental, it’s sharp, it’s malicious or it’s organised crime. We’ve got to stop it all because any one of those vulnerabilities that are open allows money to leak out of the scheme. We get a significant number of tip-offs every year. We get 29,000 tip-offs every year. They are not all fraud. We’ve got to be really careful in assuming. They’re not all fraud. As you go up the spectrum, there are several thousand ABNs that we’ve already got some controls on through manual payment reviews, and we have been building more systems in the last few weeks that are now turning on. We will put a couple thousand more ABNs into those reviews in the next few weeks. Then you go up the spectrum a bit more, where we’ve got Fraud Fusion Taskforce investigations. There are about 660 investigations, but 400 of those related to the NDIS are either with the commission or with us—or both. Then you get to the ones that are in the prosecution phase. There are a few dozen in the prosecution phase, so they’re in front of the courts or we’ve got briefs of evidence with the CDPP to prepare them for the courts. That’s the spectrum. And it’s really important to note that there is no regulatory system in the world that thinks that every single non-compliant thing is going to end up as a prosecution. That is not the way the world works.
Senator ROBERTS: How many convictions have there been?
Mr Dardo: There have been 25 convictions since the Fraud Fusion Taskforce started, and those sentences have resulted, in some cases, in custodial sentences up to six years. There are more cases where there has been a guilty outcome—either pled guilty or found guilty—but they’re awaiting sentencing. We don’t control the dates of the court, so some of those have been sitting there awaiting sentencing for six months or a year. There are cases that are currently scheduled for sentencing in July. They may happen in July; they may happen in December—we don’t know. But there are more cases sitting there right now where they’ve been found guilty awaiting sentencing.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/HFyqGlbiGm0/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2026-08-26 11:40:172026-08-26 11:40:21Protecting Every NDIS Dollar
The Labor government introduced legislation to increase the petrol and diesel excise by 16 cents a litre. When combined with GST (a tax on a tax) and retailer margins, everyday Australians will face an extra 32 cents per litre at the pump. This is money going straight into Treasury to fund Labor’s wasteful spending.
This tax hike hits those who can least afford it. While large corporations can pass these costs on to consumers, small and medium businesses lack market power and must absorb the hit directly from their profits. For everyday families, commuting, running errands and simple drives will all become more expensive.
Contrary to claims, reducing the fuel excise is not inflationary. It directly lowers fuel prices, which immediately reduces CPI inflation.
Furthermore, because fuel is a core input across the whole economy (farmers, tradespeople and freight operators), lowering fuel costs relieves inflationary pressure across all goods and services.
When One Nation proposed cutting the fuel excise by 50% and freezing indexation, it was dismissed. Yet, when the government temporarily adopted our measure, it proved to be a resounding success for living costs and inflation. That is why One Nation is calling on the government to freeze the fuel excise and cancel all indexation increases until June 2028.
While Labor is raising taxes to fund its reckless spending, a One Nation government would put a line through these wasteful projects.
We would:
➡️ Terminate all Net Zero spending, including associated departments, grants, and subsidies.
➡️ End funding to the “Aboriginal industry”, replacing it with direct grants to local councils for housing, infrastructure, and community support.
➡️ Scrap Snowy Hydro 2.0, saving taxpayers from a financial sinkhole that could reach $100 billion.
➡️ Cancel the $3.8 billion federal allocation for Victoria’s Suburban Rail Loop, an insane project projected to cost $216 billion that serves to line the pockets of union bosses.
The Albanese government must stop overtaxing Australians to funnel money to renewables, union mates, and left-wing causes.
One Nation will put money back in your pocket, starting with a freeze on the fuel excise until 2028.
Transcript
Senator Roberts: This week the government is introducing legislation to make a 16c a litre increase to the excise levied on petrol and diesel. When including the GST, which is levied on top of the fuel tax—it’s a tax on a tax—and then adding retailer margins, this will cause petrol to go up around 20c a litre before the weekend. Every litre, 20c—kerching into the Treasury for Labor to waste. This is occurring just when small business and everyday Australians are recovering from the high petrol prices caused as a direct result of the war in the Strait of Hormuz.
Make no mistake, this is a tax on those who cannot afford it. Large corporations can simply pass this rise on to their customers—meaning you’ll be paying more. Small and medium businesses can’t do that. They have no market power. They are price takers. This tax rise will come straight out of what is left of their profit. Everyday Australians will find their drive to work will be more expensive, as will running around after the children. Even a simple day out, just getting in the car and going out for a drive, will be more expensive.
I know when One Nation promised a 50 per cent reduction in the fuel excise at the last election, the commentariat called that ‘inflationary’. Then the government copied our policy and suddenly it’s no longer inflationary! Which is correct? It’s not inflationary. Reducing the fuel excise reduces the petrol price, which is directly trapped in the CPI—the consumer price index—calculation. Lower fuel prices means lower inflation.
There is a second-round effect as well. Fuel is an input cost right through the economy, from the farmer running a cool room or ploughing a field, to the local tradesman, to the truckie who delivers everything we buy. When fuel goes up, everything goes up. When fuel goes down, inflationary pressure is taken out of the economy. Reducing the fuel excise will reduce inflation. It’s that simple. It’s proven. This is why One Nation promised, at the last election, to reduce the fuel excise by 50 per cent and suspend indexation for 12 months, with a review after that.
Well, the government borrowing our policy for a few months has provided the review we needed to know that the policy is a winner. Everyday Australians have enjoyed the lower cost of living. Inflationary pressures were taken out of the economy for a short time. This is why One Nation are calling on the government to not increase the fuel excise until June 2028, including cancelling all indexation increases, and then review it after the next election, which any incoming government would do anyway. Give hardworking Australians and small businesses two more years of respite from the Albanese government’s high—stubbornly high—inflation.
Why do the government need to put this tax up? Because they’re wasting our money again, that’s why! This budget included measures that One Nation would have put the red line through. I’ve already spoken about our policy promising to remove all net zero spending, including the department itself, loans, grants and associated boondoggles. We’ve already announced all spending on the Aboriginal industry will be terminated. Instead, One Nation will give grants directly to local government to build the homes and roads and provide maintenance and support to Aboriginal communities.
We’ve already announced that Snowy Hydro 2.0 will be terminated and taxpayers saved from a financial disaster which may reach $1 trillion for capital costs, interest, maintenance and subsidies for the tiny amount of electricity the project will generate in the period the construction loans are being paid back. The budget set aside $3.8 billion for Victoria’s Suburban Rail Loop. The Victorian Parliamentary Budget Office has put the cost of this project at $216 billion over a 50-year finance cycle. This is an insane project. Even Victorians don’t want it. It’s there to put money into the pockets of corrupt union bosses and assorted underworld figures, as 60 Minutes clearly showed last night. One Nation would terminate that project.
We will have more policy announcements in the months ahead. For today’s debate, let me say this: the Albanese government needs to stop overtaxing everyday Australians so it can funnel money to its mates in the unions, to the renewable solar and wind industry, academia and other costly lefty nonsense causes—spending that does not benefit everyday Australians and certainly benefits the Labor Party’s election campaign funds. Labor is making life harder during a severe cost-of-living crisis. One Nation will put more money back in people’s pockets, starting with a freeze on fuel excises until 2028.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/ly_zfr8u81o/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2026-08-20 16:41:112026-08-20 16:41:22One Nation vs Labor: Putting Money Back in Your Pocket
I questioned ACCC Chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb on how the regulator is standing up for everyday Australians against corporate giants.
I congratulated the ACCC on their major court win against Coles for misleading price discounts. While 14 products were selected by the judge as a sample set, the deceptive conduct ruling applies across more than 200 cases.
A decision on similar allegations against Woolworths is currently reserved in the courts.
Supermarkets are backed by massive global institutional investors like BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, with endless legal resources. The ACCC assured me they are not daunted and point to recent actions against Amazon and Microsoft.
The ACCC highlighted the urgent need for new Unfair Trading Practices laws to crack down on sneaky business tactics that current laws miss, such as subscription traps you can’t cancel and manipulative mobile interfaces.
I thanked Ms Cass-Gottlieb for her concise, upfront, and comprehensive answers.
We need strong, clear enforcement to protect Aussie families and small businesses from predatory corporate conduct.
Transcript
CHAIR: Senator Roberts.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for appearing again today. I’ll start with the ACCC and the court case against Coles for misleading conduct. Congratulations.
Ms Cass-Gottlieb: Thank you.
Senator ROBERTS: That was a great result, and one which Coles richly deserved. I note you only listed 14 products in your prosecution when you identified over 200 cases of offering misleading discounts. What was the logic behind that choice?
Ms Cass-Gottlieb: We took action in relation to the 250. That choice of the 14 was by the judge in order to focus the proceedings on a sample set of products. But the conclusions the judge has reached—which is that 13 of that sample set are misleading and deceptive—and criteria will be applied across the full 250. It was a manner for the judge to more efficiently conduct the proceedings.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. A similar case for Woolies is still before the courts. Is there a timeframe on that case?
Ms Cass-Gottlieb: The judgement is reserved, and we will await the judge’s decision.
Senator ROBERTS: These supermarkets have corporations on their share register with trillions in funds invested: BlackRock, Vanguard, First State, State Street et cetera. They’re able to muster huge legal resources for Coles and Woolies. Are you appropriately resourced to conduct these cases for maximum benefit? I mean, you had a victory.
Ms Cass-Gottlieb: Firstly, we prioritise the matters that are most significant in terms of consumer harm—cost of living and aspects of that nature—and cost of doing business. We are well aware in the case of this sector that we need to look not only at consumers but at suppliers, including Australian farmers. So we do prioritise. In addition, in the last budget we received a $67 million uplift specifically to assist with enforcement in both competition matters and consumer protection matters, recognising the importance of setting clear standards and having clear guidance across the business community on the way in which the law applies.
Senator ROBERTS: So there are many factors involved in which cases you take on. Ms
Cass-Gottlieb: There are. We have to take account of a range of factors in order to determine where we can give most benefit to the public through our strong enforcement program.
Senator ROBERTS: But you’re not daunted by the deep pockets of BlackRock, Vanguard or State Street? They own controlling interests in many Australian brands.
Ms Cass-Gottlieb: No, we are not daunted. You will have seen other litigation that we commenced in the past year, including on allegations relating to Microsoft’s conduct with the rollout of integration of Copilot in the Microsoft 365 program, and only a week ago we commenced action against Amazon in relation to its online marketplace sales of products that we allege are unsafe. We are confident and dedicated to take action where it’s most important for the public benefit, and that includes against very major domestic and global companies.
Senator ROBERTS: These fines being awarded go into consolidated revenue. You don’t get to keep the money in your budget. Is that correct?
Ms Cass-Gottlieb: That is correct.
Senator ROBERTS: Do you get to deduct your costs in the prosecution before handing over the proceeds?
Ms Cass-Gottlieb: Not—
Senator ROBERTS: Would that incentivise you to—
Ms Cass-Gottlieb: If we win, we will recover our costs from the other side. But, if we don’t, we will also pay their costs.
Senator ROBERTS: Your February 2026 opening statement contained this passage: The ACCC continues to observe concerning business conduct that, while not necessarily breaching current consumer laws, nevertheless causes significant harm to consumers and small businesses … Can you expand on that comment, please.
Ms Cass-Gottlieb: This was particularly reflecting the importance of the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Unfair Trading Practices) Bill that has passed the lower house and is before a committee in the Senate currently. The importance of that bill is that there is some conduct for which at this time we consider there is not sufficient coverage under the Australian Consumer Law to protect consumers or to protect small businesses. It includes conduct that is not expressly misleading and deceptive or expressly unconscionable as that has been interpreted. It is important to introduce the amendment that this bill will bring, which is to create a general principle prohibition upon unfair trading practices. The sorts of ones we have considered, which are the ones we were thinking about there, are, say, when an interface on a mobile phone is nudging you to make a purchase or confusing you with a significant amount of information which means you can’t focus on what really matters to you or a subscription that you find practically impossible to cancel. These sorts of examples need amendment to be covered by our law. This bill which the government has introduced is very important, and we welcome it and are looking forward to its passage so that we can then conduct investigations and move through a compliance and enforcement program with it.
Senator ROBERTS: That completes my questioning for the ACCC. I want to comment and put on the record that I appreciate Ms Cass-Gottlieb’s succinctness and comprehensiveness. It’s very clear; it’s wonderful.
During Senate Estimates, I questioned the Minister and Department about the long-overdue review of the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Act (Comcare).
The report, delivered back in September 2025 with 124 recommendations, made one thing crystal clear: the 36-year-old Act is so outdated that there is “no option but to redraft the current legislation.”
Yet, months later, the Minister’s repeated answer to crucial questions on implementation, return-to-work duties, and preventing psychological harm caused by claims management was simply: “The government is considering the report.”
We are still months away from even seeing an exposure draft. Bureaucracy cannot drag its feet when injured workers are paying the price.
Safety shouldn’t be a compliance box. It’s a moral and strategic imperative.
I also spoke with Comcare about workplace health and safety. Cutting corners doesn’t create a competitive edge. It leads to tragedy, ruined lives, massive penalties, and destroyed businesses.
I shared a definition of safety I developed 30 years ago: “Safety is the state of being in which people are conscious, aware of and successfully manage, and feel accountable for the potential for injury and loss.”
True safety requires accountability at every level, especially from the top. A safe, highly engaged workforce isn’t just the right thing to do morally, it builds a stronger, more productive nation.
I’ll keep pushing to ensure our workplace laws are reformed quickly and effectively.
Transcript
CHAIR: Senator Roberts, you have the call.
Senator ROBERTS: I thank the witnesses for appearing. Minister, a comprehensive review of the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Act has a date of September 2025. The review says: ‘Change is urgent. It is now time to deliver long overdue reform.’ On what date did you receive the final SRC Act review, and on what date were you first briefed?
Senator Walsh: The review was released publicly in December 2025. Is that enough information for you at this point?
Senator ROBERTS: When did you first receive the final copy?
Senator Walsh: I’ll have to take that on notice.
Mr Duggan: I can help there. The final report was delivered to government on 25 September 2025.
Senator ROBERTS: What day were you first briefed, Minister?
Senator Walsh: I am the minister representing Minister Rishworth, so the secretary may be able to assist.
Mr Duggan: I’ll need to take the precise date on notice, but I imagine it would have been within a very short period of 25 September.
Senator ROBERTS: If you could put it on notice, please.
Mr Duggan: Yes.
Senator ROBERTS: Has the minister decided to accept the review in full or in part?
Senator Walsh: The government released the report in December, and the government is considering the recommendations and findings of the report.
Senator ROBERTS: So the answer to the question, ‘Do you have an implementation plan?’ would be no, not yet?
Senator Walsh: The government is considering the report.
Senator ROBERTS: What about a recommendation-by-recommendation response table? Have you got one of those?
Senator Walsh: The government is considering the report.
Senator ROBERTS: Have you approved further consultation?
Senator Walsh: There is work going on around the report. The secretary spoke to that earlier and can speak to that again.
Mr Duggan: We undertook some target consultations in March through April of this year. The intent is to consult further in the second half of this year to inform the response to what was a very comprehensive report with 124 recommendations. It’s a complicated area so, as you can imagine, we want to make sure that we do that work thoroughly before we provide advice to government on its response.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you, Secretary. Do you have opening and closing dates for consultation?
Mr Duggan: Do you mean for the consultation that has occurred, or the consultation that is to occur?
Senator ROBERTS: The consultation that will occur.
Mr Duggan: I’ll have to take that on notice.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. Will it include an exposure draft bill or clauses? If not, what exactly is being consulted?
Mr Duggan: We are a couple of steps away from being at the point of an exposure draft of legislation. So at this stage we are consulting for the purposes of informing our advice to government on the policy and programmatic design. That would include advice on any changes required to legislation. Following on from that, the process would be legislative drafting instructions and an exposure draft, et cetera. We’re several steps away, so I can’t give you a definitive answer to that question.
Senator ROBERTS: So the consultation is to develop the legislation changes, if any?
Mr Duggan: If any, that’s correct.
Senator ROBERTS: The review explicitly says the extent of changes means, ‘no option but to redraft the current legislation.’
Mr Duggan: Yes, I am aware of that. So as we work through the 124 recommendations and our advice to government, were we to reach the same conclusion, then a legislative package would accompany our advice.
Senator ROBERTS: What time frames are you looking at—I know it’s early days—for redrafting and introduction of the legislation?
Mr Duggan: I gave evidence earlier that we are working through this. Again, there is a lot to work through, but we are working through it through the second half of this year with the intent of being in a position to provide comprehensive advice to government before the end of the year. Questions of the timing of introduction of any legislation, and the timing of any announcements around the way the scheme would work in the future, are questions for government and not something that the government has made a statement on at this point.
Senator ROBERTS: What is the single biggest issue holding things up?
Mr Duggan: I don’t think there is a single biggest issue. I referred to 124 recommendations in a very complicated area, the need to work through that rigorously and to consult broadly to make sure that we get right our advice to government.
Senator ROBERTS: Minister, do you accept the review’s principle that the scheme must cause no harm, and that harm caused by interacting with the scheme should be prevented or reduced?
Senator Walsh: The work of the Comcare scheme is about assisting people. There should be no harm in relation to the scheme. In relation to all of this work, we commissioned the review. The review covers a whole range of issues around governance and usability and entitlements. We want the scheme to be focused on the people who need assistance through it, and that was the focus of the review. I repeat that the government is considering the recommendations. The secretary has laid out a time line for the department to consult around the recommendations. The act is almost 40 years old—
Senator ROBERTS: and complex.
Senator Walsh: and there hasn’t been substantial reform of it, so this review is comprehensive. There are, as the secretary has said, 124 recommendations. The department is working to consult on those recommendations and provide advice to government.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. Will you implement the review’s position that step-downs—lighter duties— should not apply where the employer has refused or been unable to provide suitable duties?
Senator Walsh: In relation to any recommendations of the review, the government is considering the review.
Senator ROBERTS: Will you legislate enforceable employer return-to-work duties, including the duty to provide suitable work, with consequences for noncompliance?
Senator Walsh: All answers around the review and review recommendations are that the government is considering the review.
Senator ROBERTS: The review notes that the claims process can negatively affect health and recovery outcomes. Do you accept that poor claims management can cause or worsen psychological harm?
Senator Walsh: The government is considering the review.
Senator ROBERTS: Minister, I knew these things 40 years ago. There’s no gotcha in this one; all right? I just want to reassure our constituents, because we’ve had constituents come to us with problems. Surely you can acknowledge that the claims process can negatively affect health and recovery outcomes.
Senator Walsh: As I said, in establishing the review, the government wanted to make sure that the scheme is centred on the people that it is there to assist and that it is fit for purpose to be focused on the people that it’s there to assist. You said you’ve been focused on this issue for a number of years. The act is 36 years old. It hasn’t been reformed. There are a lot of recommendations. The secretary has outlined the process which the department is following to assess the recommendations. We’ll provide advice to government.
Senator ROBERTS: I know that 40 years ago we learned that selected duties or light duties—whatever you want to call them; I prefer ‘selected duties’—can be highly significant in getting people back to work, fully back to work, and getting them back to work quickly. That’s better for their mental health and their physical recovery at times. That’s why I’m interested in that. Will you implement or consider, or do you recognise, the review’s approach of trauma informed claims management, enforceable service standards and public reporting?
Senator Walsh: You’re asking me these questions, Senator, as you are entitled to do—
Senator ROBERTS: From our constituents. Senator Walsh: I welcome your questions. I’m just wondering whether some of them may relate to current practices of Comcare and whether Comcare would like to assist in some of the answers about how you approach these issues, if you’re happy with that, Senator.
Mr Radford: I’ll ask Mr Vivian-Taylor from our claims division to join us at the table, if that’s all right, Minister.
Senator Walsh: Yes.
Mr Vivian-Taylor: We do some trauma informed training for our claims managers. That’s what we do in claims management at the moment.
Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. I’ve finished my questions of the minister. Mr Radford, you were talking about Cleanaway with Senator Dolega. In my experience—and I use this strategically—safety has moral benefits. Safety has personal responsibilities and personal benefits. It also has economic benefits. What is the level of understanding in industry generally, and within Comcare, that safety can be used to improve a business—not just the moral, personal and safety benefits but the economic and business benefits?
Mr Radford: I agree with your proposition, Senator. I can’t speak for industry, in terms of the level of industry knowledge, but certainly at Comcare we are of the view that safer workplaces, by and large, are more productive workplaces. You have a more engaged workforce—
Senator ROBERTS: Lower turnover.
Mr Radford: Lower turnover, higher retention. We, as the regulator, focus very heavily on the human cost of unsafe workplaces, as you would expect. There is no doubt that safe, fulfilling work is a huge benefit to workers. As you mentioned earlier, it has a significant, positive impact on their mental health. It also has a very positive impact, as I mentioned earlier, on productivity. From my engagement with industry, in both this role and previous roles in this space, I know that the vast majority of employers want other employers to do the right thing, because employers that cut corners on health and safety are probably also cutting corners in other areas in terms of their regulatory responsibilities. The majority of employers want to know that someone is not getting an unfair or competitive advantage by essentially not adhering to their responsibilities under workplace health and safety laws. As I said, I can’t speak specifically for industry, but from my engagement with industry and industry leaders and industry representative groups, by and large, they want everyone to do the right thing so that it is a fair and even playing field. It obviously supports the economy.
Senator ROBERTS: I just want to pick you up on something you said there—that people who take shortcuts on safety have an economic advantage. That’s what you’re implying—
Mr Radford: No, I said—
Senator ROBERTS: I believe it’s wrong.
Mr Radford: No. People can think that, if they take shortcuts, they can get a profit gain.
Senator ROBERTS: They think that, but they don’t, because they end up hurting the business.
Mr Radford: They end up hurting the business. As I said in evidence—I think prior to you joining, Senator— we certainly take the view that no profit or productivity improvement is worth the price of a human life. I think the majority of employers also think that way, but, unfortunately, there are those who think they can cut corners. The Cleanaway matter was resolved last week, on top of the very significant human cost of two people losing their lives and two people being seriously injured. Cleanaway has now been fined $1.1 million as a result of its failure in the training of the truck driver involved. That should send a very clear message that cutting corners has human consequences. It also has economic consequences for any company that thinks it can get away with it.
Senator ROBERTS: Perhaps, if Cleanaway had been more enlightened in its management, it wouldn’t have had the fatalities and it would have had a better bottom line.
Mr Radford: I can’t speak to their balance sheet, but in my experience no good ever comes from a serious injury or a fatality in the workplace.
Senator ROBERTS: That’s taken for granted. What I’m getting at is that just improving safety can be a strategic advantage, leading to reducing costs, increasing productivity and increasing profitability.
Mr Radford: Yes. I agree.
Senator ROBERTS: To what extent do people in the industry accept that? Is it still limited?
Mr Radford: As I said, I can’t speak for industry. Certainly, a large part of Comcare’s role is to educate industry and the economy more broadly about the benefits of safe work and the benefits of having a highly engaged, safe workforce, whether that’s physical safety or psychological safety. The more engaged your workforce is, the safer your workforce is and the higher your productivity is likely to be.
Senator ROBERTS: Could you make a comment on this. This is a definition of safety that I developed 30 or 40 years ago: safety is the state of being in which people are conscious, aware of and successfully manage and feel accountable for the potential for injury and loss. Do you agree?
Mr Radford: I would agree, yes.
Senator ROBERTS: It’s about accountability all the way throughout an organisation.
Mr Radford: Through the whole supply chain, through all of the activity. I agree, yes.
Senator ROBERTS: Everyone’s responsible for safety, but the senior people have the ultimate responsibility.
Mr Radford: Yes. Under our legislation and the work health and safety laws right across Australia, everyone does have responsibility for creating and maintaining a safe workplace. But ultimately the responsibility at the highest level rests with those who have control of that workplace, and the workplace is controlled by the managers and the leaders of that enterprise.
