One Nation agrees with the sentiment behind the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Make Price Gouging Illegal) Bill 2024. Coles and Woolworths have morphed from trusted Australian grocery stores into greedy, shareholder-driven machines that have rightfully become the most disliked brands in the country.
While we support the goal of reining them in, we cannot support this specific bill for several reasons:
✔️ Free enterprise is doing what it does best — punishing greed. We see Amazon partnering with Harris Farm to deliver fresh food and independent retailers like IGA and Supabarn are treating customers like they matter.
✔️ We don’t need more poorly worded regulations. What we need is the ACCC and the Labor government to grow a spine and enforce the laws we already have. The supermarkets are already using deceptive “specials” to manipulate prices and the fines they receive are a pittance.
✔️ If we’re going to talk about price gouging, let’s talk about the government. Between $70 cigarette packets, fuel excise, and skyrocketing energy bills, the government is the biggest price gouger of all.
This bill won’t help the Aussie family at the checkout.
Instead, it will simply create a goldmine for lawyers. And with their deep pockets, Coles and Woolworths will be the ones who will walk away winning while the customers lose.
One Nation supports the “principle” of stopping corporate greed, however we completely oppose this flawed implementation.
STOP making new, ineffective laws and start enforcing the ones that actually hold these giant corporations to account.
Transcript
One Nation agrees with the motivation behind the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Make Price Gouging Illegal) Bill 2024. Coles and Woolies have far too much market power and they’re exercising that power in a way that benefits their shareholders, not their customers. With BlackRock Inc. holding influential positions in the share registers of these once fine companies, rapacious greed was always going to be the outcome. The accent here, though, is on the fundamental mistake Coles and Woolies are making, which is to exercise market power for the benefit of their shareholders, not their customers. Customers have been given notice. Coles and Woolies, once trusted and respected names, are now the two most disliked brand names in the Australian corporate scene. What a fall from grace!
This abuse of market power has caused customers to migrate to new options, so the market’s coming to the rescue. In a stunning rebuke to Coles and Woolworths, Amazon has now paired with Harris Farm to add fresh food to Amazon. Amazon now offers same-day and next-day delivery of Harris Farm products—including meat, dairy, eggs and fresh produce—to over 80 suburbs in Sydney’s inner city, inner west and surrounds. This will use specialised insulated chilled packaging via Amazon Flex for freshness. Harris Farm already had its own online store and partnered with Uber Direct for quick store based same-day delivery prior to this happening. That’s the beauty of free enterprise competition. If one retailer turns a cynical and greedy operation, this creates an opportunity for someone else. And Coles and Woolies will be done.
If you haven’t been into your local Harris Farm, IGA or Supabarn lately, I suggest you do that because Coles and Woolies have put their prices up much more than the inflation rate would justify, and the independent retailers have not. The price difference now is almost negligible, and you still get served by human beings. Fancy that—a human being serving! A retailer who values the customers wants to treat them as human—what a refreshing change! The 25c paper bags don’t fall apart, but the Coles and Woolies’ paper-thin rubbish bags faint with fright when confronted with an escalator or steps on the way back to your car. We’ve all had this happen.
The existing regulations need to be policed before we add new ones, especially ones as poorly worded as this bill. Seriously, this bill could mean anything. The ACCC conducted an inquiry into deceptive price advertising by Coles and Woolies and found they’re using specials to put the price of a product up, then down and then up again in a way that leaves the public confused as to the real price. And the public is learning from this. They know that Coles and Woolies are not focused on customers; they’re focused on their BlackRock Inc. investors. They exploit the confusion to put the prices up further. They were fined a pittance and they’re still doing it. Surely we have laws already to bring these companies to heel. This Labor government needs to grow a bloody spine and just enforce the laws. You’re not enforcing the laws, and then you’re quite often wanting more. How much have Coles and Woolies donated to the ALP in recent years?
While we are on the subject of price gouging, will this bill cover price gouging by the government? Seventy dollars for a packet of cigarettes is price gouging. Fuel excise, the fees on passports, energy bills, insurance, strata fees—these are price gouging One Nation supports the principle but completely opposes the implementation. This bill won’t do anything except create a lawyers’ picnic that Coles and Woolies will win. It will be a lawyers’ picnic, and the customers will lose.
What we are witnessing under this Labor government is nothing short of a deliberate assault on the Australian dream.
Labor is systematically killing off the traditional quarter-acre block and removing the option of home ownership from everyday Australians.
Labor want to make us all equal by making everyone poor, destroying the independence that owning a home provides, so that every citizen is forced to rely entirely on the state, or global corporations.
Labor’s “Help to Buy” and low-deposit schemes are complete traps and push up housing prices. These schemes don’t let young people get ahead. Instead, they limit how far they can get ahead. Under “Help to Buy,” you become a slave to the government in your own home.
If you renovate, the bureaucrats pocket a percentage of your equity — for doing absolutely nothing. You can’t refinance, you can’t use your equity to start a small business, and you can’t help your children buy their own home.
Unlike Labor, One Nation has a fully thought-out suite of policies to restore the Australian dream.
I thank Senator Bragg for introducing the Housing Australia Amendment (Accountability) Bill 2025, which One Nation supports.
There’s an urgent need for this bill, which restores the Senate’s right to scrutinise regulations issued under a bill. In recent years, more and more provisions which would previously have been included in the bill—hard coded, if you like—are now provided for in regulations which are written by bureaucrats for the benefit of bureaucrats, ministers, donors and mates. These are regulations that, in many cases, are beyond the reach of parliamentary scrutiny. They avoid parliament. We are increasingly seeing not government but dictatorship—a collectivist agenda informed by communist ideology and deployed with complete contempt for the parliamentary process and the large majority of Australians who did not vote Labor or Greens.
The Liberal Party had form on this, yet Labor have normalised it. The Albanese Labor government is in the process of removing the option of homeownership from the reach of everyday Australians. Young people will simply not be able to own their own home or use that home in the way that most in this chamber have been able to. Let me explain.
One Nation opposed the Help to Buy scheme because the scheme ensures that people will, most likely, never fully own their own home—never. In the many, many years that this scheme makes you a slave to the government, in your own home, the government does nothing for you. For example, with any renovations you make, the government benefits from what you pay. Installing a new kitchen for $20,000 means you get only $12,000 in capital appreciation and the government pockets $8,000 in additional equity for doing nothing. If you spend $21,000, you’ll first need to get the government’s permission to modify your own home. You can’t use any equity you do accumulate to refinance and free money up for buying a business, for instance. That’s expressly forbidden. Say your children get into trouble or need a hand to buy their own home. You can’t help them. There is no part refinancing. You’re trapped. If you want to buy the government out, then you have to pay them back in five per cent lots.
Why? Well, the government knows prices appreciate. Taking a loan to pay all of the equity off in one go costs the government money. They miss out on the capital appreciation during the period you’re paying that loan off. Say you want to use your home as security for a personal loan: no. There are no secured loans against one’s own home. They’re expressly prohibited. That’s why we did not support the scheme. We are proud we didn’t support it, because it’s a trap. It’s not about letting our young get ahead; it’s about limiting the amount they can get ahead by. That’s what Labor is doing. As usual, communists make every person equal by making everyone poor. This scheme is a tax dressed up as a helping hand, a solution to the exemption of family homes from the capital gains tax. Nobody stands between this Labor government and the money they want to give away to other people in electoral bribes—sorry, ‘promises’.
One Nation opposes the Albanese government’s low-deposit homeownership scheme, which allows borrowers to get a home loan with a five per cent deposit—or, if they are single parents, two per cent. The government underwrites the mortgage so the bank does not wear the risk. You’ll notice a pattern here: this government is every bit as friendly with Australia’s rapacious banking sector as the Liberals were. Under the low-deposit scheme, the home can’t be valued at more than $1.5 million, and there’s no limit on the income of the applicant or the number of mortgages issued. Don’t you just love this scheme! It should be called the ‘making it easier for high-income earners to buy a house in urban Labor electorates’ scheme.
No wonder the government’s support in recent opinion polls is strongest amongst those earning more than $100,000. It’s the party of the workers no more. The party of the rich is a better description of Labor. No wonder the Liberals have lost market share. Labor is stealing their voters.
One Nation is now the party of the worker and the party of small-business owners who use their home as security to grow their business. Our opposition to the low-deposit scheme has been proven to be the right decision. House prices in capital cities went up by between eight per cent and 10 per cent in the year to January 2026, adding $100,000 to the average Sydney home price. That’s $100,000 more that people will have to borrow to get their home. Thanks, Labor!
The additional demand for homes from these schemes forced the price up and made affording the mortgage harder. A low deposit is no help if you can’t afford the repayments on 95 per cent or 98 per cent of a $1-million-plus mortgage. They’ve done this and destroyed hopes. The combined average price for a home in our capital cities is now $1.14 million.
One Nation policy is to allow first home owners to top up the first home owners’ grant with secured equity from the person’s own superannuation account. We will allow low-income earners to buy with a five per cent deposit against a government guarantee on the mortgage. Why won’t this force up home prices? It will be because of the thing the Albanese government refuses to do: stopping mass immigration.
A One Nation government will deport around 200,000 people who are here illegally and will have a moratorium on new arrivals for three years, creating negative immigration. As Australians engage with the housing scheme, they will find there will be a home available to purchase without the price of homes being pushed up. One Nation policies have been thought through. One policy complements another, and every Australian will benefit. Our policies come in suites—s-u-i-t-e-s—unlike this Labor government, which continues to throw money at problems it never solves because it never thinks things through. They want to look good, not do good. It’s shallow and hurting young people.
Yesterday, the Reserve Bank put up interest rates by 0.25 per cent, which would not have happened if government policies had not driven up house prices by eight to 10 per cent in the last year. Every mortgage holder in Australia is now facing higher repayments because of the Albanese government’s inability to manage government policy. Senator Bragg is right that this bill is necessary to provide scrutiny and to try and elevate the standard of government in this country.
Can I say to the Labor government: for the love of Australia, please, please stop trying to help. You’re making it worse, especially for young people. Let people get about their business, keep more of their own money and more easily pay for their homes themselves. Stop bringing in millions of new arrivals—millions of new arrivals—all of whom need a home in which to live. Stop forcing people out of their homes with the evil land tax, as Labor are doing in Victoria, so that your mates running union super funds can buy up the homes. Every new scheme makes things worse for young Australians. That’s why we don’t support your idiot ideas—your dishonest, ludicrous ideas. Where else should the accountability be forced on the government?
Foreign corporations used to pay 30 per cent withholding tax on housing investments like build to rent. Labor has cut that tax to 15 per cent. It’s been halved; you’ve looked after your corporate mates from overseas. Labor makes it easy for its mates, globalist foreign wealth funds, to rip more money out of Australia and to rip more money off Australians. You lower the tax, and the tax will come out of the people instead. Let’s be clear. This Labor government said to foreign corporate landlords like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and First State—with interlocking ownership, they are in reality BlackRock Inc. Labor said to BlackRock Inc., ‘We’ll cut the amount of tax you pay in half.’ Australians: forget the Australian dream of owning your own home.
Labor’s dream is that you live in a shoebox apartment paying rent to BlackRock Inc forever whilst those foreign corporations pay less tax than you do. Labor has just cut it in half. That’s what ‘build to rent’ means. Whenever you hear ‘build to rent’ from Labor, remember renting forever to a foreign corporate landlord. They will build homes for sure, but Australians will never ever own them. It’s ‘build to rent’ forever. Part of the United Nations and World Economic Forum’s agenda is global control of people and wealth transfer from the people to global wealth funds like BlackRock Inc. This Labor government is helping that along by giving these foreign corporations a big tax cut to incentivise foreign corporations to buy Australian homes.
The bill did not reduce the tax for Australian owners; it brought foreign owners’ tax rate down to the same level as Australian investors. That’s the most telling part of all. This bill only changed the tax treatment of foreign predatory multinational corporations. Is Labor the party for Australia, or is it the party for foreign corporations? Build to rent answers that question. Clearly Labor is for the foreign corporations like BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street—BlackRock Inc. That’s why Labor’s policies on mass immigration and housing are designed to destroy homeownership for all young families. Instead, One Nation is for Australians owning their own home. On all this, I told you so for years. I initiated the mass immigration and housing debates four to five years ago and have hammered both.
Only One Nation’s housing policy covers all aspects: supply, demand, construction cost and finance. I’m going to do something a little unusual and quote extensively from Senator Bragg’s dissenting report on the build to rent bill. I hope you don’t mind, Senator Bragg. It goes to the very heart of what’s wrong with the Labor Party. The following passages are taken from the dissenting report following the committee inquiry into the Labor Party’s build-to-rent scheme: Build to Rent has had minimal cut-through in Australia because our tax settings are designed to favour individual, ‘mum and dad’ investors, not institutions. That is appropriate. This legislation seeks to tip the scales in favour of institutions through tax concessions, in order to make Build to Rent projects profitable for industry super funds and foreign fund managers. Labor thinks that institutions need a leg up over Australian first home buyers.
Dr Murray— a witness in the inquiry— was critical of the Bill’s attempted perversion of our tax arrangements: ‘It’s not clear to me why local investors shouldn’t be advantaged over foreign investors in Australian housing. I don’t see that there’s a good argument … for levelling the playing field there. It’s not clear to me, if the intention is to attract super funds into this, why owning your own home via your super fund and renting your own home from your super fund is better than owning your own home and using that money to buy what is the best asset to own in retirement.’ That’s similar to One Nation’s housing policy. Here’s another quote from Senator Bragg: At the public hearing, the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (‘ASFA’) suggested that Australians would prefer Black Rock and Cbus be the nation’s landlords, and described mum and dad investors as undertaking a ‘hobby activity’. Really? Do you think the Australian people want to rent their house from a super fund? A hobby activity—come on! Senator Bragg continues: This is the view of a vested interest— that Labor is cuddling up to— Most Australians would not agree with this proposal. Another witness observed that we are seeing a corporatisation of housing in Australia, not from the usual suspects, the Liberal Party, but from the Labor Party, the former party of the workers, headed by Prime Minister Albanese.
A witness said: … pushing mum-and-dad investors out of the housing market will result in less competition. What we’re seeing in the Northern Hemisphere is a horrific new software program called YieldStar, which in Atlanta coordinates rental increases for 81 per cent of rental properties. The board of supervisors in San Francisco has now banned this as a monopolistic practice. There’s just nothing in this legislation that even prepares us for what’s coming … Hence the need for Senator Bragg’s bill. His dissenting report said: The Housing Industry Association pointed to the importance of Australia’s housing market maintaining a focus on individual ownership: ‘… with the association and connection with home and with location, and a sense of place and purpose … All the evidence shows that people who own their own home are far less likely to be incarcerated and more likely to be gainfully employed. All of the evidence shows positive economic, social and cultural outcomes.’ Personal responsibility is a cornerstone of a safe and productive society, I say. Senator Bragg continues: Australians are not interested in subsidising institutional investors. When asked what organisations would be the key beneficiaries of Build to Rent tax concessions, Treasury confirmed that foreign fund managers would be at the centre— Really? Fund managers? Foreigners? How very corporate of the Labor Party! Some of the most alarming evidence from the public hearing was that the passing of this bill could see Australian taxpayers subsidising foreign governments in their investment in our housing market.
Dr Murray warned the committee: I find it interesting because we’ve already even got foreign investment funds doing build to rent. What’s even funnier is that the largest one is a foreign government. We’ve got the Abu Dhabi Investment Council, who owns the Smith Collective on the Gold Coast, which is 1,251 build-to-rent dwellings, and we’re now proposing to offer them a better tax treatment for something they’re already doing—through a foreign government. I find that a bizarre outcome of this proposed bill. It seems Prime Minister Albanese is not only best friends with billionaires like Larry Fink from BlackRock and Bill Gates from ‘Vaccines R Us’ but also best mates with the Islamist Abu Dhabi regime. The dissenting report said: Approaches like Build to Rent endeavour to emulate the corporate housing model which has seen a downturn in the United States housing market. Fund managers have become the predominant landlords in the US. According to the US Government Accountability Office (‘the GAO’), large institutional investors emerged following the global financial crisis, purchasing foreclosed homes at auction in bulk and converting them into rental housing.
Prime Minister Albanese’s housing schemes will lead to foreclosures and misery. This is not an unintended outcome; it’s the point of it. Communists detest homeownership. It provides people with independence from the government, and that’s the opposite of the fundamental purpose of the Labor government, which is to make people reliant on the government. Senator Bragg continues: This corporate housing model, in order to generate a return on investment for institutional investors, relies on individuals being locked into a cycle of perpetual renting.
There is a growing consensus in the US that this model has failed and is hurting prospective first home buyers. Lawmakers from both sides of politics are introducing legislation to limit institutional investment accordingly. While the US is moving away from corporate housing, the Australian Labor Party is forcing Australia is into it.
One Nation is dedicated to all Australians being able to own their own home and to use that home as they see fit. (Time expired)
https://img.youtube.com/vi/RSXFntS1zoc/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2026-05-28 08:58:022026-06-03 10:58:51The Death of the Quarter-Acre Block
One Nation strongly opposes the Albanese government’s plan to remove the private health insurance rebate for older Australians (65+).
Removing these rebates will ultimately cost taxpayers billions more than it will save and will put immense strain on the public hospital system.
One Nation rejects the government’s “intergenerational fairness” narrative. It is nothing more than a diversion.
The true causes of financial hardship for Australian people are immigration, net-zero policies, inflation and high living costs.
Rather than cutting health rebates for the elderly, we should stop mass migration and abandon all net-zero targets, which will help ALL Australians.
Transcript
I thank Senator Ruston for this motion, which One Nation supports. Currently, all Australians get a rebate on their contributions to private health insurance. For the people under 65, it is 24.1 per cent, for those 65-69 years of age it is 28.1 per cent and for those over 70 it is 32.2 per cent. These are adjusted for income. Minister Butler described the system as ‘not fair between generations’. The government has announced the additional amount paid to our elderly will be removed, making everyone equal. How very communist and how self-defeating. The rebate is higher the older you get, because the cost to the taxpayer of a person moving from private to public care is higher the older they get. The extra payment encourages older Australians to stay in the private health system and save the taxpayers from having to carry the full cost of their health care.
Across forward estimates, this measure will cost taxpayers—including young people—billions more than it saves, and it will put more pressure on public hospitals already dealing with bed block and long waiting times. Our young people will not always be young. A measure that helps more than three million older Australians today will help younger Australians tomorrow.
The Albanese government is promoting division in order to set one age group against another. How dishonest! Classic communism! This is the politics of envy, designed to cover up the real reasons young people are struggling, which are immigration, net zero, grocery prices, energy prices, inflation—destroying industry, making lives harder and robbing our young of the opportunity to own their own homes, to enjoy the life that my generation enjoys. To pitch to younger voters, start there. Introduce negative immigration until housing and infrastructure catches up, reducing house prices. Terminate this net zero madness and let business get on with creating breadwinner jobs that provide a future for our young.
Intergenerational wealth transfer is a term that is a furphy, a lie, a dishonest diversion. Labor is crippling the young. In reality, this is an excuse from Labor to increase taxes on people with assets who, after a lifetime of work, are the older generations. Remember, today’s young adults are the future older people. This aims to hit all Australians, including the young. You will eventually get hit. This is a lie that is masquerading to steal more taxes. One Nation will unwind this petty, dishonest, counterproductive measure. We are one nation, one community and One Nation will not set one Australian against another.
In our Budget Reply, we had so much to say about saving this country that Senator Hanson ran out of time to deliver it all.
One Nation is offering a fundamentally different direction for Australia — one rooted in proven, common-sense economic principles.
➡️ Cheap, Reliable Energy: Ditching the “green” agenda to invest in coal and nuclear.
➡️ Real Wealth: Backing the local industries that actually build this nation.
➡️ Lower Taxes: Putting money back into the pockets of hard-working Australian families.
➡️Less Bureaucracy: Listening to engineers and physicists, not climate bureaucrats.
Transcript
For all the talk about this budget, many issues are all too familiar. Revenue is up from $773 billion to $815 billion. Expenses are up from $812 billion to $833 billion. Gross interest payments are at $27 billion, rising to $40 billion over the forward estimates. Budget deficits are forecast to balloon by another $100 billion over the next four years. Interest-bearing debt will climb another $300 billion to $1.3 trillion. Businesses are collapsing at record rates—almost 50,000 insolvencies since Labor took office. Productivity is stuck at six-decade lows. Eight out of 10 new jobs are now created by government because the private sector has become so disillusioned. Business confidence and domestic investment have fallen to 1990s recession lows. Our inflation remains the highest in the developed world.
Australian families have endured 15 interest rate hikes, pushing more than one million households into extreme mortgage stress. GDP per capita has fallen in 10 of the last 13 quarters, and 337,000 households can no longer pay their energy bills—double the level of five years ago—as power prices continue to surge.
Labor will introduce the working Australians tax offset. It’s less than $5 a week in relief and doesn’t kick in until next year, an election year. The government wants you to be grateful for 68c a day off your tax. That tax offset will be completely rubbed out by bracket creep. Bracket creep means working Australians will pay more in tax because of inflation. The government profits from higher inflation. It’s a stealth tax, a trap for the next election and an advertising slogan for 2028. They used the same trap in their election advertising in 2022. If anyone dares to refuse passing a useless, less than $5 tax cut, they will be accused of not supporting tax cuts. While Australians will receive just $2.6 billion back in the one-off WATO, they’ll pay tens of billions more in taxes because of bracket creep.
One Nation tried to end bracket creep by indexing income tax thresholds to inflation, ending the stealthy tax increases. Labor, the Liberals, the Nationals and the Greens refused to support it. Instead of the measly $250, ending bracket creep would put thousands of dollars a year back in working Australians’ pockets. We don’t need Labor to protect Australians; we need to protect Australians from Labor.
The tax changes in this budget, including on discretionary trusts, will suppress investor appetite and speculative capital, forcing these businesses to set up in jurisdictions with no impediments. Capital will always, always follow to where it is most loved.
This budget reveals a political culture that relies evermore heavily on centralised bureaucracy, dependency on the state and short-term intervention. That is the Labor way. Forget the spin about intergenerational equity; it’s being used as an excuse to break election promises. True equity does not punish those who worked hard, took risks, built businesses and paid their taxes. It does not resent aspiration or success. Real intergenerational equity means giving young Australians the same opportunities their parents had—the chance to own a home, raise a family, start a business and get ahead through hard work. Young people are not struggling because older generations succeeded. They are falling behind because governments have chosen subsidies and wealth redistribution over allowing free enterprise to flourish.
On the forward estimates, our total liabilities will exceed $1.9 trillion—a burden to be repaid by our children and grandchildren. That is not equity. That is hypocrisy. Changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax will further dampen economic activity, push rents higher and reduce housing supply. As a self-proclaimed scholar of Paul Keating, the Treasurer might have reflected on what happened in 1985 when these same policies were tried and had to be reversed two years later.
Housing is a national crisis only since Labor took office, and I say ‘crisis’. More than 40 per cent of the cost of building a new home is government taxes and unnecessary compliance costs. One Nation will take a different approach. We will slash the GST to zero on building materials for homes up to a value of $1 million for the next five years. Rapid population growth without matching supply is a recipe for declining living standards. This is not about blaming migrants. It’s about recognising limits. But this government has no interest in reducing migration, for all the talk. It expects to increase visa application fees from $4.7 billion today to $7.1 billion by 2029-30. Elevated migration is a money spinner. Canada cut migration sharply from 2024 and has now enjoyed 18 straight months of falling rents and easing house prices, something we have strongly advocated for.
We will introduce income splitting for every family with at least one dependent child. A single earner on $120,000 with a stay-at-home partner would be around $9½ thousand a year better off. We will exempt insurance from the GST, and we urge the states to drop stamp duty on it as well. Affordable insurance ultimately reduces burdens on taxpayers. We will allow aged pensioners and veterans to work as much as they want without losing any of their pensions or health card benefits.
For more than a decade, One Nation has consistently argued that Australia must strengthen domestic resilience, including strategic fuel reserves, reliable energy systems, food and water security, and sovereign industrial capabilities supported by true nation-building infrastructure. The current liquid fuel crisis has not only exposed our domestic unpreparedness but signalled to adversaries how vulnerable we would be in a conflict. Building a strategic reserve is a step in the right direction, but it is still not enough to build resilience and liquid fuel independence. The total cost of not having sufficient supplies will always outweigh the net cost of having them in a crisis.
One Nation will cut the red, green and black tape that is strangling projects and fast-track major approvals, especially energy, to a maximum of six months. We will ditch net zero, exit the Paris Agreement and axe the climate change department, saving $30 billion in the process. We will back coal and gas and support bringing nuclear power to bring down prices, restore reliability and guarantee national energy security. Next week, I will introduce a bold new gas policy that underwrites our vast sovereign resource assets for decades to come. It will provide real equity investment and genuine skin in the game, where our healthy dividend will help pay down the debt racked up by successive governments.
We have listened extensively, and we will work with industry, not against it, in genuine partnership. We will bring back our mining and resources industries, the bedrock that funds schools, hospitals, roads and defence. A strong nation leverages its natural advantages. It does not demonise them. One Nation will swiftly move to get rid of impediments in an increasingly competitive global environment and restore our status as a nation that rolls out the red carpet in resources rather than roll it up. We are backing the Capricorn steel project, to connect coal in Queensland’s Bowen Basin to iron ore in Western Australia’s Pilbara region with a rail line that will open northern Australia to development. The project is strongly backed by Australian investors and is aimed at making Australia a major global supplier of high-quality steel. It will require the Inland Rail project, now abandoned by Labor, to be completed and extended to the more suitable Port of Gladstone, in Queensland. It will be the foundation for a national rail circuit that effectively circumnavigates the Australian continent, providing freight efficiencies and improved defence logistics. These are no longer abstract debates. They are national security imperatives.
In agriculture, we will ban the further sale of controlling interests in freehold farmland to foreign investors and limit the sale of leasehold farmland to a maximum of 25 years. We will ban foreign ownership of water and return balance to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. One Nation strongly supports the modern hybrid Bradfield scheme to improve water security, open new areas to farming and improve food security and exports. We will build new dams and water infrastructure, reintroduce drought payments and re-establish a federal government backed rural lending fund to protect farmers through other natural disasters.
Importantly, we will restore accountability. Australians work hard for their money, and they deserve a government that shows the same discipline. Successive governments have failed to tackle a culture where people in charge of creating multiple white elephants pay no price for their commercial illiteracy. Snowy 2.0, which has blown out 21 times—to $42 billion—is but one egregious example. One Nation will ensure past, present and emerging failures will no longer be transaction free for those responsible.
We will abolish divisive cultural departments and race based programs that divide Australians by skin colour or ancestry. Every Australian will be treated as equal under one flag and one culture. Help will be given on the basis of genuine need, not race. No more special privileges—equal rights for all, and special rights for none. There will be no more taxpayer-funded welcome to country rituals. Unity builds strength; division destroys it.
Our Defence Force must focus on operational readiness, capability and deterrence, not morale-sapping identity politics. One Nation will restore pride in wearing the uniform and give them the latest equipment to carry out their duties. We won’t sell off our historic sites of symbolic significance to cover irresponsible spending.
Australians are not asking for miracles. They are simply asking for a country that works again. One Nation continues to attract practical Australians with real world experience—people from finance, investment, trade, engineering, farming, small business, building, energy, manufacturing and defence. These are men and women who have built things, employed people and delivered results outside the Canberra bubble. Australia does not need more career politicians serving vested interests. One Nation believes the government is there to serve you. This budget only goes to prove yet again that this government believes you are there to serve it.
In closing, Australia stands at a crossroads. For too long, Labor’s failed experiment of reckless spending, crippling regulation, net zero ideology and wealth redistribution has driven businesses to the wall. It’s crushed living standards, saddled our children with debt and stolen the Australian dream from an entire generation. A nation loses hope when it loses vision. Australia now has near a trillion dollars in debt and nothing to show for it. One Nation will break the green, red and black tape that has tied us down. We will work with the natural strengths of the assets on our balance sheet. We have iron ore, coal, gas, cattle, rain, cotton, gold, copper, oil and so much more. Australia should be a powerhouse, but the major parties lack the management skills for us reach our potential. It is perverse that a government and an opposition believe they can change the weather, and are prepared to waste ultimately hundreds of billions to do it, while they mock the idea of a version of the Bradfield scheme that would open the massive potential for irrigation of the rich but dry soils of the western districts. It is perverse that a government and an opposition that came up with the biggest construction fiasco on earth, the $42 billion Snowy Hydro 2.0, cannot complete the Inland Rail from Melbourne to Brisbane, which would open up the intermodal efficiencies and commercial potential of the inland corridor.
We are covering the land with windmills and solar panels and, in turn, delivering— (Time expired)
The DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator Hanson, are you seeking the call?
Senator Hanson: I seek leave to finish my speech.
The DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Is leave granted? Leave has not been granted, Senator Hanson.
Senator Hanson: I seek leave to table my speech.
Leave granted.
“We are covering our land with windmills and solar panels and in turn delivering the dearest and most precarious electricity grid our nation has ever had, when we had the cheapest coal fired power and sitting on one of the greatest coal resources in the globe.
One Nation does not care about major party sneers. We care about handing our children a better opportunity than was handed to us by our parents, currently it is the other way around.
One Nation will reallocate the resources from the fool’s errand of Australia changing the weather to invest in coal fired power, nuclear, irrigation, freight, rail, ports and roads. We will work with businesses as partners in these projects.
One Nation will listen to civil engineers, nuclear physicists, and research scientists in medicine instead of climate change bureaucrats. These assets on our nations balance sheet allows us to pay for expenses on the Profit and Loss. These assets build a nation that can repay its debts. One Nation is offering a fundamentally different direction -one rooted in proven, common sense economic principles. We’ll lower taxes on working families, slash regulation that strangles enterprise, deliver abundant and affordable energy, and back the industries that actually create real wealth and opportunity.
We will never pretend we know better than you how to run your own lives. That is why we are determined to hand power back to the Australian people where it belongs.
We will reward hard work and aspiration, restore fiscal discipline, and put Australian families and businesses first once again.
One Nation’s word is our bond – and we have three decades of unwavering policy consistency to prove it.
We hope to earn your trust to implement the bold change Australia desperately needs.
https://i0.wp.com/www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-21-215100.jpg?fit=676%2C336&ssl=1336676Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2026-05-22 05:32:242026-05-22 05:32:36Budget Reply: One Nation’s Blueprint to Put Australians First
Labor and the Liberals have abandoned their founding visions.
Today’s modern Labor Party has traded its commitment to the working class and the family for radical gender ideology, social engineering and control over children, undermining parental rights and effectively claiming ownership of our children.
And the Liberal Party has abandoned the middle class to serve wealthy corporate “puppet-masters” and big-money interests.
There is a stark divide between corporate success and the struggle of everyday Australians.
Data shows corporate profits have soared while the share of GDP going to wages has plummeted.
Real wages have stagnated since 1980, while the costs of education, healthcare, and housing have increased by 300% to 400%.
The “net zero” transition is causing skyrocketing power bills and economic suicide.
One Nation is the only party capable of restoring Australia’s prosperity.
Our plan includes: ▶️ Slashing government spending by at least $90 billion a year. ▶️ Putting $30 billion back into the pockets of Australians. ▶️ Investing $20 billion annually in wealth-growing projects.
One Nation calls for a return to patriotism, family values and economic fairness for the often “forgotten” middle and working class Aussies.
Transcript
Tonight I deliver One Nation’s eulogy for the status quo that had dominated Australian politics since 1949 and that passed away during the break. 1949 was the year Labor prime minister Ben Chifley delivered the famous ‘Light on the hill’ speech and Robert Menzies was elected as the first Liberal Party prime minister. Both were men of vision, both had the courage of their convictions and both were driven by a deep love for our beautiful country. This may cause offence amongst the 2026 rabble pretending to still be Labor, yet I must point out the ‘light on the hill’ metaphor Ben Chifley used as a regular churchgoer is almost a direct quote from the Gospel of Matthew 5:13-16. This is the famous ‘salt and light’ passage from Jesus’s ‘Sermon on the mount’, where he said inter alia: ‘You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Men do not light a candle and put it under a bushel but on a candlestick, and it gives light to all that are in the house.’ And it’s true that Chifley’s speech was rooted in the trauma of the Great Depression, with this line: If the movement can make someone more comfortable, give to some father or mother a greater feeling of security for their children, a feeling that if a depression comes there will be work, that the government is striving its hardest to do its best, then the Labor movement will be completely justified.
How times have changed. The Labor Party now refuses to even say ‘mother’ or ‘father’, let alone build them into their policies. Indeed, Labor ministers refuse to define what a woman is. Today’s Labor Party uses gender ideology to subvert the concept of man and woman. It refuses to back families as the fundamental building block of society. It undermines family. To those on the government benches, ‘uterus owners’ and ‘prostate owners’ now stand as references to women and men, with ‘birthing parents’ and ‘ejaculators’ serving as references to mothers and fathers.
The Labor Party has used transgenderism to establish the principle that the state owns your child, and refusing the state’s instruction to transition your child will result in the termination of parental rights. Parents should understand that children are no longer, as Ben Chifley said, theirs; rather, they are the state’s. Last week Jacinta Allan, the Premier of Victoria, confirmed this new Labor principle in the extraordinary defence of child castration, which she still insists on calling ‘gender-affirming care’.
Mass immigration eliminated job security for most unionists and forced unions to become more and more militant in response to the cost of economic growth. We stopped building wealth. Instead, the fight is over a greater share of the same pie, an inevitably futile task. It’s a game the wealthy have won and the working class have lost, because the Labor Party falsely pretends that it’s in the worker’s corner when it’s not. Corporate profits as a share of gross domestic product have risen from 17 per cent in 1975 to 65 per cent in 2020. The share of gross domestic product for wages and salaries has fallen from 25 per cent in 1975 to 17 per cent today. Corporate profits keep going up. The income share of the middle class, who are still paying everyone’s social security, just keeps going down.
It’s impossible to look at this data and see a pattern which apportions blame only to the Liberal Party’s periods in office. Both parties are to blame and equally so. The status quo has done over Australian workers, and the polling for One Nation clearly shows workers, tradies and small business are sick of it. Ben Chifley spoke of comfort as a core Labor Party value, and I ask Australia’s working class: where’s your comfort? You’re not only being attacked as colonisers and being degendered and disrespected in Labor’s social policy; your financial position has gone backwards.
The cronyism and corruption inherent in the net zero transition—the lie—designed as it is to subvert energy generation to the weather, has run riot and rampant through the economy. Business insolvencies are at a record high. Householders are terrified of opening their power bills, and bills are set to rise at five times the inflation rate this financial year, as the cynical energy subsidies the Albanese Labor Government uses to bribe voters and cover up the problem are removed to reduce Labor’s growing budget deficit. Inflation is out of control because of that deficit. And yet you’re responsible for the deficit and the inflation which has resulted from your bribes, dishonesty and pathetic financial mismanagement. It’s taken 75 years for the inspirational vision reflected in the ‘Light on the hill’—a vision of family, comfort and, yes, happiness—to degenerate into an imbroglio of self-interest, moral degeneracy, cronyism, cynicism and, in places, outright corruption. The status quo died because it failed Australia’s working class. It’s no accident that, in the latest polls, people earning over $100,000 a year still support Labor ahead of anyone else. Labor’s new culture of social engineering and division on ethnic grounds has support from those whose incomes insulate them from the damage these policies are doing. Indeed, this moral virtue signalling has replaced the light on the hill. Sit tibi terra levis: may the earth be light to you.
The Liberal Party is as culpable in this attack on the middle class. In Menzies’s speech—which, to give it its correct title, was the ‘Forgotten people’ speech—he spoke of ‘salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on’. He said: These are, in the political and economic sense, the middle class. They are for the most part unorganized and unselfconscious. They are envied by those whose social benefits are largely obtained by taxing them. They are not rich enough to have individual power. They are taken for granted by each political party in turn. Menzies’s success was to put the middle class at the fore, recognising that a strong middle class would power the economy and provide a tax base for those who were not able to provide for themselves. His words in 1944 took him into government in 1949, and he went on to become Australia’s longest-serving prime minister for 18 years.
That was then. The year is not 1949; it’s now 2026, and the modern Liberals no longer owe their allegiance to the middle class. Instead, they owe their allegiance to the wealthy interests who pay the bills and set the agenda. Those rivers of gold have enabled the Liberals to outspend the Labor Party during every election cycle since 2007. The Liberal Party puppetmasters are prepared to surrender the country to the Labor Party rather than see opposition leader Peter Dutton—someone who was asking for a modicum of independence and was eliminated. Those same forces are now defending their latest marionette, an opposition leader who’s so weak that one has to ask: just how much are these people paying?
One Nation has no puppetmasters. We offer government decision-making based on facts and data, applying principles of fairness and patriotism. I will return to One Nation’s plan for the post-status quo Australia in a moment. Menzies was again correct when he said: The communist has always hated what he calls the “bourgeoisie”, because he sees clearly the existence of one has kept British countries from revolution, while the substantial absence of one in feudal France at the end of the eighteenth century and in Tsarist Russia at the end of the last war made revolution easy and indeed inevitable. What he did not realise is that the modern Liberal Party and the modern Labor Party are acting in unison to destroy the middle class, albeit for different reasons.
The Liberals want more money for their corporate owners, who do not understand the meaning of a fair share for all. Labor wants to bring about a revolution in society to mirror their Prime Minister’s communist ideology, which is destroying the pillars of Australian society: family and the middle class. Not surprisingly, then, the middle class is shrinking, even as the overall share of wages and salaries in the economy is shrinking. Australia’s median wage has gone backwards by eight per cent under this Labor government, although this is not just on them. Since 1980, the median Australian wage in real terms, adjusted for inflation, has not increased. Nothing. Zero. In that same time, education expenses have gone up 300 per cent, health care up 300 per cent and housing up 400 per cent. If it feels like you’re working harder and going backwards, it’s because you are. The Liberal-Labor status quo has screwed Australia rotten.
One Nation support has grown rapidly in the last eight months, which is proof that courage is contagious. For 30 years, One Nation has been confined to a cage built to contain our threat to the status quo, a cage that was plastered with a huge sign falsely declaring the contents racist. And, for 30 years, the narrative was successfully maintained because a host of dishonest, self-interested politicians, media and talking heads all benefited financially from maintaining the status quo.
One Nation will return $30 billion a year into the pockets of everyday Australians. We will shrink the government to fit the Constitution, reducing government spending by $90 billion a year and putting the budget into surplus in our first year. We will invest $20 billion a year in infrastructure, which the private sector will legally match, to build projects that grow wealth for everyday Australians, not foreign corporate profits. We’ve showcased these. These fully costed plans were taken to the electorate last May. We have the details. We know how we will do this, and we know that it can be done. The Australian people have clearly decided it’s time to ignore the insults and instead vote with their heads and with their hearts. Australians want our country back. One Nation is the only party that can achieve that and, indeed, the only party that wants to achieve that.
Beyond simple funding gaps, the medical, psychiatric, and legal challenges confronting veterans reflect deep-seated systemic failures.
The government and “top brass” of Defence are failing to manage and “mend” those who have served.
Standards are ignored. The MRH-90 Taipan helicopter crash is a primary example where warnings were reportedly ignored, leading to fatalities.
There is a disconnect between the “top brass” and rank-and-file members. The government overriding the findings of the Senate inquiry into Defence honours and awards is evidence that the concerns of service members are being ignored.
The veteran community is feeling “lost and broken,” struggling with loneliness, anger, and vulnerability. The Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide provides a backdrop to this desperation.
The “shambles” within the ADF leadership threatens the security of all 27 million Australians. By betraying the “heart” of the ADF, the effectiveness of the entire force is compromised.
Reform is needed and includes: ➡️ Enforcing honesty and “fair dinkum” treatment of veterans. ➡️ Holding senior ADF personnel, government ministers, and bureaucrats accountable for their decisions. ➡️ Restoring the standards and values that protect the lives of service members.
These failings are killing people.
Senior levels of the Australian Defence Force must be held accountable.
And until this is addressed, this issue will never be fixed.
Transcript
I support Senator Lambie’s motion and thank her for it. This is urgent. This is a crisis. This is growing. I want to talk more broadly about how to properly fix the system, and I commend Senator Lambie and the others who’ve talked about the system. The government is not managing vets, and this has led me to support Senator Lambie. The situation is critical. It needs action, because the neglect is piling issues on issues on issues for ADF members and veterans, and for Australia. This reflects on Australia. The Romans said, ‘We send them, we bend them, but we don’t mend them!’ That could be said of the ADF. Men and women are getting desperate. They’re feeling pain, hurt, loneliness, anger, desperation and vulnerability. They’re feeling lost and broken. They’re very concerned about their mates. We have people coming to us almost daily with legal problems caused by Defence, with medical problems or with psychiatric health problems. These are serious issues. They simply need honesty, mateship, a fair go and being fair dinkum.
These men and women have served our nation here and overseas. They deserve our support. What will it take? The government hasn’t cared. Although I commend Senator Chisholm for what he just read out, it needs to go far deeper. The government has made this an urgent issue. The findings of the recent Senate inquiry into the Defence honours and awards system were clear. The government came out and just did what the top brass wanted it to do— overrode the whole lot. It listened to people and then ignored them.
There were the Taipan deaths. After our warnings, after Senator Shoebridge’s warnings, after the previous crash— in which, fortunately, no-one died—the chopper was faulty. The chopper model was faulty. The heads-up display was faulty. ADF top brass ignored the standards and now they’re trying to hide it. I once listened to a very experienced senior ADF member who had top service in Vietnam and had risen to a very senior rank. He said that 70 per cent of the deaths of Australian soldiers in Vietnam were due to breaches of standards, which shows that Defence measures breaches of standards. Now, here we are with the Taipan chopper fatality, ignoring standards. The ADF senior brass is ignoring standards.
We’ve had a royal commission into veteran suicide. We’ve got the ABC, funded by taxpayers, defaming Heston Russell, who did a marvellous job in Afghanistan. When they were found guilty of defaming him, there was no apology. This man serves and then is targeted at home. Defence equipment purchases are hopeless, and people know it. What I’m saying is that this is systemic. It’s not just about dollars, Senator Chisholm—through you, Madam Acting Deputy President Hodgins-May. It’s about accountability at the senior levels of the Australian Defence Force. Until that’s fixed, this will never be fixed.
This shambles is killing people. Vets simply want to be heard. They want their issues addressed, and they want senior ADF responsibilities to be fulfilled. There are 27 million Australians whose security depends on senior ADF personnel. That security is at risk because the key to our Australian Defence Force—the heart, the mateship, the truth—is being attacked and betrayed. Costs are going up; results are coming down. This needs to incorporate a systems approach including senior ADF personnel, who set the tone, and including government ministers and bureaucrats. It’s an enormous problem, with the security of 27 million Australians at risk.
The Senate’s decision to suspend Senator Hanson last year backfired.
And during that suspension, One Nation welcomed former Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, achieving official party status.
There has been a huge rise in support, with One Nation’s primary vote jumping from 6% a year ago to now around 26% plus depending on the polls. This shifted the public conversation toward how many lower house seats the party might win in 2028.
One Nation rejects identity politics and will:
* Remove DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives and gender quotas.
* End the “gravy train of victimhood.”
One Nation considers ALL Australians equal, regardless of race, religion, or gender.
Note: Senator Hanson’s Bill to ban the burqa was the product of extensive constitutional and parliamentary drafting, intended to ensure the legislation was “conforming” and “within the Senate’s purview.”
Transcript
On the day before One Nation leader Senator Pauline Hanson returns to the Senate, I’d like to reflect on just how Australia has changed during her absence. If a week is a long time in politics, seven sitting days was a generation, sufficient to span the most fundamental realignment of Australian politics in 80 years—which Senator Hanson was free to facilitate, thanks to the Senate suspending her for those seven sitting days. The ALP-LNP uniparty still doesn’t understand the concept of unintended consequences. Everyday Australians were outraged at the suspension, and their actions inspired many to speak out in her place.
Senator Hanson left with the LNP coalition intact, and she led a party of four senators. She now returns, seven sitting days later, with five members of parliament and party status, and riding a tidal wave of success. Meanwhile, the opposition is in tatters, and the National Party’s conscience and engine room, former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce, has brought his impressive policy and political skills to One Nation.
In May last year, One Nation received the first preference of six per cent of Australian voters. In November last year, that was 15 per cent. Today, polls show it sitting at 26 per cent, and the pundits have stopped asking if One Nation can win lower house seats and instead are trying to work out how many we’ll win.
Those seven sitting days saw an Islamic terrorist attack on Australian soil in Bondi and the abject failure of this Prime Minister to show compassion towards the victims, or accountability, or justice against the perpetrators. We’ve seen rushed legislation that ostensibly protected the public, yet, in reality, took away freedoms we all used to enjoy. One Nation would have taken away the perpetrators, and those who incited their terror, and would have left Australians alone to enjoy their lives in peace, freedom and prosperity—concepts which seem foreign to the uniparty.
The bill that Senator Hanson presented last November was designed to ban face-coverings on Commonwealth property and has proven prescient—the right measure at the right time. It would have not only unmasked Islamists; it would have unmasked Nazis—a point the internet failed to grasp, because nobody bothered to read the bill. This was not an anti-Islamic measure; it was a measure against those on both sides of the political spectrum who would seek to harm Australians. It’s a fundamental belief of One Nation that all Australians should stand equal before the law. No religion should be untouchable. No race or gender should be favoured over another. A One Nation government would sweep away DEI, gender quotas and the gravy train of victimhood. We have one law which should apply equally to all. This is why Senator Pauline Hanson made her stand—all the work that went into that bill in One Nation’s office, all the to-and-fro which went on with the Office of Parliamentary Counsel and the hardworking staff of the drafting office—to produce a bill that was conforming, constitutional and within the Senate’s accepted purview. (Time expired)
The Albanese Labor government is failing to address the primary threat to national security: radical Islamic terrorism.
Political correctness and left-wing politics have allowed radicalisation to fester. The Bondi massacre (and other historical attacks) should be labelled exactly as they are – radical Islamic terrorism.
The Prime Minister and ASIO have been more focused on right-wing extremism while missing red flags regarding Islamic radicalisation and the firearms the Islamic killers were able to access.
One Nation rejects the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Firearms and Customs Laws) Bill 2026, which is nothing but a “dog’s breakfast.”
This Bill will:
Target law-abiding firearm owners instead of criminals.
Threaten free speech.
Lead to the deplatforming of political opponents.
This Bill is “anti-Christian” and will protect Islam while ignoring antisemitism. Instead of legislating new laws, we should:
Enforce existing laws.
Immediately deport and “remigrate” radicals.
Protect the rights of lawful gun owners.
Implement “castle law” (self-defense in the home).
One Nation would hold a genuine Royal Commission to investigate government and security failures.
The Labor government is using “shoddy” legislation to distract from a failure to confront religious radicalism, while unfairly penalising ordinary citizens and firearm enthusiasts.
Transcript
Part of the Bondi massacre horror was the realisation that the great Australian ‘she’ll be right, mate’ has failed us. We’ve watched the growing pro-Gaza demonstrations openly calling for violence against Jews and anyone who supports them. We’ve watched Islamic clerics preach hate against Western civilisation and call for jihad—violence against unbelievers. Many Australians thought: ‘She’ll be right, mate! This is Australia. This will sort itself out.’ It did not.
For many years, the left-wing commentariat, politicians and media accused those who sought to raise the alarms around rising antisemitism and Christianophobia with the crime of ‘threatening social harmony’. The very elastic crime of racism has now been extended to describe as racist anyone who defends Australia and our way of life. Many Australians have been guilty of shooting the messenger, while the message itself—the hatred and radicalisation—went unchallenged. We were told that highlighting radicalisation, rather than the radicalisation itself, was the problem. Well, now look. Look!
Australia will not be a safe and tolerant society again until the evil encouraged to fester in our beautiful country is cast out. It is an evil that has become an ‘ecosystem of poison’, as Labor’s Mike Kelly so aptly described it recently. The Bondi massacre was not Islamic-on-Jewish terror imported from the other side of the world. The gunmen did not stop to ask if the victims were Jewish before executing them. We must call Bondi what it is: a radical Islamist attack on all Australians.
Why were the Labor Party, the Greens, the teals and the globalist Liberals so blind to the growing threat of Islamic terror in this country? As recently as 16 May 2023, Prime Minister Albanese denied the reality of Islamic terrorism when he said:
… the strongest threat that has been identified for our security has been right-wing extremism.
This statement from the Prime Minister and quisling bureaucrats is misdirection. Fascists and white supremacists are a straw-man argument; their numbers are tiny and their influence non-existent, yet the Prime Minister knowingly and deliberately uses them to divert Australians’ attention away from radical Islam.
The Greens are advocating an extension to the hate crimes legislation to cover hate against LGBQ+, transgenders and anyone else who does not worship their religion of the sky god of warming. Okay—I threw in the climate. But, once censorship laws such as those the Prime Minister is pushing are introduced, the inevitable outcome will be the deplatforming of political opponents. The Greens’ call to extend the hate crimes provisions are designed to confuse the issue, to create multiple moving targets and to allow the government to pretend it’s doing something without ever taking action against the real problem: Islamic terror.
One only has to look at the history of Islamic terror attacks against Western civilisation to see strong measures are needed now. In the Munich Olympics massacre of 1972, there were 12 dead. In the Bali bombings of 2002, there were 202 dead, including 88 Australians. In the second Bali bombings, 2005, there were 20 dead, including four Australians. In the London bombings, 2005, there were 52 dead. In the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris, 2015, there were 12 dead. In the Brussels Airport bombings, 2016, there were 32 dead. In the Nice truck ramming, 2016, there were 86 dead—and no calls for a truck buyback. In the Berlin Christmas market truck ramming, 2016, there were 12 dead—no truck buyback. In the Pulse gay nightclub attack in Orlando, 2016, there were 49 dead. In the Manchester Arena bombing, 2017, there were 22 dead. In the Hamas attack in Israel on 7 October 2023, there were 1,180 dead. In Moscow’s Crocus City Hall bombing and stabbing attack in Russia in 2024, there were 145 dead. And now there’s Bondi, which was not the first Islamic terrorist attack in Australia. There was the Lindt Cafe siege in Sydney in 2014, with two dead; the car ramming in Bourke Street, Melbourne in 2017, with six dead—no car buyback; and the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in 2024. Islamic terror is here—right here—on Australian soil, and it’s been here for 25 years. All these terrorist attacks were predicated on a hatred of Western civilisation and a fundamental belief that Islam will rule the world and nonbelievers will convert or die.
ASIO can’t warn against what it can’t see. ASIO’s budget is now over a billion dollars a year, double what it was five years ago, and it’s not enough. Australia must decide: does it further increase ASIO funding or does it start sending home people who have demonstrated hatred for Australians?
At ASIO, there are 230 potential terrorists being monitored while they participate in deradicalisation therapy at the taxpayer’s expense. Here’s One Nation’s deradicalisation therapy: boarding passes, immediate deportation and remigration, never to return. While ASIO were busy mollycoddling violent extremists, they missed the Bondi shooters travelling to a known Philippines terrorist training ground for an extended stay before returning and committing their terror. ASIO missed that the father of a suspected terrorist purchased three guns on the same Thursday night in September 2023 from the same New South Wales firearms dealer.
ASIO missed that hate preacher Wissam Haddad holds a current New South Wales firearms licence. Haddad led Sydney’s Al Madina Dawah Centre where Naveed Akram, one of the Bondi shooters, studied. Akram’s father had a gun licence for six guns in New South Wales. How did none of this trip a red flag for New South Wales police, Home Affairs or ASIO? A royal commission must determine if this was wilful ignorance to protect a demographic that’s much more likely to vote Labor than conservative.
Australia is not the country it was when I was growing up. The destruction of social harmony started when successive governments let in people who came to live apart from us and not to assimilate with us. Those who betray the hospitality we show them must be required to leave. Those who wage war crimes against Australians should be charged. As an example, ISIS brides travelled overseas to conduct war against Australia and against our armed forces.
ISIS bride Zehra Duman spoke on social media in 2015 and demanded that the faithful ‘attack the UK, Australia and the United States’. ‘Kill them, stab them, poison their food’—your food. This is who Minister Burke knowingly and secretly enabled and helped to be smuggled back into our country. They perpetrated criminal activities and should be prosecuted instead of making work for ASIO by needing to be followed around.
Under our Westminster system of government, the buck for these failures stops with Prime Minister Albanese and Premier Minns. The terms of reference for the royal commission—if we ever see them—must allow scrutiny of how these failures occurred. This is no doubt why the Prime Minister refused for so long to call a royal commission: to protect himself and his ministers and to hide the truth.
Today, the Senate is voting on legislation which could have been brought in on a regular sitting day later in the year. What we are not voting on is the enabling legislation for the royal commission, to first get the data and the facts. This is what royal commissions are for—to inform bills like this. The Albanese government is putting the cart before the horse and burying the facts. Prime Minister, Australia is watching this royal commission. Do not cover up anything. If the cards are not allowed to fall as they may then it’ll be your government that will fall.
One Nation will oppose this rushed dog’s-breakfast bill—the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Firearms and Customs Laws) Bill 2026—and the second bill coming after it later tonight. There are processes to produce good legislation. This government has made a mockery of them all. The atrocious, shoddy legislation reflects contempt for our democratic process and for the people of Australia. The hate provisions for the Commonwealth Criminal Code that Labor introduced in 2010 and subsequently amended to make prosecutions easier have never been used—not one prosecution.
Australia does not need more laws which take away the right to free speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement and freedom of protest. We need the government to start policing the laws we already have. Whether people are Christian or another civilised religion, there can only be one set of laws, which are laws based on our Christian, Western heritage. There can only be one allegiance in our community and it’s to those laws. Tolerance has been weaponised. Labor, the Greens, the teals and now the Liberals have elevated tolerance to be the end itself. The thing being tolerated became irrelevant.
Speaking about Islam has been made prima facie racism, yet criticism of Christianity and Judaism is encouraged as being the religions of white-skinned people and of colonisers. White-skinned people are being demonised by the left-wing lobby groups and by other white-skinned people, like Greens Senator McKim, who said yesterday that Australians will not be safe until we’ve eliminated Islamophobia. In ‘Greens-land’, apparently there’s no radical Islam and the terrorist attacks I listed earlier never happened. It’s this illogical, suicidal empathy that’s led us to this moment.
The list of terror attacks I read out used guns, bombs, knives, cars and trucks. Guns are a straw-man argument. ‘Look over here at these evil guns and don’t look at the person wielding the gun.’ Failing to act against radical Islam will lead to more Australians losing their lives. Australia does not have a gun problem; we have a radical ideology problem. One Nation strongly supports the right to own and use firearms lawfully and responsibly. This Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Firearms and Customs Laws) Bill 2026 penalises legitimate, law-abiding gun owners. The poor wording shows a failure to understand how guns are used on farms and in sport. This is what happens when city based antigun groups are consulted and gun owner associations are not.
The bill proposes limiting the use of carriage services. This is pitched at limiting the use of the internet to access blueprints and use 3D printers to print guns. This is already illegal under state law. This bill elevates the description of ‘illegal material’ to mean whatever the hell the government decides is illegal. It could include a legal owner downloading the manual for a gun or educational YouTube videos on how to pull down, clean and reassemble a gun or on the science of a gun, like how the striking pin works and how to detect change, damage or wear to machine parts which may render the gun unsafe.
Merits review of a refusal to grant a gun licence under this bill is eliminated. Appeals would now have to be undertaken through the Federal Court, which is—what?—$20,000 minimum. The Administrative Review Tribunal system is working just fine, so now the government are fixing a problem that doesn’t exist so they can use a spurious argument to take guns off anyone they dislike.
As Minister Watt raised gun numbers, let me assist him. There are more guns in Australia now than there were in 1996, before the Port Arthur buyback, because our population has increased. The number of guns per person today is lower now than in 1996—lower—and the number of guns owned per person is lower. Honesty is important, Senator Watt.
One Nation supports the right of Australians to participate in sports involving firearms, to use firearms for hunting or recreational shooting, to collect antique and historically significant firearms and to use firearms in rural areas for pest and stock management. One Nation seeks to end discrimination against legitimate firearm owners and users, ensure all stakeholders are fairly consulted in the development of firearms laws and regulations and make existing laws fairer. We seek to improve community safety by cracking down on illegal firearm use with stronger penalties if firearms are used in committing crimes. The buyback scheme is a blank cheque, which industry sources we spoke to said could cost up to $15 billion. This is a tax on everyday Australians, because it must be paid for with a tax. One Nation supports castle law—the right to use force, fatal force if necessary, in proportion to defend one’s home and family from an intruder. Bring that legislation before parliament and One Nation will support it.
The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Criminal and Migration Laws) Bill 2026 has been so badly rushed that critical passages are inconsistent to the point that a court is likely to refuse prosecution based on these inconsistent provisions. The changes on which the government and the Liberal leader, Sussan Ley, surrendered do not justify Liberals supporting this bill. The government said that creating a new offence of racial vilification was removed from the hastily redrafted bill, yet some elements are hidden in the revised bill. The bill still includes supremacy. Anyone who says ‘Australian society is superior to Islamic Society’ is off to jail for five years, 12 if you are a priest or a lay preacher. Will the government start rounding up hate preachers in the electorates of senior Labor ministers like Messrs Burke, Butler and Bowen for declaring the superiority of Islam over Christianity? Of course not.
Make no mistake, this bill continues the war on Christianity and the promotion of Islam that has been a feature of left-wing politics for a generation. I welcome the last-minute government amendment to include a clause attempting to guarantee freedom of political communication, even if that protection is already in the Constitution. It may make it less likely this bill would be used to ban political rivals, including One Nation.
The bill still does not mention antisemitism, not once. It was never about protecting Jews; it was always about promoting Islam over Christianity. Liberal leader Sussan Ley has sided with the Labor Party to wave it through without due process and with onerous clauses that take away peoples freedoms, will cost all Australians more in taxes and will, in the end, fundamentally change the nature of Australian society without protecting against a recurrence. Australians, your choice is now One Nation or no nation.
The Albanese Labor government is accepting refugees almost exclusively from Muslim countries while ignoring Christians being slaughtered in Nigeria and Syria. Why are we importing cultures of violence instead of offering protection to those being persecuted by them?
The regime of Abu Mohammad al-Julani is currently conducting a slaughter of Christians and Alawites to establish a caliphate. I asked whether the government would balance the intake to protect these groups before they are killed.
Why is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees effectively “managing” our resettlement intake, a practice that risks the safety and security of everyday Australians?
Instead of addressing why Christian refugees are being excluded, Minister Watt resorted to the usual Labor tactics: personal attacks. He attempted to smear me and my party as “divisive” and falsely attributed comments to Senator Hanson to avoid answering for his government’s policies.
I made it clear: our immigration program should be based on protecting our security and supporting those truly in need, rather than outsourcing our sovereignty to the UN or prioritising groups that do not share our values. The Minister’s refusal to provide a straight answer only proves that this government is more interested in virtue signalling than the safety of the Australian people.
Transcript
Senator ROBERTS: My question is to the Minister representing the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Watt. Last November, I asked you about the country of origin of refugees in your government’s refugee visa program. Your response on notice stated, ‘There were no visas granted to citizens of Nigeria or South Africa through the offshore refugee program.’ In my question, I pointed out the reason why we’re not taking in Christian refugees is that your government is taking refugees almost exclusively from Muslim countries or communities. Minister, why is your government not offering refugee status to Christians currently being subject to persecution, violence and murder in Nigeria and South Africa rather than taking the people who are propagating the culture of violence?
Senator WATT: I’m always careful, Senator Roberts, to not concede that what you put forward as facts are actually facts, particularly on matters relating to migration because we know that you and your party seek to divide Australians based on the issue of migration. If any evidence of that is needed, it’s the conclusion of your question which yet again seeks to tar all Muslim Australians and Muslim migrants with the action of a small minority who do the wrong thing. It wasn’t that long ago that your party leader, Senator Hanson, effectively said that there was no such thing as a good Muslim, a statement that we utterly reject and, in fact, Senator Whitten rejected, to his credit.
The PRESIDENT: Senator Roberts?
Senator ROBERTS:I have a point of order. That’s not accurate; she did not say that. That was a media beat-up.
The PRESIDENT: Senator Roberts, thank you for sitting down when I requested it. Minister Watt, please continue.
Senator WATT: Senator Hanson’s comments on Muslims were so outrageous that Barnaby Joyce distanced himself from them and Senator Whitten distanced himself from them. I don’t recall you distancing yourself from those comments, Senator Roberts, and it’s a matter for you to determine how you feel about those statements.
The PRESIDENT: Senator Roberts?
Senator ROBERTS:I just did distance myself because the comments weren’t accurate.
The PRESIDENT: Senator Roberts, that’s not a point of order; it’s a debating point. Minister Watt, have you concluded your answer?
Senator WATT: What I’ve said repeatedly in answer to questions from One Nation on the issue of migration in this chamber is that the Albanese government proudly has a policy of not discriminating against migrants based on their religion or other personal attributes. We will always consider the merits of every migration application. Each and every day, we reject applicants who are seeking to move to Australia and migrate to Australia on the basis of character checks and other reasons, but we don’t have a blanket rule of stopping all people from a certain faith in the way that One Nation seeks to do.
The PRESIDENT: Senator Roberts, first supplementary?
Senator ROBERTS: Minister, the Syrian Islamic regime of President Abu Mohammad al-Julani is conducting a slaughter of Christians and Alawites in Syria to turn Syria into a caliphate. The videos are all over social media, and, yes, we have checked them, and they have been authenticated. Minister, will you reduce your Islamic refugee intake and at least balance it with Nigerian and Syrian Christian and Syrian Alawite refugees before they too are killed at the hands of Islamists?
Senator WATT: Again, Senator Roberts, to your deep shame, you are equating every Muslim who seeks to move to Australia with the actions of what sounds like a reprehensible organisation, and that is not a position that we accept. Our position is that anyone who seeks to get a visa to migrate to Australia should be assessed to ensure that they are of good character, that they don’t present
a security risk to Australians wherever they’re from and whatever their faith is. Senator Roberts, I might need to remind you of the comments of your leader, Senator Hanson. She was asked whether there are good Muslims out there, and she said: ‘How can you tell me there are good Muslims?’ If that’s the kind of language and rhetoric that you think is going to help bring this country together, then that’s on you.
The PRESIDENT: Senator Roberts, second supplementary?
Senator ROBERTS: Minister, in your written reply dated 4 November, you twice refer to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and admit that it informs and ‘manages’ your resettlement intake. Why is your immigration program risking the safety and security of everyday Australians?
Senator WATT: It’s not, and, Senator Roberts, I know you and your party have sought to profit politically from the awful tragedy we saw at Bondi just before Christmas. It’s worth remembering that one of the people involved in those attacks migrated to Australia during the Howard government’s period in office and the other of those people was born in Australia. But let’s just ignore the facts for a minute, Senator Roberts, hey? That’s the way you operate. The way this government operates is that we make decisions about individual applicants based on their character, based on whether they’re going to make a positive contribution to Australia and whether they represent a security risk to Australia. We do not have the kind of approach that you are encouraging us to take, and we will always, proudly, stand up for Australian values in terms of who is admitted to this country.
One Nation cannot support this bill in its current form. While we agree that Australians caught up in the Robodebt scandal deserve closure, this legislation fails to deliver justice and accountability.
The government’s amendment MM100 introduces Section 44A, giving bureaucrats the power to use AI to mine data, match records, and even issue debt notices — all without human oversight. This is Robodebt 2.0. The same flawed approach that caused harm, heartbreak, and even loss of life is being repeated. The Royal Commission exposed the dangers of automated debt recovery. Why would we allow it again?
On top of that, Schedule 5 was added after the committee stage with zero scrutiny. It could suspend benefits for people accused, yet not convicted, of crimes. That’s a denial of natural justice and a dangerous precedent. An accusation is not a conviction, and financial penalties before due process is unacceptable.
One Nation supports restoring the six-year debt recovery limit, but without proper safeguards and accountability, this bill is a recipe for disaster. We’re calling on the government to pull these last-minute inclusions or send the bill back for full scrutiny. Australians deserve fairness, not another robodebt scandal.
— Senate Speech | November 2025
Transcript
Senator Roberts: Minister, this bill includes provisions that have been introduced after the committee stage and, as such, have not been subjected to proper scrutiny. It’s true that those who were caught up in the robodebt scandal need closure. One way or another, they need closure. A line needs to be drawn under as many of these debts as possible. This bill as it is, however, fails to achieve that objective to One Nation’s standard.
I note that government amendment MM100 was passed this morning on the voices. I would like to ask Hansard to note One Nation’s opposition to that amendment, and here’s why: the amendment includes section 44A, which allows the government to use a computer program—in other words, AI, artificial intelligence—to mine data and match data and decide whether a debt occurs, and even to issue the debt notice. Are you kidding? This just restarts a robodebt type of debt recovery, but this time using AI. The fundamental problem still exists—data matching across systems with different software, different indexing and different ages that led to matching errors. The government has spent $2 billion trying to sort this mess out and has now pushed back the timeframe to complete the linking of government data back to 2028. We’ll get you. Why ask for these powers now when you have no ability to deliver? There’s no scrutiny and no guardrails; just do whatever the hell the secretary wants. This is a recipe for robodebt 2.
The government must be responsible, accountable and transparent. The failure of robodebt was to try to match data from incompatible computer systems, which led to innocent people being presented with a debt notice, and it led to inaccurate amounts being claimed. This resulted from the use of computer matching software. Amendment MM100 repeats that same mistake and will surely lead to the same outcome of substantial errors in data matching leading to erroneous debt collection. As the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme found, people died as a result of these debt notices. Introducing a system that makes these notices, untouched by human hands, is not the answer. The answer is careful scrutiny.
One Nation cannot support this bill with section 44A included. Senator David Pocock introduced a perfectly logical amendment to pull schedule 5 from the bill. The schedule was introduced after the bill went to committee. It has not been properly scrutinised. The provisions of schedule 5 could be misused to suspend benefits for persons accused, but not convicted, of a crime. In particular, fathers accused of domestic violence will be robbed of their benefits—whether that is unemployment, parenting payment, rent allowance or whatever—placing them in a weakened position to defend those charges. This schedule is designed to encourage domestic violence allegations. This provision should be limited to persons who have been convicted, not accused, of a crime, even where an arrest warrant has been issued. An arrest warrant is not a conviction. It is the police saying the accusation is serious and the complainant may be in danger. Suspending their liberty via an arrest warrant is how this is dealt with, not levying a financial penalty by terminating their income before a conviction. Greens amendment (2) on sheet 3487 restores the six-year limit for debt collection. While One Nation would have gone with seven years to align with the tax law, I understand that the six-year limit restores a provision the Liberal-National government repealed in order to facilitate robodebt initially. Again, you’re bringing it all back. Without this provision, the government has unlimited recovery powers. It has gone back to 2004 in some cases. I understand they have gone back to last century. This is a denial of natural justice and administrative fairness. Who has the documents from that far back to challenge a notice? Make no mistake: these debt notices are guilty until proven innocent. One Nation will support the Greens amendment.
Without all of those amendments in place, One Nation cannot support this bill. We are happy to work with the government to clean the mess called robodebt and have the bill reintroduced next year with due scrutiny of the ramifications of using AI and with schedule 5 properly scrutinised. Minister, my question is: will you pull these last-minute inclusions out of the bill or send the bill back to a committee so that these last-minute inclusions can be properly scrutinised by the people’s representatives in this house?
