Transcript

[Marcus Paul]

Maybe we need people like Senator Malcolm Roberts in positions of greater power. Malcolm’s with us on the programme. Hello mate, how are you?

[Malcolm Roberts]

I’m well, thanks Marcus. How are you?

[Marcus Paul]

Pissed off.

[Malcolm Roberts]

I know, you’re cranky and frustrated, I just heard-

[Marcus Paul]

I’m really annoyed-

[Malcolm Roberts]

You should be too-

[Marcus Paul]

I’m really, really annoyed. Anyway, let’s get to some of the issues. I’m sorry, but did you just hear what Premier Annastacia Palaszcuk said today?

[Malcolm Roberts]

Yeah, I did, and what she’s doing is just playing the Queensland card. Queenslanders are very proud to be Queenslanders, but we’re also proud to be Australians. And Palaszcuk is running off the old trick, of just trying to isolate. And that’s what a desperate leader does.

They try and build a circle around themselves, and everyone outside is bad, and that’s what she’s doing. But she’s actually misrepresenting the situation. We’ve got two tertiary care hospitals in Queensland, we’ve got a couple in Brisbane, and we’ve got one centre in Townsville.

Now the Townsville looks after all the way from Townsville, right through to Papua New Guinea. It looks way out into the east, into the islands. It looks way west into the Northern territory, and south to about Central Queensland.

The hospitals around Brisbane, they take care of Central Queensland, north of the hospitals, and south of the hospitals into Northern and New South Wales. That’s our responsibility. We get paid federal money for doing that. And Anastasia Palaszcuk is misrepresenting the truth.

She has actually now, people are starting to wake up Marcus. She has stopped two twins in birth, in the womb, from coming to Brisbane for treatment. That mother would have had a helicopter flight in half an hour to the hospital. Instead she took 16 hours, to get on a royal flying doctor’s services plane-

[Marcus Paul]

Why is it you can say all of this Malcolm, but we’ve got a prime minister, who says stuff all! Does nothing, says nothing to call this woman out, says nothing about what’s going on with the border debacle.

[Malcolm Roberts]

Well, I believe we have a prime minister who’s doing a marketing job, and Scott Morrison is very much in favour of building facades and then selling them. Look, he’s caused a real problem with this cabinet, this so-called cabinet that he’s established.

I believe that one of the motives of that cabinet was to pull people together, that’s good. But the other motive was, if it went pear-shaped with their response, he would have had the cabinet to blame.

And so, what we’ve now got is we’ve got rampant premiers, and Dan Andrews not fulfilling his responsibilities, Anastasia Palaszczuk, not fulfilling her responsibilities to the country and to Queensland, and harming both those states, and who pays mate?

The prime minister pays, the taxpayer pays. So when Victoria has as a sloppy response, and has more cases of COVID, and has to shut down to a stage four, who pays the bill for the extra job keeper, the extra job seeker?

[Marcus Paul]

Well-

[Malcolm Roberts]

The federal government does. So, what we’ve got now is the complete reversal of our constitution which is based on competitive federalism, and we’ve got competitive welfarism. The more the Queensland, and New South, and Victorian Governments fail, the more money they’ll get. It’s ridiculous.

[Marcus Paul]

All right. Look, again, I don’t understand why they’re so quiet on this and look, and I know the way the system works, I get it, but I’m sorry, you’re right.

He’s just hiding behind marketing slogans. He thought he hit a home run yesterday with this announcement, this grandized announcement of vaccines, and then he tripped over the words when he went down the whole mandatory line.

[Malcolm Roberts]

This is just a repeat-

[Marcus Paul]

Then having to backtrack-

[Malcolm Roberts]

This is just a repeat of what happened with the COVID tracking app. You know, he came out, and three times he refused to rule out that it would be compulsory. So I jumped in on a radio station and said, “No, we are not gonna support it, if it’s compulsory.

“We’re just not, you can’t do that.” He was very quickly backtracking as soon as that happened. Now Pauline did the same with this declaration of compulsory vaccines. And she belted him and he quickly retreated. He doesn’t stand for anything, and that means he’ll fall for anything.

And that’s Scott Morrison summarised in a nutshell. But that’s typical of the Liberal and Labor parties these days. They don’t stand for anything and they fall for anything.

[Marcus Paul]

All right, what about compulsory superannuation? This 50-year experiment continues, we’re now 30 years into the super experiment, and without getting bogged down in any of the financial detail, is it working, and can we afford the increase the government has promised Malcolm?

[Malcolm Roberts]

Well, you know, the reserve bank governor has come out and said the rising super would reduce wage growth, and spending.

And he’s right, because what people fail to realise is this super has to be paid from somewhere. The extra super contribution has to come from somewhere, and it comes out of an employer’s revenue.

And so, the employer then has less opportunity, less affordability, to give wage increases in the future. So the money doesn’t come out of nowhere. It goes either into super, or it goes into increased wages.

Take your pick Marcus. And so the reserve bank governor is sensible in saying that. So I’m saying that we need to really consider this, and have a good look at it, because the contribution from super, the tax concessions on super fund earnings is now costing us 38 billion a year.

The cost in saved pensions is only $8 billion a year. That means there’s $30 billion being transferred somewhere else. And we know that it goes to the banks and the super funds and fees.

[Marcus Paul]

Of course it does.

[Malcolm Roberts]

So this means that what’s happening, is that the rate we’re going, the return to members would be below the projected return if it were not for taxation concessions.

So we really have to think about what we’re doing with super and we have to stop making it increasingly complex. Have to really look at it in a solid way, and then come back to having a solid strategy on super and stop changing it all the time.

[Marcus Paul]

Yeah, I mean if business is forced to increase super in order to survive, then unfortunately they may just take that out of wages.

We know that real wage growth has basically flat-lined over the years, and they can’t probably afford, given the fact that we’ll be in hopefully recovery phase by then with COVID-19, with all borders open and all economies chugging away.

So while business survives, perhaps individuals if you like, may be worse off. I mean it’s, I don’t know whether the economy can sustain a rise in compulsory superannuation.

[Malcolm Roberts]

Well, you’re absolutely correct. And it points to not only the confusion and the concern that people have with continual meddling with the super, but also it points to what we discussed last week and the week before Marcus.

And that is that our economy has been debilitated from about 1923 onwards, and then especially from 1944 onwards, with signing the Lima Agreement, the Paris Agreement, the Kyoto Protocol and all these things that have destroyed our economic sovereignty, our economic sustainability, so we’ve had a reduced economy now, and even before COVID, it was floundering.

So, as a result of COVID, it’s collapsed. What we need to do, when Morrison and Albanese are talking about lifting the economy back to where it was, we don’t need to think about February this year Marcus, we need to think about getting back to being number one in the world, which is where we were in the early part of last century, right through to 1920.

We had the number one income per capita in the world. And that’s what we need to get back to. And what’s happened is that the Liberal Labor policies of pushing UN policies has failed. And we need to get back to really aiming for being top of the world again.

We’ve got the people, we’ve got the resources, we’ve got the climate, we’ve got the opportunities and the potential, we’ve just got wombats running the show in Canberra. That’s what we need to change.

[Marcus Paul]

All right, good to have you on the programme as always Malcolm. Calling a shovel a bloody spade. Appreciate it, we’ll talk to you next week. Thank you.

[Malcolm Roberts]

Thanks Marcus.