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Australia watched the Treasurer turn the cabinet room into a stage for business and union bosses instead of using it for real cabinet deliberation. The roundtable wasn’t about shaping policy—it was about rubberstamping what the government had already decided. Their attempt to link productivity to higher taxes collapsed, and Australians are left wondering why this government keeps chasing revenue instead of fixing its spending problem.

One Nation will fight the Albanese government’s tax hikes and end the wasteful net zero transition that’s draining billions a year while driving private enterprise away. We will restore fiscal sanity by cutting unnecessary spending, imposing an eight-year residency requirement for Social Security, and cracking down on fraud in agencies such as Centrelink, Medicare, the NDIS, and the PBS.

Smaller government and a sensible energy policy will deliver real productivity gains and prosperity for Australians—especially our young.

Transcript

Last week, Australia watched the Treasurer host business and union bosses in the cabinet room. The irony escaped the Treasurer—using the cabinet room to hold a policy debate cabinet itself should be doing. The usual suspects were not there to help form government policy; they were there to rubberstamp the policies the government intends to implement in this parliament. The roundtable even failed to achieve that. We know this because the ABC leaked the outcome of the week before. That communique remains in Treasurer Chalmers’s drawer, abandoned and unloved. The core intent—making productivity about taxation—failed.  

One Nation will oppose the tax hike the Albanese government will still try to introduce to cover its growing financial black hole caused largely through the increasing use of taxpayer money to pay for a net zero transition from which private enterprise is walking away—indeed, running away. This government doesn’t need more revenue; it needs to spend less money. One Nation will abolish the net zero transition, saving the government $30 billion each year in direct expenditure and generating that much again in extra revenue from a revitalised economy. One Nation will impose an eight-year residency requirement on access to social security, taking tens of billions of dollars off the cost of Centrelink, Medicare, the NDIS and the PBS and giving auditors and police a chance to investigate and prosecute the rampant fraud. Net zero insanity, deficit spending and throwing cash at new arrivals are robbing our children of their future.  

Smaller government and a sensible energy policy are where productivity improvements will actually come from. One Nation’s policies will restore wealth and prosperity for all who are here, especially our young. The Albanese government will just take your money and leave working Australians with less—much less. A One Nation government, though, will restore Australia. 

Transcript

I thank Senator McGrath for this motion, which One Nation supports. This government is flooding the country with new arrivals who need a bed to sleep in. Home construction is 500,000 homes behind, and this figure is not reducing; it’s growing. A sensible party would simply impose a moratorium on new buildings until housing catches up. That’s One Nation policy.

This, though, is not a sensible government nor an honest government. The roundtable received a proposal to force Australians with spare bedrooms to take in new arrivals or pay a penalty tax. Elderly Australians living in their family homes, with children moved out and bedrooms galore, are terrified of this idea. Current best practice is for the elderly to stay in their homes for as long as possible. Now they are to be turfed out through taxation and forced into retirement homes. In answer to my question on this topic to Minister Gallagher yesterday, I did hear a qualified denial. The minister did not rule the idea out, though; rather she used vague words like, ‘The proposal was not raised while I was in the room.’ Really? That’s not a clear statement. The idea must be dismissed and never considered again.

I would raise this simple question: what’s a bedroom? Does ‘bedroom’ mean any room that can be used to house a new arrival? Studies, rumpuses, garages turned into granny flats? Who will make these decisions? SBS, who promoted the idea, has clearly never watched Doctor Zhivago, a movie depicting life under Soviet rule, which depicted this very thing. The Soviets actually did this, so it’s an idea with precedent. Will the government include compulsion in addition to taxation? Will all those Australians who are buying their homes under Help to Buy or government guaranteed mortgages, who have the government as the shareholder or guarantor on the mortgage, be forced to comply? Will they? Who knows, because no-one is saying. They won’t deny it.

I call on the Prime Minister to rule out any new taxes on the family home, including land tax, bedroom tax and grave tax.

I’m an immigrant, and I love this country deeply. Like many others who marched in the March for Australia, I came here legally, embraced the culture, and built a life as part of the Australian community—not separate from it. We weren’t born here, but we’re proud Australians.

What we’re standing up against isn’t immigration itself—it’s immigration without assimilation. We’re tired of politicians pushing mass immigration without thinking about the social and economic hardship it causes. We’re fed up with being called racist or hateful just for wanting to protect our way of life, our jobs, and our communities.

Australians aren’t against migrants — we’re against policies that prioritise foreign workers over Aussie ones, that erode secure employment, and that replace permanent jobs with insecure subcontracting. Labor used to stand for workers, but now they’ve abandoned the working class in favour of globalist agendas, predatory billionaires and their corporate interests.

The truth is diversity is not our strength. Our strength lies in people from all over the world with different backgrounds coming together as Australians, respecting our laws, values, and culture. That’s the Australia I believe in – the Australia I marched for. If you love this country, if you want to contribute and be part of a united Australia, then join us.

Transcript

Immigration without assimilation is an invasion.’ So read the T-shirt that a lovely, older immigrant lady wore in the Cairns March for Australia on Sunday. Many of the tens of thousands of Australians who marched for Australia on Sunday were not born here. Like me, they’re immigrants. I spoke with marchers from all over the world, of every religion and skin colour. They are wonderful Australians who came here as migrants legally, who love this country and who have built a life in Australia, not on top of it—not those who impose their religion, their culture, their intolerance and their perpetual hate onto Australians and who marchers rightly criticised. Marchers criticised politicians and others who hate this country so much that they seek to flood Australia with like-minded arrivals to destroy our culture and to carve off religious and ethnic enclaves in order to divide us. The Australian public are not against immigrants. We’ve had a gutful of excessive, mass immigration—a simple distinction that the unhinged rants from Greens and Labor senators yesterday were designed to cover up. I appreciate the far left in this country have disappeared up their own nobility complex and have completely abandoned any pretence of democracy, decency or civil discourse. Vile, unhinged abuse devoid of facts—indeed, devoid of any relevance to the motion I presented yesterday—doesn’t work on One Nation. It doesn’t work on our supporters and it doesn’t work on those who attended the many marches for Australia. Our beautiful country can embrace and lift up only so many people before the economic and social costs cause the elastic of society to snap back, which is the process you’re watching with confused looks on your faces and fear in your eyes. 

The immigration debate is not an argument about someone’s past nationality, religion or skin colour. It’s an argument about wealth, opportunity and security. Former Labor prime minister Julia Gillard knew this to be true. In an address to the University of Western Sydney in March 2013, then prime minister Gillard promised Labor would ‘stop foreign workers being put at the front of the queue, with Australian workers at the back’. She said: 

We will support your job and put Aussie workers first. 

What a difference 10 years makes! Now those foreign workers are being advanced to the front using DEI, and Australian workers are being told not to apply. Often, the application is not even for a job with secure employment, an award or guaranteed conditions. In the new Australia, jobs are now a subcontracting arrangement requiring an Australian Business Number, an ABN. A microbusiness with a single customer—the same business which used to employ Australians on permanent employment, with awards protecting wages and working conditions—is no more. In just 10 years, the Greens have pushed Labor so far to the left they have abandoned their working-class base, embracing a UN/World Economic Forum sustainability agenda which gives their members less and foreign, predatory billionaires more. 

It’s no surprise that marches included members of the AWU, the CFMEU, the ETU and other unions who’ve seen their wealth, opportunity and place in Australia be reduced. Labor has failed to defend Australian workers from employment arrangements that destroy the standard of living of everyday Australians. Instead of listening to the public, rightly complaining, Labor came into this place yesterday and ranted against One Nation. They name-called, lied and misrepresented out of confusion and fear. One Nation has a message for this government: go back to your masters at the World Economic Forum, go back to your owners—the world’s predatory billionaires—and tell them Australia has had enough. We’re not going to be ground zero for your evil plan to tear apart Australian society, culture and cohesion and rebuild in the image of the World Economic Forum. Everyday Australians want our country back. Our success is inevitable because our Australia, built on family, on community and, yes, on national pride, is paradise compared to your ugly vision of a society based on an ever-changing agenda relying on intimidation and bullying. 

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam found that the greater the diversity in a community the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and the less they work on community projects. A massive new study based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America supports those who marched on Sunday. In the most diverse communities, neighbours trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogeneous settings. The study found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings. Ask the five tight monocultures—Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea and Singapore. Diversity is not our strength. Our strength is Australians who’ve come here from all over the world, with different races and religions providing different perspectives on life, working together as a community of Australians old and new. One Nation welcomes anyone who loves our country, who wants to join in and who wants to pull their weight, follow our laws and, in so doing, lift themselves up. If that’s the Australia you love, please join One Nation and help us reverse the decline of our beautiful country. 

Australia’s migration program is failing to deliver the skilled workers we were promised.

An analysis shows that in 2023-24 only 12% of permanent migration spots went to skilled workers — and 0.09% to tradespeople. Meanwhile, the housing crisis worsens.

The system is broken!

— Senate Estimates

Transcript

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for appearing tonight. I want to go to an analysis of the migration program—it’s an analysis done by Emeritus Professor Peter McDonald and Professor Alan Gamlen, who are affiliated with the Migration Hub at the ANU—and also a comment on their analysis by Leith van Onselen, the economist, who says of the report:

Australia’s immigration system is unskilled and broken.

They say, ‘In 2023-24, the permanent migration program’—185,000—’delivered just 166 tradespeople, negligible against national needs.’ The report also shows that just 12 per cent of places in the nation’s permanent migration program are going to skilled workers. Instead, many of these place are being allocated to members of skilled workers’ families. Zero point zero nine per cent of new permanent residents are in the trades. Australians have been promised that the migration program is to fill skills shortages to fix the housing crisis, and that’s being used to justify hundreds of thousands of arrivals—millions over the last few years. Yet now we know that just 166 tradies arrived in one year. Why is your department failing to make sure the people who are granted permanent places in Australia are actually skilled?
Senator Watt: Maybe the place to start, Senator, is what figures the department has around—there was a little discussion about this earlier in a session you weren’t here for, but maybe that’s a decent place to start.

Ms Sharp: Certainly. Thanks, Minister. Going very specifically to primary visa applicants who work in the construction sector, in 2024-25 there were 15,524 skilled visas granted to workers in construction.

Senator ROBERTS: Excuse me—what was the total migration that year?

Mr Willard: 185,000.

Senator ROBERTS: 185,000?

Ms Sharp: That was the permanent program, Senator, yes. Of that permanent program, 8,741 were skilled workers in the construction sector.

Senator ROBERTS: That’s about four per cent.

Senator Watt: But very different to the numbers you were just quoting, Senator.

Senator ROBERTS: Depends how they’re classified, Minister.

Senator Watt: Well, I think you gave a figure of 150-something—

Senator ROBERTS: 166.

Senator Watt: Yes, whereas the actual number is over 8,000—so, pretty big difference.

Senator ROBERTS: We can argue about the accuracy because it depends on the classification, but keep going.

Mr Willard: Senator, I’d add that the permanent program—it’s roughly two-thirds allocated to the skilled program. You are correct that the skilled program includes the primary applicants and their immediate family members, and there were 132,148 places delivered in that skilled program in 2024-25.

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank deny home loans to mining communities

Australian banks are the world’s most profitable, raking in $30bn in profits last year. Much of this was sent overseas to their foreign shareholders, including the usual suspects – Blackrock, First State, and Vanguard. In total, Australian banks paid $27 billion in dividends, of which 26% or around $7 billion was sent to foreign-owned corporations.

Every dollar which goes overseas in dividends is a dollar Australia never sees again, reducing our GDP and making us all poorer.

In this Parliament, One Nation will introduce legislation to create an Australian People’s Bank, with 100% Australian ownership and a Banking Code of Practice which gives customers rights and protections that have been removed from the code being used by Australian banks.

Rural and Regional customers will benefit the most, with many Australian towns no longer having a single bank branch.

Banking greed, dishonesty, and profiteering is something I have been working on since coming into the Senate in 2016.

In 2017 One Nation were successful in creating a Select Committee on Lending to Primary Production Customers. It was obvious to the Senate the banks were screwing over the bush.

Specific issues raised by the Inquiry have been substantially addressed although remediation has not occurred. The big banks are behaving more responsibly in their lending practices as a result of this Inquiry and the Royal Commission that followed.

While lending practices have improved, the banks have turned to other schemes to make their excessive profits.

One area of great concern, one which will be corrected by a People’s Bank, is the closing of bank branches, forcing customers online.


In the last 10 years 2,500 bank branches have closed


I have written about the effect this has before. Today there is a new scam I want to alert you to. I thank the fearless journalist Dale Webster for her work on this topic: link to her article titled “Burning Down the House”.

The culprit this time is the Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, Australia’s fifth largest bank.

Bendigo are refusing to give home loans to any town or region which hosts a mine. This includes any mine, no matter the purpose – gold, coal, iron ore, bauxite, rare earths needed for the technology – everything.

Yes, the Bendigo Bank is black-banning towns where the very materials are mined that are used to make the computers that run their bank. What folly.

Anyone applying online for a loan to buy property in a mining area is immediately denied. Home lending in all of Queensland’s mining regions – from coal, oil and gas to opal mining – is knocked back by Bendigo Bank. Yes, even opals.

Distinct areas separated from others by favoured postcodes include Moura (4718) in the Bowen Basin coalfield, home to the Dawson Coal Mine, Mount Isa (4825), site of one of Australia’s largest copper and zinc mining complexes, and the world-renowned opal fields surrounding Quilpie and Longreach.

Coal centres Moranbah, Dysart, Clermont, Emerald, and Blackwater are no home-loan zones, as is the Roma-Miles-Dalby district, the site of Australia’s first oil and gas discoveries. Weipa, built by Rio Tinto to house bauxite mine workers in Far North Queensland, gets an instant knockback as does Tieri, built to house coal workers north of Emerald.

In the course of this investigation, more than 1,000 locations across Australia have been run through Bendigo Bank’s online loan process to verify whether this is truly a mining blacklist or if these postcodes are part of a bigger cohort focusing on general risk.

The Australian Taxation Office’s 10 lowest earning suburbs in every state and territory for 2021-22 were reviewed. The top 100 riskiest suburbs to purchase housing in for 2024 according to Realestate.com were reviewed. Climate Valuation’s top 30 suburbs by ‘number of high-risk properties from all climate change hazards by 2030’ were reviewed. All were approved.

Bendigo Bank will lend for housing in the poorest, riskiest, and most isolated places in Australia rather than a mining area.

This is not about risk, this is about social engineering.

Bendigo and Adelaide bank are publicly-listed Australian companies. They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to act in their best interests, not indulge their own prejudices.

As Dale points out, the embarrassing thing is that Bendigo, the city from which Bendigo Bank takes its name and where it has its head office, was built on gold mining.

If people cannot finance their home purchases these towns will die. This is a deliberate and possibly criminal attempt by the Bendigo Bank to destroy mining in Australia by destroying the towns that support the mines.

Once an area loses housing credits and mortgages the bank in that area can be closed, using the lie that there is no longer the demand for the branch. The truth is the banks are creating the lack of demand by withdrawing key banking services and engineering the closure.

Do you hear a peep out of the leadership of the Nationals or the Liberals about this? No of course not.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley and Nationals Leader David Littleproud take their orders form the same predatory merchant banks that Bendigo Bank does. The Liberals, in particular, have overseen this destruction of retail banking in Australia since the time of Prime Minister Howard.

Only One Nation will fix this profiteering and control agenda by creating a People’s Bank.


Mining towns debanked by Senator Malcolm Roberts

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank deny home loans to mining communities

Read on Substack

On Sunday 31 August, One Nation senators joined the tens of thousands who marched against the program of mass migration.

We believe in one Flag, one community, One Nation. Thank you to all who came despite the scaremongering.

We will not be shut down because the truth is politically inconvenient to Liberal and Labor.

Thank You

Thank you to all Australians who turned out today for Australia and building a better country for our children.

Here’s my quick wrap up.

One Nation moved to establish a Senate inquiry into the program of mass immigration.

On Monday 1 September, I asked the Australian Senate to establish an inquiry into the impact of immigration on our economy.

The Australian public and the government must be properly informed about the data and the impacts of this policy. Without that, there can be no genuine policy debate or discussion.

That’s why we want to establish this inquiry, to take the emotion out of the debate and deal with the facts and data.

See the Senators who voted NO to our inquiry 👇 Almost all Liberals, Labor and Greens teamed up to block the inquiry.

Live Debate: 1 hr 16 mins.

Motion Defeated – 37 to 9

Number of Temporary Visa Holders in Australia

Mainstream media is out there gaslighting Australia, telling us that immigration is going down.

Can anyone point to the part of the graph where we aren’t currently at record migration levels?

Source: Number of Temporary Visa Holders in Australia, Department of Home Affairs.

Australia has up to 3.7 million noncitizens—in a population of just 27.4 million.

Hospitals are stretched, housing is unaffordable, and life is more expensive.

Why won’t the government reveal the real number?

Transcript

Not counting tourists, the number of people in Australia today who are not Australian citizens could be as high as 3.7 million. In a country with an estimated population of just 27.4 million people, this huge influx is stretching our hospitals, making housing unaffordable and making life more expensive. 

Noncitizens must have a visa to be in Australia. These are split into two categories: permanent residency visas and temporary visas. The latest data from the Department of Home Affairs shows that, excluding the 320,000 tourist and crew visas, there are currently 2.5 million people in Australia on temporary visas. The data on permanent residency visas is not clear; it’s murky. Between 2000 and 2021, three million permanent residency visas were issued to permanent migrants. In 2023, it was estimated that 59 per cent of those three million permanent visa holders have become Australian citizens. As of 2021, that would leave 1.2 million people who have not become citizens and are still on permanent visas, plus any more permanent residents who’ve arrived since 2021. Adding that best estimate of permanent visa holders to the 2.5 million people on temporary visas, we get 3.7 million people who are potentially in the country on visas. 

So what’s the real number? How many people are currently in Australia on a permanent visa, and why won’t the government tell Australians? Is it just too embarrassing for the government, after they promised to reduce immigration, to admit how many people in Australia aren’t Australian citizens? My new One Nation colleague Senator Tyron Whitten, Senator for Western Australia, will be asking the government about this number in question time today. In the middle of a housing crisis, the government had better know how many additional people it is letting into our country, undermining our standard of living and way of life. 

A million foreign students and their families are in Australia—overcrowding schools, straining housing, and bleeding tens of billions of $$ out of the country.

Courses are being used as backdoor permanent residency pathways, with poor standards and little oversight.

One Nation will:

✅ Deport visa cheats
✅ End family visas for students
✅ Introduce 8-year wait times for benefits
✅ Free up homes for young Aussies

It’s time to fix the rort and put Australians first.

Transcript

 I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for the Environment and Water (Senator Watt) to a question without notice I asked today relating to international students.

I asked: has the government lost control of student visa holders? The Australian public have had enough of the government pretending immigration is fine. So many people are entering that the government has lost control. Foreign students are now allowed to bring in spouses, de facto partners and children under 18 who attend state schools and contribute to overcrowding. Spouses can work 24 hours a week, or, if the student is a postgraduate, they can work full time with no restrictions. Buying a first degree and coming in as a graduate student opens the door to a financial windfall and helps to explain how foreign visa holders were able to last year send $15 billion home to their families—money that leaves Australia forever, making our economy and our people poorer.

In the last two years, the early education graduate diploma at the Southern Cross University has had 6,000 enrolments. The ABC reports that courses like this are being used as permanent residency pathways, with courses dumbed down to keep the gravy train going. There are confirmed issues around graduates not speaking English and not understanding child protection policies, safe sleep or even hygiene. There are 1.1 million foreign students and their families currently in Australia.

One Nation will deport every visa holder who is breaching their visa, a figure close to 100,000 when the number of dishonest foreign students is included. We will introduce an eight-year waiting period for social security benefits, including Medicare, and we will cancel the visa for spouses and siblings to accompany students entirely. In the age of online learning, there is no need for a student with children to come to Australia in person. The Albanese government’s student visa rort is selling out young Australians, causing record homelessness. We will free up tens of thousands of houses for young Australians, who, thanks to the government, currently face the worst housing crisis and the worst housing market in Australian history. (Time expired)

One Nation backs Senator Bragg’s Housing Investment Probity Bill to stop public funds flowing to CFMEU-linked projects via Cbus.

We would however go further. One Nation would:

✅ Shut down the Housing Future Fund and the federal Department of Housing.

✅ Cut $50K off home costs by fixing the Building Code and suspending GST on building materials.

✅ Create a People’s Bank for 5% fixed-rate mortgages.

✅ Allow a person’s super account to invest in their first home.

✅ Deport visa violators to free up housing.

✅ Stop foreign ownership of houses.

Australia needs homes and jobs — not government waste.

Transcript

Senator Bragg has advanced the Housing Investment Probity Bill 2024, which modifies the charter of the Housing Australia Future Fund to prevent financing of projects that Cbus owns. Cbus is a superannuation fund with legal affiliation to the CFMEU. The CFMEU are currently under a federally appointed administrator, a move that was a long time coming. Queensland Premier Crisafulli has called an inquiry into the CFMEU’s systemic violence, intimidation, misogyny and bullying. This bill from Senator Bragg is common sense—to prevent cash leaking through Cbus to the CFMEU until the CFMEU clean up their act and get back to representing Australian workers and to working constructively with industry to create secure, well-paid jobs at scale for all Australians.  

Australia needs housing, and we need breadwinner jobs. We have a responsibility to ensure infrastructure is built on time and on budget. One Nation does, though, propose a better alternative to Senator Bragg’s bill. We would shut down the housing future fund and the federal department of housing. Housing is a state responsibility, a state power. Government has no role in building houses. Its presence in the market drives up prices and slows down production, displacing private builders and monopolising building products. We will wind the building code back to remove the woke nonsense and the net-zero nonsense which were recently introduced into the code, and suspend the GST on building materials. Together these will cut $50,000 off a new home’s construction cost. Independently assessed, around $49,000 of that comes out of the modifications to the building code, which are rubbish. We will take the $11 billion in funds under management at the housing future fund and roll that into a people’s bank, accessed through Australia Post, offering mortgages for first home buyers who are Australian citizens. It’s been proven here in the past in Australia. It’s been proven in North America. It’s been proven in Japan and New Zealand.  

Mortgages will be on five per cent interest with a five per cent deposit, fixed for up to 30 years. The five per cent deposit can come from the first home owner grant and then be topped up using the applicant’s own superannuation account, protected with a lien. Notice I said ‘account’, not ‘fund’. This will not be a drawdown from super. Super is useful for retirement. Our policy simply replaces super funds investing in housing with the person’s own super account investing in their own house. As the house grows in value, so too does the value of the lien held in the person’s own superannuation account, protecting their retirement. Someone who has been working in the workforce for five years on average, and who is entitled to a first home owner’s grant, may be able to move into their own home straightaway.  

We must do more for the young Australians who this government, and other recent governments, have sold out. Young people who did everything society asked—they studied hard, stayed out of trouble, got their degrees, got their high school qualifications—now have a HECS debt, rent and a grocery bill they can’t afford. And they are in despair, right across Australia. 

The government’s housing measures are complete rubbish. They are an insult to Australians. The government’s own incoming government report stated clearly that their construction targets would not be met—bloody hopeless. Canberra, as I’ve said many times, is the source of every major problem in this country, and one of the biggest problems we have in this country right now is a homelessness crisis—an inhuman homelessness catastrophe.  

In my state of Queensland, going from the north in Cairns, every major provincial city has a homelessness crisis, a housing crisis. In Cairns, Townsville, Mackay, Rockhampton, Gladstone, Bundaberg, Maryborough, the Sunshine Coast, the Gold Coast, Brisbane—the capital city of what should be the wealthiest state in the world has got homeless people sleeping on the riverbanks, under bridges, in tents and in caravans—Ipswich, Boonah, Toowoomba, in every major provincial city, there are homeless.  

If you drive into Gympie, in a concrete car park, there are homeless people in tents. Parents come home at night—working mothers and fathers—wondering if their kids are still in the car and then sleeping in the car. Where do they go to the toilet? Where do they have showers? These are good people. And then the councils just put the bulldozer through the tents, put the bulldozer through the cars and that’s it: gone.  

Why is that happening in Queensland? It’s because we’ve got so many people leaving Victoria to come up to Queensland. In particular, we have got catastrophic, inhuman immigration levels that this government and the previous government have perpetuated. Catastrophic immigration started with John Howard’s government when he doubled immigration. Every prime minister since has been on the trend of increasing immigration.  

We’ve got so many foreigners owning houses. Some of them are locked up as an investment, not being used. We’ve got 75,000 people here on residence visas illegally. One Nation says, ‘Deport them immediately.’ We’ve got students here in contravention of a student visa—up to 100,000 of them. Get rid of them. Free up some houses. We’ve got accommodation capacity for 100,000 students; we’ve got about 600,000 overseas students in the country. That can’t continue. One Nation says: start with the demand and deport people who are here illegally or in contravention of their visa—deport them. Stop foreign ownership of housing, which will increase the supply. And, regarding the construction costs that I’ve mentioned, our policy goes beyond what I’ve mentioned briefly. We’ve also mentioned the finances. Our One Nation policy fixes demand, supply, construction and finance. Senator Grogan said that housing cannot be fixed overnight. It can be fixed close to overnight, just by doing the things One Nation has said: address demand, supply, construction and finance. We must do better. It takes several months to build a house; it takes several months to build an apartment complex. It doesn’t take long, though, to deport people who are here illegally. It doesn’t take long at all. That frees up supply and reduces the demand. 

Canberra, as I said, is the cause of every major problem in this country, and it comes from both Liberal and Labor governments—every major problem. The government’s housing measures—I repeat—are rubbish. Their own incoming government report stated clearly that their construction targets would not be met, yet they perpetuate the nonsense. We must do better. One Nation are in support, and I thank Senator Bragg for this legislation.