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During the Productivity Roundtable, the Albanese Government allowed a proposal to be discussed that many consider “monstrous.” The proposal involves forcing homeowners who have spare bedrooms to rent them out to new arrivals – or pay a tax if they don’t. The outcome appears to be that elderly Australians will vacate their homes and move into retirement facilities, thereby freeing up housing for others.

Young couples will also be a target. Those purchasing their first home with extra rooms intended for a family in the future may mean that they will be required to take in boarders or pay a tax—an added financial burden at a time when many are already stretched thin.

During Question Time, I asked Finance Minister Senator Gallagher to rule out this horrible idea. Unfortunately, she declined to do so.

As Margaret Thatcher once said, “Eventually, socialists run out of other people’s money.”

It seems the Albanese Government has taken that as a challenge.

Transcript

I move: 

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Finance to a question I asked today regarding taxation proposals raised at the productivity roundtable. 

In public life, there are some ideas that are so monstrous they should never be raised. Last week, Treasurer Chalmers encouraged not one but two monstrous ideas for new taxation. The first is grave robbing. An Australian works their whole life, pays off their home and, on their death, their home is sold to help their children or grandchildren enter the housing market. Some use the money to pay off their HECS debt so they can afford some home repayments. Treasurer Chalmers now proposes we should tax the home and only give the children what’s left, forcing the children to sell the home to pay taxes levied. This is being dressed up as somehow helping the housing market. Instead it will take away the only chance many young Australians have of affording a home of their own. 

Death duties were first introduced in Australia in 1851. In 1914 some states’ duties were as high as 54 per cent of the value of the property, before they were abolished after a public outcry and were never introduced again. Death taxes meant children could not afford to buy their parents’ farm and were forced off the land. The Prime Minister has met personally with the billionaires buying and controlling homes and farmland around the world—BlackRock’s Larry Fink, who is the new World Economic Forum co-chair, and vaccine king Bill Gates. Is this what they discussed—plundering our homes and farmland? 

The other monstrous idea was taxing unused bedrooms. For this each person will need to report to government how many bedrooms are in their home and how many are occupied. That spare bedroom is often being kept for family to visit and stay a while, meaning this policy is designed the deliberately break the bonds of family. A tax on empty bedrooms is an attack on the elderly, and that will force people into retirement homes earlier, the reverse of what we accept as best policy. Will our elderly be forced to take new arrivals as boarders into their own homes to beat the tax—language, culture and religious differences be damned? Minister, rule these monstrous proposals out now. 

Question agreed to. 

Australians are being priced out of their own country — and I’m calling it out.

In this full interview, I expose the real forces behind our housing crisis. Foreign buyers are snapping up homes while everyday Aussies are left struggling to afford a roof over their heads.

44% of the cost of a new home is TAX. That’s right — nearly half the price is government greed.

I lay out my bold plan: every foreign property owner will have two years to sell — no exceptions. It’s time we put Australians first.

I also dive into:

  • The massive impact of immigration on housing demand
  • How climate policies are wrecking our economy
  • And the banking system that’s bleeding families dry

Unemployable Media – not just a channel; they are a community that celebrates and uplifts individuals charting unconventional paths.

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Transcript

Adam Hudson: What’s up, guys?  Welcome to this very special episode of UNEMPLOYABLE.  This is our discussion with Senator Malcolm Roberts.  He is a federal member for One Nation.  It was a really insightful chat.  We covered a lot of stuff. 

If you don’t know anything about Senator Roberts, he is a very controversial figure in Australian politics. He does not believe in climate change. He is very vocal about immigration. He’s very vocal about our energy and how we are giving it away for literally nothing. He is very vocal about our overspending and waste as a nation.  He’s very vocal about what makes great children and great parenting. 

And I think you’re going to find this really interesting.  We talk about free speech.  We specifically spoke about why he and Pauline Hanson abstained from the recent hate crimes bill and so much more. I think you’re going to really enjoy it. 

It goes a lot of directions over the course of nearly two hours. 

Make sure you like and subscribe.  Put a comment below as well, guys, because, you know, engaging with this kind of media helps people of power and influence like Malcolm know that the attention is now in places like this podcast, independent media. 

We are not paid. We don’t have sponsors.  We fund this ourselves.  And so, you know, your engagement shines a light on where they should go and be heard. 

So, with that said, please enjoy this discussion with Senator Malcolm Roberts. 

What is up everybody?  Welcome to this very special episode of Unemployable.  This is our second ever political interview.  The first one went absolutely nuts on YouTube.  Don’t mean to brag, but we outperformed both of the major parties by bringing none other than Senator Pauline Hanson, who at the time of this recording has gone to nearly 200,000 views on YouTube – absolutely blitzing any other political interview in the podcast space this cycle, which is really, really encouraging.  And today we have with us Senator Malcolm Roberts, who is also with One Nation. 

And just for the record guys, we have invited Albo on, we’ve invited Peter on, we’ve invited on a couple of independents.  We do have Gerard Rennick coming in as well.  So, it’s not that we are just playing One Nation. We happen to be very receptive to Nation’s message and I think all Australians leading into this election should be absolutely opening their minds and listening.  And that is the point of these long form podcasts. 

Mark Di Paola: Yeah, the listeners have been great and the comments on Instagram and what not have been great in suggesting guests as well.  So, if anyone, you know, we put the message out to Dutton and Albo, but if anyone has a contact to them. 

Adam Hudson: Yep. 

Mark Di Paola: Let them know. 

Adam Hudson:  We want to – I’d really like to talk to them as well.  I got a few hard questions.  I don’t think I’d like to come on here because they’re not going to be softballs, let me tell you that, but Senator Malcolm Roberts, thank you for coming in.  We really do appreciate it.  Thank you so much for your time.  Welcome. 

Malcolm ROBERTS:  Well, thank you for the welcome.  And first of all I want to say how much I appreciate the new independent people’s media, the truth media, the freedom media, because the other two forms of media – the anti-social media – social media is really anti-social and it’s censored.   And the other one is the globalist mouthpiece, Big Brother media, whatever you want, it’s owned. So, this is the only way we can get our voice out. So thank you so much for what you’re doing. 

Adam Hudson: Yeah.  One thing I noticed as soon as you walked in the studio just now and this is what gets lost in media of all kinds, we sit in a very privileged position here on the panel, being able to meet politicians face to face. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: What’s privileged about that? 

Adam Hudson: Well, what I mean is I get to look you in the eye.  A lot of people just see through a lens and when you meet Malcolm, for the listeners and those who are on Spotify, he looks you dead in the eye and he keeps your gaze.  And that’s something to be said for that and a firm handshake, and I love that in people generally.  I got the same from Pauline.  And it’s refreshing. 

So, I’m sure this pod’s going to be good because I’ve watched a lot of your clips. I’ve watched you go into Senate hearings, and I’ve watched you battle it out on the on the floor of Parliament in Australia.   
And I’ll say to you the same thing I said to Pauline, which was thank you, because we need people like you who are prepared to sit there, and I’ve watched the smug look on these politicians faces as you grill them thinking this guy’s just a conspiracy theorist extremist, and they’re kind of dismissing you. 

And I watch how you just let it go off your back and you just keep pushing them on the facts, on the point and you won’t let it go.  And I think the tide is turning.  And I think Australians more than ever are secretly laughing at the politicians who are looking down their noses at you, even though you’re a politician, but looking down their noses at you dismissively, like when is this clown going to stop talking – and the Australians watching are going, Malcolm, keep going, keep pushing these guys because so much trust has been lost in the last few years that I think there’s more swing vote now than there has been for a long time.  What’s your feeling out there in the electorate as you go out and talk to people? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: I get constantly bombarded wherever I go – thank you for what you’re doing and, which is really disturbing in a way, because they mean it and they’re saying keep going, but for someone to thank me for doing my job?  That shows how few people are doing their job.  So, it’s very encouraging, of course, but people definitely are starting to see that the two tired old parties, the Uni-Party is really just that – they’re not alternatives.  They’re both pushing the same basic policies, immigration, energy, climate, the same #$&!*%@*’s coming out of both of them. 

Mark Di Paola: It’s really interesting because Mark Bouris, who has more subscribers, you know – the Yellow Brick Road – has more subscribers than the Unemployable pod does, had Albo and Dutton on.  I think the Dutton podcast got 60,000 views and the Albo podcast got 20,000 views on YouTube – just YouTube, and ours I think is sitting at about 200,000 views with Pauline. 

Adam Hudson: With 1/10th of the subscriber base. 

Mark Di Paola: With 1/10th of the subscriber base.  So yeah, talk us through that a little bit more. Does it come down to people’s frustration with the two major parties, or what do you – how do you see it? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: The vote overall for the two tired old parties – if that’s a graph, it has gone from 95% to Labor and Liberal in a matter of a few decades ago to now 65% and falling.  People are swinging.  They’re starting to wake up.  It used to be the days of – oh, I’ll just go in and which one, Labor’s not doing good job, I’ll vote for Liberal, Liberal’s not doing good job, I’ll vote for Labor, but now they’re starting to wake up and are really starting to look at independents and minor parties. 

Mark Di Paola: Wow! I didn’t realise it swung that much. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Well, we’ve got a government Mark, in Albanese’s government, the Labor government, that has got less than 1/3rd of the vote, less than 1/3rd of the vote.  And what people don’t realise is that that they’re in cahoots – that’s in the lower house – in the Senate, they’re in cahoots with the Greens, which are the most destructive force in this country.  And they have to buy off a couple of independents every now and then to get things through the Senate.  We’ve had 205 bills dragged into the Senate and guillotined.  No debate or debate shut. Albanese is not a democratic Prime Minister. 

Mark Di Paola: I’m pretty interested in politics, I must say and I had no idea that he only had 1/3rd of the vote. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Just slightly under 1/3rd

Adam Hudson: Interesting.  There’s so much I want to dive into and I know from the comments that we’ve gotten when we’ve said we’ve got you coming on and since Pauline’s come on, the number one thing that we’re getting at the moment and we won’t address it now, we’ll address it at the right moment, but for the listeners because I know they’re sitting there going “ask why did they refrain from the free speech vote? You know that bill that went in and didn’t vote against that. We’ll get to that in a minute. So if you’re listening … 

Malcolm ROBERTS: I’d love to get to that. 

Adam Hudon: Yeah.  So don’t worry guys, we are going to cover that.  But I want to set this interview up before we get into the meat and potatoes because I think it’s really important to get some context about you.  You were born in Africa, right? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: India. 

Adam Hudson: Oh, sorry! India.  My mistake.  So born in Bengal, wasn’t it?  West Bengal? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: West Bengal. 

Adam Hudson: Yeah, India.  And you grew up a son of a coal miner.  You were a coal miner for a period of time.  So maybe just give us that.  And you’re an engineer by profession.  So maybe just give us that little bit of early background because of what I want to understand, I’ve watched you on many, many clips and you’ve got a dog in you that’s really strong.  And I love that. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: I’m being called a dog now. 

Adam Hudson: But you know what I mean? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: No, no, I, I get it.  Thank you for that.  That’s a compliment. 

Adam Hudson: That’s what I mean.  Absolutely is a compliment.  Like you are very, very strong on your opinions.  And I’d like to understand what is, where does that drive come from?  And I suspect it’s from a lifetime that’s now here in your political career.  But where, where are these beliefs forming and what led you to align yourself fully with Pauline?  Where’s that fire coming from? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: OK, I’ll have to remember all of those parts of the question.  I don’t know where the drive comes from.  I was born with it.  When I was under one I think, I was being taken, in Wales with my father’s parents, my grandparents and apparently Mum and Dad used to take me down a road and they’d take the right fork – this is less than one, and my grandparents took me for a walk one day and they took me down the left fork and I went (hand movement) the other way you know, so I’m not afraid to speak up. I get a bit nervous, like I’m nervous now. So, I still get nervous when I speak in the Senate.   But it’s like Pauline – the thing is that Pauline does not like fighting. She doesn’t like a fight. You can tell it in her voice.  I mean, she has first 30 seconds she’s nervous, speaks up with a high pitch, but then she relaxes into it.  One thing worse than a fight and that’s running away from a fight and so that’s why we’re both tentative in the sense that we’re not relaxed doing that, but we tell the truth, and we’ve got to do it because I just can’t live with myself if I don’t do it. So that came from my parents, I think. What else? 

Adam Hudson: How did you grow up?  Like where you did you grow up in a where did you grow up?  

Malcolm ROBERTS: The formative years – Maria Montessori, who’s the most powerful, the most eloquent – she’s dead now, she died about 85 in the 50’s I think – she had the most comprehensive understanding of human development and human behaviour.  And she said the critical years for the formation of both character and intellect, character and intellect, are birth to six.  So, my formative years were spent in India and I got, I mixed with Muslims, Hindis, Buddhists, probably atheists, Christians, so it didn’t matter where I was, I would talk to people and listen to them. The other thing that my mother taught me is that it’s very important to listen first, so we listen. And the other thing my father taught me is to be calm and factual. There’s no point in going off at people. It doesn’t do any good.  The strength comes from how you address the issue, not on what label you use and not on what abuse you give them and Pauline is much the same.  So, my approach is calm and factual. Let the lunatics do all the raving, carrying on.  When they’re finished, I’ll still be here.  Now what have you got to say?  So, I’ve used that with industrial relations.  One of the things that that surprised me – I graduated as a mining engineer and then I decided I better go and learn something. So, I worked as a coalface miner. I mean that sincerely.  I learned more as a coalface miner because mining is about people and it’s about different conditions underground. And conditions can change from like working in a car park in a parking station, really safe to treacherous within a metre. And sometimes we don’t even know it. So, you’ve got to rely upon people, and you’ve got to develop in people the skills and the accountability to take responsibility for themselves. And that means letting go. So, I don’t believe in micromanaging.  I believe in setting standards, laying down my expectations and then making sure that people can do their job, get out of their way. Because that’s the problem with a lot of managers in Australia. We’re rambling a bit here, but a lot of managers in Australia want to tell people how to do things and they miss the talent. And I guess that’s the other thing that I’m very, very pro human. We’ve had our dickheads, we’ve had our authoritarian rulers – Hitler, Stalin, Maurice Strong, who you might want to ask about, Chairman Mao, Morrison, Palaszczuk, these lunatics and I mean that, they’re lunatics, but the majority of people are absolutely wonderful. Humans are wonderful.  And the overriding traits in people are care. You’re only here because you care about what’s happening to our country, correct? 

Adam Hudson: Mmm hmm. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: And you want to do something about it and you want to give voice to the majority.  So, humans are absolutely wonderful.  And I’ve learned from my mother I suppose. that that’s the case.  So, we can’t trust everyone.  We can’t rely on everyone, but we’ve got to extend to them an opportunity to use their talent.  And that’s something that I found very, very important and I love – when I was managing Westworld’s End mine, when I arrived, it was in turmoil industrially. Every night the evening shift would have a stop work meeting and decide whether or not they’d go home or stay at work. And I thought, wow, this is strange.  Then I realised the previous manager was telling lies. So, they didn’t trust us. So, it took a lot of time for me to go underground, be with people because you can’t run a mine from the surface.  So, one day after about 18 months there, I was walking out to the car park, just on dark, and I remember just thinking, why am I happy? And I turned around behind me and looked at the coal stockpiles, record coal stockpiles, record production, safety statistics that were really, really very, very powerful. And I thought it’s not the record coal, it’s the fact that people come to work, get changed, put their mining gear on and go down the mine and come back out. And not always lack of argument because we still had our arguments, but they trusted and people when they’re allowed to do their job, they love doing their job. People are just wonderful.  

Adam Hudson: And they rely on leadership not to lie to them.   

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yes, and it’s not – leadership is not about just saying do whatever you want. Leadership is about saying here are the expectations I have for you and quite often developing those expectations together.  But ultimately, I’m representing the shareholder, I’m in charge of the mine. And I draw a line because we did have, when I first arrived there, we did have union delegates who were, they didn’t trust anyone. I had meetings with 10 delegates in the room, because there were five unions, they didn’t trust each other and each union had to bring two people because they didn’t trust their mate. So that was the level of trust.  Yeah, it’s shocking. So, there were a couple of times when I’d have to say – that’s it, we’ll take it to court.  And sometimes we just, you know, some people – I’d sack someone and for example, we sacked 8 people and after six months, all for good, documented reasons, and after six months, the mechanical engineer came to me and said, I didn’t know you could sack people in the mining industry.  If you have a reason and you give them notice and they don’t respond, of course you’ve got to.  So, it’s a matter of building trust and the union delegate in charge of the lodge, that’s the branch at the mine, he actually was up in arms within the first six months trying to intimidate me. So, I didn’t yield back. I didn’t scream, just calm and when he saw me just being calm, he would deflate like a big, big bag and then he was like putty. But he was a good guy, but he had a terrible reputation. And then two years later we went through massive retrenchments in the Hunter. He came to me and said, what do you need?  And we made some major changes that he got into trouble from with his with his national delegates. So, it’s just stunning because that’s what happens when trust comes. But you’ve got to have the standards in there and you must be prepared to enforce those standards. But you do it responsibly. 

Adam Hudson: A politician that has worked outside of Canberra.  That’s amazing. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Well, Pauline’s worked outside of Canberra. 

Adam Hudson: I know, I know. 

Mark Di Paola:  I was just about to say, trust and leadership is such an important topic and sometimes when we’ve previously spoken about politics on this show before having a politician on, people would say, why are you talking about politics – we’re tuning in because this is a business show and I think what people sometimes forget is that running a country is the biggest business in your economy.  You know, the American government is the biggest business in their economy.  The Australian government is the biggest business in our economy and sometimes it’s being run by people who don’t have business experience or don’t have the trust of the nation and that’s what we’re seeing at the moment.  You know, you’re seeing the Elon Musk thing.  I mean, that guy is the world’s richest person ever by a long shot.  Not because he’s stupid.  He must know something and he’s getting demonised, demonised. And it’s like, you know, we had a couple of people in the comments on the Pauline clips say, oh, ask her how her mate Gina is going.  And it’s like, why do we have that mentality?  We’re trying to tear down those partnerships.  I mean, don’t we want the best and the brightest and the most successful to help in whatever way possible, even if it is people who’ve had previous business experience coming into politics?  Don’t we want that? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Boy, there’s so much in that, Mark.  I strongly disagree with you that government is a business.  Governments should be there to create the environment so you can go and invest and do your job.  That’s what it is.  What we’ve got now is governments in control and we’ve got, and governments have long been whether they’re democratic or monarchs, monarchy or republican – Republic, and we are basically a Republic, but I diverge, and I’ll come back to that.  Governments have long been a source or a vehicle for people to control others, whether they’re in government themselves or whether they’re puppets for people outside.  Our country is being destroyed.  It’s not being governed, it’s being destroyed. And so, you’re right that most people in politics don’t understand business. They don’t understand that you have to create an environment.  You know that if you create a shitty environment, your people won’t respond.  I turn up to work, you turn up to work, everyone turns up to work with a heart, a mind and a pair of hands. And that’s basically the physical, the mental and the spiritual or emotional. And you’ve got to get people engaged.  

And how the hell can investors get engaged in this country and create new employment when they’re having their electricity sector destroyed in front of their eyes?  And based on a lie? How the hell when government comes in to mandate so many things that are destroying our productivity and destroying our productive capacity, how the hell can you get investors? What happens is you get foreign investors in because they’re not paying tax, many of them. They’re not paying company tax.  
So, you as a family person – I assume you’re a family person – you’re paying tax to keep these bastards here and you know the government – so I’m rambling a bit, but government is not a business. Government is an enabler and should get the hell out of the way and create the environment, create the tax … The most destructive system in our country is the tax system.  

Mark Di Paola: So, if you don’t like the analogy that the government is like a business, what is the answer to allowing government to more properly govern?  

Malcolm ROBERTS: Government has three basic responsibilities, three basic roles – protect life (security), protect property (again security … ) and protect freedom. Because one of the things that is really disturbing me is that, well, I’ll tell you a story – I’ve been chasing this climate fraud since 2007 and  I went around the country quite often, met up with Bob Carter, who’s dead now, but he was a professor, climatologist, paleoclimatologist, wonderful man, retired, doing this work voluntarily just like I was. And one day he said to me in a break, “you know mate, this is the biggest scam ever”. I said, Bob it’s not even close and he said, “what do you mean?”  I said it is a big scam, but a far bigger scam is the money scam, the ability to print more money. If you did it, you’d go to jail, but the banks can do it. So, he said, “oh, yeah, you’ve got a point. There’s no doubt about that – that’s a much bigger scam”. And I said, but there’s a bigger one – that’s the anti-human scam. 

The Club of Rome in the 1960’s started pushing the anti-human scam. They did it subtly and by saying your first duty is to protect the planet and everyone is like “oh yeah”.  It’s not.  Your first duty is to enhance your species, contribute to your species and the species, first of all, we must realise the truth about our species. Our species is not lazy, incompetent, dishonest, irresponsible, uncaring. We are the complete opposite on all of those things – I’m starting to get a bit fired up because I’m passionate. 

Hosts: It’s okay. 

Malcolm ROBERTS:  We are destroying these people.  From this age (hands spread) we’re telling them they are incompetent, dishonest, lazy, irresponsible, that their species doesn’t care – you’ve got to protect the planet. Then yeah, so that’s destroying the future leaders of our country. And then they’re saying your number one job is to protect the planet because civilization and the environment are mutually exclusive. That is complete bullshit.  If we want a future as a civilization, we have got to protect the environment. If we want to protect the environment, we’ve got to have civilization. You go to any country in the world, Mark, and you will find that the countries that are developed have a cleaner environment and are more aware of protecting the environment. And so, it’s not a matter of saving the environment or civilization, because some of these people are pushing climate fraud want us back in the dark ages. It’s a matter of saying we want both because they’re mutually dependent. And so, your job is to protect, is to enhance the human species as a member of our species. But to do that, you have to protect the environment. So, what I’m saying is it should be a very positive, very wonderful message and yet our kids are being bombarded, our adults are being bombarded with decades of bullshit about how we’re a bad species.  

Mark Di Paola: There’s so much in that but it’s, you can just see when you’ve got the kids destroying artwork and tying themselves to different things. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: And cutting bits of pieces off themselves. 

Mark Di Paola: And just doing crazy things. And it’s like they didn’t just wake up one day and decide to do that. It’s social conditioning that’s led them to believe that that’s the way to make a difference in the world. And anyone with a few years of maturity realises that’s not how you inflict any change. Even if you do believe in climate change, that’s not how you make change.  

Malcolm ROBERTS: It encourages virtue signalling because what they’re doing, Mark, when you look at it, they’re always creating a victim, the left, and then there becomes a perpetrator.  So, you’re a white male – you’re a perpetrator.  And that’s what they’ve done deliberately so that they can set us up against any minority group they want to. 

Adam Hudson: Constantly apologising for turning up anywhere.  

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yeah.  

Adam Hudson: You know, call to country, something that happens at all these major sporting events. What’s your position on that?  

Malcolm ROBERTS: I don’t need to be welcomed to my own country. And I know a lot of Aboriginals say exactly the same thing. They say it’s rubbish.  

Adam Hudson: So that’s my point as well – and I say to people, you know, like Mark’s child, his little daughter was born here in the same way the first Aboriginal child was born here. So why is one more entitled than the other through spiritual providence that they turned up on this land, right? Why should one have to do that.  I don’t get it – that’s her home. 

And that’s not saying that we shouldn’t care for the native Australian Aboriginal people and that we shouldn’t provide them services and programmes.  I just think that the two things are not – they get conflated together and they’re completely different things.  One is, like you said, is the virtue signalling that creates this negativity or this pessimism. 

Adam Hudson: Which is ruining the country. 

Mark Di Paola: Which is ruining the country.  It’s creating a divide. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Look at our NRL, look at our AFL. The elites in both those …  are Aboriginals. The proportion of Aboriginals in the country is about 3% and it’s now climbing to about 5% because a lot of whites are registering as Aboriginal. 

Host: Right, because of the incentives. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yeah because of the incentives.  Yes, that’s true, but in the AFL and the NRL it’s way above 3%, way above 5%.  If you look at the Parliament, it’s 11% Aboriginal or part Aboriginal. So there – when we say the Aboriginals need help – don’t set them apart from anyone else because what you’re actually doing is saying you can’t get on without that. We’ve got Warren Mundine, we’ve got Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, we’ve got Karen Little – wonderful, wonderful humans, wonderful contributors, wonderful Australians. They don’t need help, and they will tell you they don’t need help, but what they want is a fair go. And what’s happened is, again the same thing, wealth transfer.  Government is there to transfer wealth illegally.  So, what they do is they set up the inferior people and automatically Aboriginals then start being bashed with the fact that they’re with the nonsense, the myth that they’re inferior, which is a terrible way to try and help people. But when you go into the communities, you find the white and black aboriginal industry has got its claws around everything. And so, the billions and it is literally billions of dollars, somewhere up around $40   billion, but at least $25 – $30 billion spent, and most of the money goes to the black and white aboriginal industry. I said white and black.  Consultants, lawyers, bureaucrats, politicians – they don’t get the money – activists, academics, they’re feeding off this. And you walk into the communities and the people in the communities, the Aboriginal communities, the remote community say “why don’t we get any help?”  And so, the other thing is I was told by a Councillor up in Bardoo Island in Torres Strait, he said, “mate, the people on the Closing the Gap gravy train do not want to close the gap because they get money while the gap is there”. We have gone backwards in the gap in the last few years.  

Mark Di Paola: It’s kind of like the NDIS service provider, isn’t it?  

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yeah, it is but think of the people that are missing out by the white and black aboriginal industry stealing that money, misappropriating that money. We’ve got white and black people getting very, very wealthy, but the people on the ground not getting it.  

Adam Hudson: Yeah, well … 

Malcolm ROBERTS: But they’ve created victims, and you don’t say to an Aboriginal you’re a victim because people, white or black will fall into the victimhood status. That’s crippling. 

Adam Hudson: It’s interesting you mentioned the role of government is to protect life, property and freedom.  

Mark Di Paola: Yeah.  

Adam Hudson: And I think in the last five years with what we went through with COVID and so on, if I give a scorecard to our government on protecting life and protecting our freedoms and what they did to the accessibility of property to a lot of people, it’s a disaster. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: It’s negative. Oh my God, they killed people. It was homicide.  

Adam Hudson: Yeah. Like, it’s like a you couldn’t get a worse score. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: No 

Adam Hudson: I mean, I don’t know where to start to talk about stuff because like there’s the COVID stuff that we can talk about. There’s the …  I want to get into all of that. I want to get into your views on the mismanagement of COVID and the gross egregious breaches of freedom that have pissed off so many Australians. And I think either of the two political majors need to start with an apology to the Australian people for what they put this country through and the damage they did. It’ll never come. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: We’re working on it.  

Adam Hudson: Oh my God. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: We’re not going to give up on that one.  

Adam Hudson: And a royal Commission into what happened. I don’t know.  What’s your suggestion with …, because I think a lot of Australians have lost trust as a result of what went on.  

Malcolm ROBERTS: Well, the irony is, Adam, I’ve noticed this in private sector. I’ve noticed it in many places. The irony is that people say the boss is a dickhead, the boss is irresponsible, the boss is dishonest, you can’t trust politicians. Then where do they turn when something goes wrong? They become dependent on the boss. They automatically genuflect to the boss or the politicians. That’s one of the fundamental problem. Our country is a constitutional monarchy. It’s not a monarchy. Monarchy is where the king or queen has absolute power and says this is what you’re going to do Mark, gives you orders, makes all the rules, makes all the regulations. A constitutional monarchy is one where you have a constitution that is the supreme governing instrument. And that is the case in our country.  And the monarch in our country and I think it’s one, I used to criticise the monarchy because I don’t believe people should get a title because of their parents. But then what I realised is you look at the alternative, a president, and quite often that’s based on corruption. Who can spend the most money. I’m not saying that about Trump. Trump is wonderful. But so, and a constitutional monarchy, we’ve got the King or Queen of Britain acting as our monarch under the constitution. Their role is prescribed in the constitution.  They’re subordinate to the constitution. They have to serve. And Queen Elizabeth’s did a marvellous job of that.  Their powers are in reserve powers. If something happens then they can do this. So, we actually run the show. When I say we, I don’t mean the politicians, I mean the people of Australia, who … our country is the only country in the world in which the constitution was voted on by the people before it came in. Did you know that?  

Hosts: No. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: I didn’t know that till six years ago. Who are the only people who can change the constitution? The people through a referendum. So, who’s in charge? Who elects the government?  The people. Democracy in this country, like most of the Western countries, has become a passive sport, a passive activity. We need – a democracy can only survive and thrive when it’s active. So not only, I’m not just talking about voting, I’m talking about being pissed off with the parties, with your representative, making sure that they are representing you properly, holding them accountable. That might mean letters, it might mean turning up to their office.  

Mark Di Paola: It’s the freedom to be able to have the conversation. And, you know, one of the things that really has just killed my faith in our leaders is these misinformation and disinformation bills and all these bills that they’re just trying to ram through to stop people like us simply speaking about … 

Adam Hudson: Our thoughts.  

Mark Di Paola: Our thoughts, yeah. Yeah. On what we think, the problems that Australia is facing. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: You can’t even question. You can’t even question, let alone think.  

Mark Di Paola: And that’s a really like, that’s a really scary place for me.  

Adam Hudson: I think that freedom of speech, we can jump into that quickly because in order to have a functioning democracy, you need to be able to speak and share ideas.  

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yep.  

Adam Hudson: And if they are successful and you’ve done a wonderful job of highlighting the fact that they will sneak through what appears to be a harmless thing that nobody could vote against, like for example … 

Malcolm ROBERTS: The misinformation and disinformation?  Who could go against that? 

Adam Hudson:  Yeah, or children accessing social media. We all of course worry about kids’ addiction to social media. And it’s hard to vote against NDIS, right? What politician in Australia can get elected by saying we should stop funding people with disabilities because it’s so unpopular to defund that. I’m not saying we should defund it. I’m just saying it’s a very difficult bill to overturn because of the nature of it. But if we can’t speak and just to finish that point, they sneak these bills through and then they, we lose this freedom and then they use it as a Trojan Horse kind of thing. Free speech. I’d love to hear your thoughts on, in your language, the importance of free speech and how that’s under threat right now. And then I want to actually ask the question about why you guys abstained from the vote, even though I know and many people know that you are pro free speech by a mile.  

Malcolm ROBERTS: We are the leaders in that fight. We are the absolute leaders in that fight. 

Adam Hudson: So that’s why it is so important.  For the average punter out there, why is it, like I said to Pauline, why should a Pakistani immigrant be funding your defence against that Pakistani minister? Like why? Why should they care about free speech even if they really disagree with what you said?  

Malcolm ROBERTS: Let’s go right back to basics. Our universe is based on freedom. It evolves freely. 

Nature is free to do whatever she or he, whatever you want to call it, wants to do, and it evolves freely.  The universe is free.  The stars are free.  The planets are free.  Animals, plants are free.  The universe is based on freedom. It’s a model. We are not part of the universe; we are of the universe. 

We’re one with the universe, so we are inherently – when you were born, you were granted every freedom there is just by being born. And people have long, long from the human condition, the ego,  

wants to come along and have control over you.  So, the constant battle is not left versus right. 

That’s a distraction, that’s a lie, That’s a diversion.  The battle is better looked at between freedom and control and always beneath control by the way, there is fear.  So, people who seek to control are afraid.  What are they afraid of?  Well, there are many things they’re afraid of, but let’s go to have a look at freedom.  Let’s go beyond freedom of speech, Adam.  Freedom is in freedom of thought, freedom of faith.  You can believe whatever you want to in terms of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of association, who you mix with, freedom of exchange, who you exchange agreements with, who you trade with, freedom of movement, freedom of political assembly.  There are so many freedoms. There’s about 10 of them – I can’t remember the rest of them.  But that is what freedoms about.  It’s about liberty.  And as the American Constitution or the American Bill of Rights says, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it’s fundamental to people. And that came from the universe. 

It came from – I happen to think there’s a God, if you don’t, but it came from the universe – it came from God.  You were born with it.  And the human condition is a fight to try and take some of that away from you.  That’s what it is. It’s a battle between control and freedom.  So, the primary freedom of the one I missed – how could I miss it – is the freedom of life, the right to live.  Okay and that’s being destroyed in our country, in many Western countries.  So, the primary freedom is the freedom of life, the freedom to exist and the primary vehicle for that is freedom of speech.  So, you can – all the other freedoms come from that freedom of speech.  So that’s why freedom of speech is so important.  It ignites everything. 

Adam Hudson: Yeah, and people say, even my wife and I when … and she goes, I think that hate speech thing is good.  People shouldn’t be able to say horrible things.  And I’m like, I, you know, no, because … 

Mark Di Paola: Freedom of speech is not – it’s not determining who can say what – it’s being sure that nobody can control who can’t.   

Adam Hudson: Well, that’s what I said to her.  Like it all comes down to who’s the arbiter of what defines hate speech, right?  And that’s why I personally – I’ve said it before, I’d rather know what somebody really thinks, even if I don’t, in fact especially if I don’t agree, because then I know. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yes. And that’s something that’s so important.  You can call me short.  Now you can call me a runt.  You can call me any kind of name you want. You cannot give offence. 

I can take offence. That is my choice. There’s nothing wrong with being short, right, Mark? 

Mark Di Paola: It’s the best thing in the world. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: I mean, we’re actually not short, we’re normal – these bastards are tall. 

Adam Hudson: He’s … 

Host: I’m in between. 

Mark Di Paola: Don’t know what’s in the water for these other guys. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: So, when we “protect” people because of – from being labelled, being called names, we are undermining their very being.  Call me anything you like.  When you call me something that’s not based on – not a statement based on data and fact, it shows that you haven’t got an argument.  So, you can call me a anti-vaxxer, a conspiracy theorist, tinfoil hat bearer, and all  

I have to say to you is, well, thank you very much for just admitting that I’ve won the argument. 

Because if you had an argument, had the data, you would have given it to me in a logical structure. 

But you haven’t. You’ve given me a label – you’ve just lost the argument. 

Mark Di Paola: Sticks and stones. 

Adam Hudson: Yeah, that’s a very important point, though. Label in place of facts. And this is what’s happened in the world like – that people just want a simple label that they can just, oh, that’s right, labelled sorted. They don’t actually want to think. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Left, right.  What they do then is, oh, I’m emotionally attached to the left, I’m emotionally attached to the right.  I don’t think – I just go into battle, but that’s rubbish because you’re missing out on so much.  So, it’s control versus freedom. 

Mark Di Paola: I agree with that.  I think the problem largely comes from the fact that problem solving and critical thinking isn’t taught in schools and so it’s just easier for people to side with the left or the right or whatever because people are being taught to memorise, and they’re not being taught to think critically.  You’re obviously a person that has thought critically about things.  It seems like you’ve got some spiritual leanings as well.  So, there’s an open-minded thread to everything that you look into. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Well, that’s the way the universe is, right?  So, if I try to control – controlling things shows that I’m afraid.  Controlling things shows that I lack the courage to just stand up and say what I think.  So, that’s I’m opposed to control.  Now see, I’m still nervous at the moment and that shows me that I’ve got something going on in my mind.  So, about 2021 I did my first day of Vipassana meditation course, it’s actually 11 days – the most intense thing I’ve ever done.  But every morning I sit down for an hour and 10 minutes in the morning, and I try to – I’d love to do it for an hour and 10 minutes in the evening, which is what the practise is – it’s non-sectarian, it’s non-religious.  But I try to do 15 minutes in the evening before I go to bed, but my wife wants to talk to me for some reason. So, I try and respect that. But when I first did Vipassana, I was very fit, physically able, very strong, no fat on me, but it was the most intense thing I’d ever done, sitting still for an hour and eventually when I first arrived at Vipassana meditation, it’s a 2500-year-old practise.  The Buddha started it, but it’s not Buddhist.  He, you know, he said this is a wonderful practise for just developing consciousness. And it’s a very simple meditation.  There’s no rituals or anything like that. It’s just being with your – it’s basically, this sounds weird but scanning your body and going through – and you pick up little sensations here and there that you didn’t know about.  And what happens is if you – if I call you a name or make a threat to you, you will feel it somewhere in your body – might be diaphragm, might be a sphincter, might be your buttocks, whatever.  And that’ll drive you. So, you’re not choosing your response to me.  But if I can say “shit I’m feeling really tight in the diaphragm or sphincter” or whatever it is, and I can go why? That’s my stuff going on underneath from when I was a child.  Because the other thing – another thing that Maria Montessori said is that we don’t start developing, and this is proven now, we don’t start developing our intellectual reasoning skills and our knowledge of the world until about nine and then we start developing that. So, what it means is that the primary user for the formation of both character and intellect is birth to six.  So, at six, you’re pretty much locked in, but you haven’t started thinking yet. You haven’t started reasoning yet. So, Adam wasn’t created by God. Your being was created by God. Adam was fabricated by you during a very ignorant time of your life.  Birth to six and then that’ll determine in a large proportion. Mark, your responses to threats, your responses to the world, how you see the world. Do I see myself as incompetent? Do I see myself as vulnerable? Do I see myself as whatever I see? And then I’ve got to look beneath that. So, when I first started meditating, it was excruciating. I didn’t know how I would finish the 10 days, the 11 days but I got through it, and I got a little voice going on inside my head saying you can do it, you can do it. And it wasn’t my inner talk, it was something else.  

Adam Hudson: It’s a silent retreat, right? So, you don’t talk. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: You don’t talk for 11 days or 10 days, the first 10 days. Because when we talk, when someone says something to you or even gestures to you, you interpret that – that dickhead, why did he do that, you know? And so, that judgement just clouds almost everything we do.  And so, you might do something to me or with me, my judgement based upon my zero to six, then interprets that and then puts it onto me saying, he’s telling me I’m incompetent, he’s telling me my whatever.  That points to my insecurities, not your nastiness.  

Adam Hudson: Let’s move back.  I just want to move back while – we got really close to that freedom of speech thing and I just want to close that loop, because for a guy that is so pro freedom and so freedom of speech, a lot of people are up in arms about the abstaining from the freedom of speech, you know, hate speech bill.  So can you just give us the context on what that bill was for that vast majority of Australians that don’t follow politics closely. What was the bill? What happened with the voting and why did you abstain from it? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: OK, first of all, you’re spreading misinformation. 

Adam Hudson: Okay. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: It’s a hate crime bill.  That’s the title of the bill.  

Adam Hudson: Yeah. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: A lot of people think it’s a hate speech bill. The second thing is that we had very good reasons. Pauline and I tossed it around – it was introduced very quickly and rushed through. So, we would normally oppose a bill for on that basis alone. Senator Rennick told a lie.  He came on to – as soon as the bill was done, he came out and said words to this effect – “One Nation has joined with the Liberals and Labor Party in supporting the bill.”  That is a complete lie – complete lie. We abstained, as you said. Then other people piled on. Clive Palmer piled on with lies. He made two statements. He said we supported the bill. That is false. We did not support the bill. We totally opposed it.  Then he also said it’s a hate speech bill. It’s not. And that’s what people have been pushing. If you look at what we’ve actually done in the freedom space, Pauline was the first to move a motion in the Senate as part of the first step of getting a committee to develop the terms of reference for a referendum on enshrining freedom of speech in the Constitution, Because it’s not in the Constitution. It’s implicitly there because of High Court rulings, but it’s not in the Constitution. And what happened during COVID fraud was, was completely wrong. So then, so we oppose the guillotining of the bill cutting – that means cutting of debate.  We opposed the bill itself because it was so poorly worded and some of the provisions like mandatory sentences, but even then – in the morning, Pauline was asked a question at a media conference: do you support mandatory sentencing? Well, in some ways we do support mandatory sentencing as a concept.  Forget about the bill for a minute. As a concept, for example, for terrorist crimes.  We’re tired of weak judges, but generally we’re opposed to the mandatory sentencing.  But she said in her response she will consider the mandatory sentencing. So that was labelled as her agreement – she doesn’t agree with it. So, there are many misrepresentations. So, that bill was about saying that you cannot threaten someone based upon their associations with a group, whether it be disability, because there are people threatening people with AIDS, for example. There are many different groups. Religion is another one. Many people are being threatened because of their religion. We can’t live in Australia in a free society with that kind of thing going on.  We can’t have threats of physical violence, threats of physical force. That is completely un-Australian. So, Pauline and I sat there and thought, what the hell do we do? Because normally with a bill that’s guillotined and a bill that we don’t like, it’s straight out oppose and then we said, hang on a minute, what about the signal we’re sending to the people who actually need this protection?  We want to send a signal saying we will consider aspects of the bill, so we will abstain. And so many people have piled on saying we supported the removal of freedom of speech. We did not. It’s a hate crimes bill to protect Australians against physical violence, physical threats, force being used. And we wanted to say we like that. So, we didn’t want to just trash the bill altogether. But we absolutely detest and do not support the detailed provisions in that bill. But it’s not a hate speech bill. 

Adam Hudson: Yeah, so it a case of – its nuanced and you couldn’t vote for or against the entirety of the bill. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Well, we could have. 

Adam Hudson: No, I mean, you could have, but there are aspects that you’re probably for and aspects that you’re probably not. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: One aspect that we’re for and that is the concept that Australians need to live in safety and security free from physical threats, violence and use of force.  So that was the nuance. Now there are some good people – Alex Antic, Ralph Babett, who came to me and said what’s your stance? And Alex – Alex and I get on really well.  So does Ralph – I think Ralph’s really good. 

Adam Hudson: Ralph’s trying to get it enshrined in the Constitution as well. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Well, he’s following in Pauline’s footsteps.  He’s trying a different approach because he’s trying to introduce it as a bill. We went through – the only way we can get it in the Constitution is go through a referendum. So, we went through the legally proper way.  But because it was a motion, it was voted against by the Greens, the Labor Party, the Liberal Party, the Nationals, from memory.  When you introduce a bill, which is what Ralph’s done, then very rarely do people oppose it.  So, Ralph won’t get anywhere with it, but he’s sending a signal, just like we did with abstaining.  There’s another point I was going to mention in there … anyway. 

Adam Hudson: Do you think we’re a danger of seeing our mildly racist grandpa getting arrested in their house just like we saw in the UK for making a comment on Facebook?  That free speech has just gone out the window in Australia, like in the UK and people are getting – like teachers are getting arrested for saying, you know there are only two genders, that kind of stuff? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: We are in danger of that.  When you’ve got a premier like Dan Andrews bringing in – yeah, it’s almost like vomiting rather than laughing, Mark, not having a go at you. 

Mark Di Paola: I lived in Melbourne during that time, so. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Dan Andrews government brought in the affirmation laws, which mean that – this is one of the things that I’m really passionate about – the parenting responsibilities and duties have been completely undermined.  And many parents don’t see that.  They’ve been done subtly but pervasively, just like so many other things.  So, if I had a son who is, you know, four, five, fourteen years of age and he came to me and said, Dad, I want to be a girl. Let’s say, “mate, you know, first of all, that quite often happens, it’s not uncommon for that to happen in adolescence. People just going through lots of changes hormonally. So, let’s sit down and talk about it”.  That’s what he wants. He’s upset about something else. So, you don’t change the topic. You just say: let’s discuss it, connect with him, listen to him, support him, say he’s okay for doing that and then get to the bottom and the only way you can get to the bottom of that is by listening to him.  He needs to feel heard. And quite often he will just say, no that’s not really, you know.  If it persists and it’s really strong because he’s being indoctrinated at school, which is the case in many, many occasions, then what you might do is bring in some counsellors. But it’s your job to protect him rather than just say, yeah, mate, cut your dick off or to a girl, cut your breasts off.  That’s wrong. Now, if you stand up and actually have that conversation with your child and question your child’s desire to change sex, then you are guilty of not affirming their desire and you can go to jail in Victoria. You can go to jail. And yet imagine what – and so what happens is a lot of parents, and I mean quite a few parents, are afraid, not only because of that, but because of the gender transformation, has become a cult. As gender dysphoria is a completely natural thing.  People are not happy with their gender. So let them work their way through it.  By the time they get to eighteen, certainly by the time they get to twenty-five , they say: oh, geez, I’m glad I didn’t cut my dick off, you know? But the other thing is there are only two genders, two sexes, male and female.  With a male, you’ve got an XY chromosomes, with a female, double X chromosomes. You cannot change that. So, when you affirm someone and they cut off their bits and pieces, you’re trapping them in something they’re not very comfortable with at heart.  And the majority of the suicides come from people who were told it’s okay Adam, you can reverse your transition. It’s a complete lie. You cannot reverse your transition. You are buggered for life because in well, the critical years for the formation of life, character and intellect are birth to six. In adolescence we go through myelinisation of the brain, enormous changes going on, the physical changes as well, but also mental changes. You start playing with that, with puberty blockers and you know, oestrogen and testosterone, you’re going to screw up the people and then when they’re wanting to have kids later, they might come back to being the gender they were in the first place, but even if they haven’t cut the bits and pieces off, they can’t have kids. 

Mark Di Paola: I think it’s, I think what you’re saying as well, and what I’ve heard a lot from people in the know is that when we’re going, like you just said, scientifically, when we’re going through that age, we are unsure about ourselves. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yeah. 

Mark Di Paola: Not just our genders. We are just unsure about ourselves when we’re going through puberty. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yep, and you’re flooded with hormones. 

Mark Di Paola: All these hormones like when a woman is pregnant, she’s flooded with hormones and her mood may change because of the hormones, whatever, whatever those moods are, positive or negative. The same thing happens when kids are going through puberty, there’s a whole bunch of changes that are going on internally leading us to be unsure about what’s happening and who we are. The fact that that’s been linked to gender seems like more fashion than it is science. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: You nailed it.  That’s exactly what it is.  But there’s also … 

Mark Di Paola:  Like, how can people say that I want to be considered a cat or I’m a furry or like, that’s … preference. 

Adam Hudson: I think we’re moving out of this madness, to be honest. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yeah, we are.  And Trump is a big, big part of that. 

Mark Di Paola: But the point is, is that it is normal.  Like you were saying. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yeah.  And if you look, Adam, at what happened in the Senate, the Greens first started talking about this madness.  And what they do normally is they, they not only talk about the madness, but they then say, if you don’t agree, you’re anti, you’re … 

Mark Di Paola: They demonise you. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: What is it?  Transphobic? 

Mark Di Paola: Transphobic. 

Adam Hudson: They label you. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: So, you want to shut up?  Well, I realised very early, and I was the first one to speak out consistently against this, and what happened was the Greens would have four or five speakers speaking for it and I’d oppose it. 

*** AD BREAK *** 

Malcolm ROBERTS: And then bit by bit more jumped in – Canavan, Renick, Antic, Hanson, a very big one on this.  We had parents coming to see us, Babet was another one.  And the last time this was raised in the Senate, it was to do with a bill that we cosponsored to stop the federal government spending money on any trans – attempts to change gender.  And I spoke first – and I said, I looked across at the Greens and said “you’re the people that are causing kids to suicide because they changed their bits and pieces and they realise it’s not reversible and they commit suicide.”  And that was the first time they had been accused of suicide, causing suicide. And Nick McKim came up and he jumped up and he spoke a whole lot of bullshit.  He just went off.  His speech was so embarrassing that I posted it on my website.  They have no facts to go by. And he was the last of the Green speakers, one speaker and then up came the others, on our side. So, we had five speakers against their one. So, we had reversed the tables. Now I’m not trying to claim sole credit for that, but initially people were afraid of speaking up against it because they’d be labelled transphobic.  You had the Australian New Zealand Psychologist or Psychiatrist Association come out last year and saying affirmation is the completely wrong treatment for gender dysphoria. Well hello, where were you for the last years? But they waited until we gave them space to be able to say that.  So, a lot of doctors were bullied and intimidated into it because they’d be called transphobic if they didn’t just go along with it. 

Mark Di Paola: Just to be clear as well, I’m not saying and I don’t think you’re saying that gender dysphoria … 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Dysphoria? 

Mark Di Paola: Doesn’t exist.  We’re agreeing that it exists. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: We’re saying it does exist. 

Mark Di Paola: We’re saying that it exists.  We’re saying that affirmation is not the correct way treatment. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: And it became very significant when some of the gender clinics in overseas were shut down, the largest in the world, I think was Tavistock in Britain, that have been doing things automatically.  And they have now got the large class action suit against them.  Sweden, I think Finland, they’re shutting these clinics down and what we’re doing is opening them up in this country. 

So, it’s also important to understand, Mark, that there is a tiny, tiny, tiny proportion of people who are hermaphrodites.  They’re genuinely – they’ve got bits and pieces of both sexes in them.  So, the way to look after them is not to pillory and confuse kids. The way to look after them is just understand them and love them and respect them as humans.  That’s all people want. 

Eric Machado: Yeah.  You mentioned earlier trust and leadership. Now where do you feel, at the moment, in Australian politics that trust is being broken and leadership is lacking?  I know you probably have a long list, but what are some of the top things that you’re seeing? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: COVID, the anti-human lie, the belief that government can solve everything, every major problem in this country, Eric, comes out of Parliament House, Canberra – every major problem.  There are a few that come out of the state parliaments, but the federal government worsens them.  There’s another one, climate.  That’s a lie.  We have – I’ve done research on climate now for since 2007.  I’ve got an incredible colleague just South of Canberra. His IQ is off the scale, but more importantly, he’s very, very practical. He’s the sort of guy who says “I think I’ll build myself a magnetic levitation train” and you’re going what? And then – he doesn’t mean he’ll buy a few parts off eBay and assemble them.  He means going to his lathe and making them. This guy is off the scale when it comes to intelligence, but he’s very, very practical.  He loves research. He’s just inquisitive. He’s been that way ever since he was a boy, but he researches nature, he researches food, he researches climate. So, when he saw me flogging away on this thing he came and said I’ll help you. He developed computer programmes. He’s a computer programmer, but he’s also a wonderful human. He’s a Renaissance man. He can dabble in everything, and he wrote programmes to go into major sites around the world and scrape their climate data out – all legal – scrape that climate data. He’s amassed 24000 data sets on climate and energy. Not only does he do that, he then goes into statistical books, statistic books and works out ways of assembling them, combining them, mixing and matching them, and Mark and Eric, there is not a single climate factor – temperature, rainfall, drought severity, duration frequency, storm severity, duration frequency anywhere in the world that shows there is a change in climate.  

Eric Machado: Why are they pushing it? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Control and wealth transfer, is what they want.  And if you look at Maurice Strong, I wouldn’t mind talking about him in a minute.  Maurice Strong is the father of global warming in the 1970’s and then he became the father of the transformation to global climate change. They’re pushing it for control and wealth transfer. They want to control how we develop and what we can and can’t you. They’re wanting it also for funding the United Nations budget. At the moment, the United Nations relies upon donations, grants from member countries, particularly the United States. But what they want to do is develop their own budget so they’re independent and that’s what carbon tax, carbon dioxide taxes are eventually meant for.  They also want to look after parasitic bureaucrats, sorry parasitic billionaires and corporations that are going to feed off this. The major banks – Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Rothschilds Bank in Australia – their advisory boards included what was her name, the previous CSIRO chief executive – conflict of interest!  But the banks were looking at huge money exchanging, carbon dioxide credits, money and wealth transfer and what you’ve got, and these are not just my words, these are the words and admissions of the senior UN bureaucrats, including Christiana Figueres, who was head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC -she said this is about transforming the global economy, the economic world order and what they want to do is bring in socialism. Maurice Strong, as I said, he fabricated this.  Incredible intellect, incredible manipulator of people. He said he had two aims in life. One is to put in place an unelected socialist global government. These people are not our friends.  The second one was to deindustrialize Western civilisation. Get rid of these things (holds up mobile phone), get rid of our technology, get rid of this, get rid of what we’re seeing around us. These people are anti human and their practises, and their words are showing that. 

Adam Hudson: So, if they wanted to find, if I wanted to Google, is that true that those were his two aims in life, where would I find that information to confirm that?  

Malcolm ROBERTS: I’ve forgotten where I found it, but I checked it myself back in around 2007-2008. 

Adam Hudson: The guy’s name is what? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Maurice. M A U R I C E.  Strong. S T R O N G.  

Adam Hudson: So, verify guys.  Go out and look this up yourself, you know, and try to dig to this. Don’t just listen to Malcolm – do the work.  

Mark Di Paola: A lot of people give us flack about not fact checking it. But really like you were saying earlier, the responsibilities is on the listeners.  

Adam Hudson: So, this is a pretty evil dude, right? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: He is a very evil dude, but very, very slick. He was, he did, Maurice Strong, the most – oh where do you start?  The most significant thing – look up until about 1850, the middle of the start of the industrial revolution. Prior to that, our species were scratching around in the dirt, subject to famine, subject to all kinds of variations in weather, right? Very vulnerable. Then we developed hydrocarbon fuel – coal, oil and natural gas. They’re not fossil fuel, they’re hydrocarbon fuels. They’re combinations of hydrogen atoms and carbon atoms and they liberated humanity and the real price of energy until we started this climate crap was on a relentless decrease. The lower you get your price of energy, the more productive you are. Automatically.  The more productive you are, the more wealth and prosperity you have. And it’s not just the few billionaires who used to control the money, even though Rockefeller made a lot of money, everyone in society was lifted dramatically from 1850 to 1996.  Everyone!  We have never seen the human race move so much, and now we’ve seen China in just a space of 40 years emerge with material wealth.  Now we’re seeing India in on it and those countries want hydrocarbon fuel because they know that’s what the secret is.   

Mark Di Paola: And cheap energy? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Cheap energy, but it’s also reliable. See what we’ve done up until the use of hydrocarbon fuels, coal, oil and natural gas, we were dependent on nature. We were dependent on beasts of burden; we were dependent on slaves. We were dependent on wind, solar, not solar as we know it today, but solar through crops. And if you had a prolonged drought, you’re buggered, that’s it, people died from famines.  Now we can store water, we can build dams, we can build clean water supply systems. So even the – for example – the dramatic improvement in health is due to that –  

Adam Hudson: All energy related? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: All energy related, it pervades, pervades everything. Now in 1996, John Howard came to power, and he said we will not comply. We will not sign the UN Kyoto agreement. I mean, you can check this out. And everyone went clap, clap, clap. But he said we will comply with it. What’s that mean? So, what he did was he started to reverse the cost of energy. Instead of relentlessly falling, he reversed it, which is reversing human progress. But what he also did was he recognised in 1996 the UNS Kyoto climate protocol came in 1997, all based on ********.  And what happens is when you’re at these gab fests, when you’re at Parliament House, you know, how a lot of people are sheep. There’s no difference amongst doctors, there’s no difference amongst politicians, there’s no difference amongst the political leaders from around the world who congregate and they just, they’re afraid to say sorry, but there’s no evidence for this. So, what he did was he put in place a renewable energy target, which we’re now seeing is destroying our electricity grid. We’ve gone from being the cheapest electricity in the world to the most expensive. Among the most expensive. He put in place the national electricity market, which is not a market, it’s a racket. It’s ********. It’s not a free exchange of, of electricity. It’s ruled by the bureaucrats who favour solar and wind. No doubt about it.  

Adam Hudson: This is what’s pushing price of everything up as well, right?  

Malcolm ROBERTS: Then they say, oh, solar and wind are the cheapest. Well, why have we got record amounts of solar and wind and our and our prices are the highest they’ve ever been? Every country around the world, if that’s a graph of electricity price and percentage of solar, as you get more solar in, you get a higher price. Every country that’s done significant changes, John Howard brought that in, but here’s what he did. The liberals are supposed to – one of the things that they will die on the Hill for is secure property rights, because it’s fundamental to responsibility, fundamental to innovation, fundamental to human progress, fundamental to development. Property rights are absolutely essential. Well, John Howard said – his government said – people are not ready to buy off this carbon dioxide trading yet. This carbon – it’s a tax – and for the UN. So, what he said was let’s – what his government said was – let’s put in place credits for that. So instead of shutting down our factories, our cars, our trucks, our farming, our power stations, what we’ll do is we’ll go to the UN and say, mate, if we stop the clearing of land, that will save trees so they can absorb carbon dioxide. So would you give us a credit rather than shut down carbon dioxide production? We will stop the clearing of land. To do that, he had to confront Section 51, Clause 31 of the federal Constitution, which is that if you interfere with someone’s rights to use their property, you must pay just terms, compensation. Now, at the same time, the states do not have that protection.  

So, what John Howard did, it’s all documented. He went to the States and said, can you stop the clearing of land? You won’t have to pay compensation because Howard was looking at $100 to $200 billion dollars of compensation for the farmers. And they did that. Peter Beatty’s written about it, he was the premier at the time and, and Queensland and Bob Carr was the environment minister or the premier at the time in NSW. So, here’s a key plank of Liberal philosophy protecting property rights being completely trashed, completely trashed. So, you think of it, a farmer buys a farm, he’s got the right to clear the land because he wants to go from beef farming to a more value added, like wheat or something like that, whatever. Just, he can’t do it without getting permission. And that is the destruction of property rights. 

But it wasn’t just in the farms, it was in the towns. We’ve got a guy up in, Brisbane. 

I know his niece and he’s getting on in age and he said he wants to sell his blocks of land; He’s got a major site for development. So, this the City Council came in and said, yeah, you can sell them, but you’ll have to give us this area for park. Now, I don’t mind that the park’s been created, but you compensate him for it! You know, you don’t steal land off people.  

A fellow Mosman in Sydney, he told me that there are regulations in the Mosman City Council that say you’ve got to have a certain percentage of grass or Bush in your property. You can’t concrete it at all.  

Mark Di Paola: If you want to concrete it, go ahead and concrete it.  

Malcolm ROBERTS: You know, if you affect the drainage and it effects a neighbour, then you have to wear the cost of that, but you know what I mean? Property rights are fundamental.  

Mark Di Paola: Windfall tax is another one in Victoria. The windfall tax, like in taxing property, that’s another way of stealing property rights, isn’t it?  

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yeah. 

Adam Hudson: They just tax people on the Gold Coast, if you’re on level 5 or above, now their rates are up 40%. 

Mark Di Paola: One of the things that got the most attention on- 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Did I answer your question, by the way, about the hate crimes Bill? 

Adam Hudson: You did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: That’s right, I started just before we go on, with what you’re talking about, Mark. So, I mixed with Ralph Babet and Alex Antic in particular. And then Ralph said to me, what are you doing on the bill? And I said abstaining. He said, oh, mate, you got to oppose it. And I said, yeah, there’s grounds for that. And he had – I like Ralph – I was seriously considering opposing it. And I remember the conversation we had with Pauline; I was umming and ahing. So it’s not an easy thing to do because we also opposed all of the guillotines and we supported the motion that failed to extend the debate because that was what we’re really after. We’re after better debate, a better examination of the bill. The Labor Party combining with the Greens usually and often with the Liberals. In this case, it was the Liberals, guillotined 205 bills, as of now. 

Adam Hudson: No debate? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: No debate, no or minimal debate, just truncated debate. So what I’m saying is, quite often we would say just oppose it, but we had to send a signal. Pauline and I, we’re not afraid to be the only two, we’re not. Because we had to send a signal, and I’ve had people walk up to me and say, we understand what you did, thank you. Because it means you’re protecting our security.  

Mark Di Paola: I think This is why podcasts in this new medium of media, like you mentioned at the start is so important because, you know, I even responded to Pauline about the bill on X and she responded and I still didn’t quite understand it. But hearing you speak about it today, it’s helped me to understand that there’s parts of what is in that bill that you support and that’s, that everybody should feel safe from threat.  

Malcolm ROBERTS: The other thing, Mark, is that on the morning of the day of that bill being voted on, we released a suite of policies. And I’m happy to talk about them later, but they’re very comprehensive. And they’re all about putting more money in people’s pockets because we are going through a hell of a tough time with families and singles and small businesses in this country. And that needs to be addressed. We’ve got rampant government that is stealing this money and wasting it, ******* it up against the wall. That’s what we want to bring back. Our policies were released on the evening before to the major public, major newspapers in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne and they took off, you know, on the comments sections beneath the newspaper articles, online wonderfully positive. And some other minor parties went **** what do we do?  

Adam Hudson: Copy them.  

Malcolm ROBERTS: No, no, no, steal the airtime, steal the airtime and, and smash them and try and destroy us through lies. As I said, Gerard Rennick told a lie. We did not support the bill along with the Liberal and Labor Party. We abstained and I’ve explained that. 

Adam Hudson: I want to talk about you. You touched on something, because we are a business show and I’d love your input because I haven’t had the –  what?  

Mark Di Paola: I was just going to ask about the 44% on property. Well, we’re talking about property rights and taxes.  

Adam Hudson: Yeah, OK. 

Mark Di Paola: That’s one of the things that got a lot of comment, and a lot of feedback was Pauline mentioned that 44% of building a new house is in one form tax. And a lot of people said, oh, she’s a liar. You guys are lying. You guys, you should have fact checked it. Like it’s ******** it’s crap. I’m a developer. That’s not true. Can you clarify where that 44% comes from?  

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yeah, that comes from-  in the first place, I knew about this ten years ago. 

Someone showed me a newspaper article in Sydney Sun Herald, I think, or the Herald Sun or whatever it’s called in Sydney or the Telegraph, might have been Telegraph, I can’t remember. 

Whichever one Murdoch owns and it was quoting the Housing Institute of Australia or the Housing Institute of NSW or NSW Realtors, whatever they said it’s 45% to 50%. And, if you look at, there are so many factors there, if you look at, I organised and led an economic summit in in our Senate office in one of the buildings at QLD Parliament House, Queensland State Parliament House in 2017. We had a number of economists there and Alan Moran, Doctor Alan Moran, he said that the cost of building a house in Houston, Texas and Sydney, Australia at that time were about the same. 

The cost of the land was astronomically high in this country. So there’s so many things. It’s not just land prices, which are just being raised dramatically by regulations. Red tape, blue tape, green tape- 

Mark Di Paola: Open space contributions, wind taxes – 

Malcolm ROBERTS: And green tap, we as you, as you know, because of my stance on the on the environment needing to be healthy for civilizations future. I’m a, really pro-environmental person, but I’m after sensible policies because I’m also pro human. And, the environmental movement has been hijacked by ideology. It’s a ******** movement. Now the,  greens, because they’re using the environment as a way of saying you’re evil. Let us control it. And, so that’s what they’re doing. So does that answer your question?  

Adam Hudson: Yeah. So, you mentioned in passing that the whole climate debate is a massive fraud, but the other one that you mentioned in passing was the debasement and the printing of money and the Fiat currency. Can you speak to that quickly though, because I’ve, I’ve been getting barbecued over the last few weeks about trying to highlight how, you know, I think it’s a, you know, money in the bank that you’ve gone out and worked for is, you know, just an abstracted form of your time and energy.  

Malcolm ROBERTS: You’re correct.  

Adam Hudson: And it’s sitting there in a bank account getting devalued. And we just accept. OK, well, it’s just inflation, but it shouldn’t be the case. Can you in like, Can you speak to that?  

Malcolm ROBERTS: Sure. It’s a stealth tax. We – I’ll come back to that – Let’s have a look at a real example here in this country during the COVID fraud, the COVID mismanagement, the COVID response. It wasn’t COVID that caused the problems. It was government that caused the problems. And, I’m going to put my hand up and say that when it first arrived here, we were given these pictures of people dead in the streets of Italy and France and Greece and China and all the rest of it. We now know that they were propaganda. They were complete ********   – the death toll from COVID was less than the flu.  

Adam Hudson: Do you mean – we – are you talking about the political class?  

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yeah, yeah, I’m not part of the political class, but- 

Adam Hudson: But you know what I mean. So, in Parliament, you’re not talking about general population, in Parliament. You guys were getting this stuff given to you.  

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yeah. And we could see it on the news. 

Adam Hudson: OK, so they sit you down and say all right, and who is they? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: No, no, no. The propaganda was everywhere through the media, and I’ll see if I can cover all the points. So we went, **** what if this is real? That means if it’s real, you have got to do something to prevent it. So we said OK to the government, Morrison’s government, go for it. Job. What was it called? Job seeker and job keeper.  

Adam Hudson: Job keeper or something?  

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yeah, the second one was job keeper. Hundreds of billions of dollars – 

Adam Hudson: Printed. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Printed. And if people want a source of the printing, there are many, many very good books, credible books that discuss it. Henry Ford, who was no slouch, he was a well-known businessman. He said if the people knew what the what was going on with their money, there would be a revolution by morning. One of the best places to hide something is on people’s noses. 

They let them have a look at it every day. They get so used to it, people – This has been happening since 1913 with the Federal Reserve Bank, which is privately owned. That’s another fact. But I asked a question of the Reserve Bank of Australia governor at Senate Estimates and the deputy governor answered my question. I said, is it true that money is basically printed? I can’t remember my exact question. And he said an electronic ledgers and he paused and he sort of thought about it and he said, yes, Senator Roberts, electronic journal entries. So yes, it is. So what happens is they don’t have any assets at stake. They just make an entry in a Ledger and then they give you the loan and when you default, you lose your asset. But they haven’t got anything at stake, just reserves and they’re fabricated. So yes, it’s very true. Now, if you have a look at what Morrison did and the Reserve Bank of Australia during COVID, they flooded the joint with cash. 

We told them that will lead to severe inflation. No, no, no, no it won’t. Well, it did. And then we had Chalmers come in as the treasurer and Albanese as the Prime Minister and continuing to hand out cash and that’s what perpetuated inflation.  

Adam Hudson: So what’s One Nation’s view of Bitcoin?  

Malcolm ROBERTS: We don’t have an official view of Bitcoin. I’m still doing my research on that at the moment, I would say, and I’ve read one book on it. I’m about to read another and I’ve listened to people. There seems to be. I’ll see if I can put my thoughts together on this. There seems to be genuine merit in it. They’re worth exploring. There seems to be. What’s attractive to me is I can’t understand this yet or put my finger on it, but it seems to be it’s a way of bypassing central banks, which I love. Sorry, I don’t love central banks. I love the bypassing of central banks. It makes money honest again, because with printing of money, money is not honest. With gold standard, the money is honest. But people are telling me that Bitcoin is a bit like the gold standard. So I’m really keen to learn more. Trump sent the right signals about that. So maybe that’s correct. What was the other thing? I was going to say it, it takes it out of the hands of the central bank and puts it in the hands of the people, which I love. But there are, that’s right. The other thing is I’ve got a very good one of my, well, I’ve got fantastic staff, but one, one of them is an economist by training, but he’s practical, he’s run businesses. He’s not just a theoretical economist. He said Bitcoin at the moment is still highly volatile. And so he said do not buy Bitcoin in one hit because you could buy it up here and lose your money. He said buy it on weekly instalments and they said they’re not, you’ll average out overall. 

But he said- 

Adam Hudson: *inaudible* cost average, yeah. The one book to read is the Bitcoin Standard. That’s  the Bible if you want to learn that space.  

Mark Di Paola: And we always talk about money printing and debasement. And there’s a really, really good book by Lynn Olden called Broken Money and it just talks about the history of money and, how like it’s a very abstract thought money printing.  

Malcolm ROBERTS: Is that Lynn? 

Mark Di Paola: Lynn Olden.  

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yeah, I watched her half hour video. There was nothing there new, well a couple of things that were new. But when I when I first started on this climate scam, because as an engineer, I’ve been taught that science is the basis of engineering. So I understand what science really is. And as a mining engineer, I had to keep people alive underground. That meant ventilating mines, that meant understanding atmospheric gases. And when I realised that they were telling us that carbon dioxide from human activity was destroying the planet, I went ******** because the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 0.04%. And somebody said, Oh yeah, but one of the, you know, you can have that much arsenic in your in your food and you’ll die. And I said, yeah, but this is not a chemical effect. This is a physical effect. 0.04% of the Earth’s atmosphere is not going to cause any problems. We now know that’s true because if you look at what they’re telling us about climate is that we’re causing an increase in levels of carbon dioxide which is causing heating. Now what we need to do then is stop the production of human carbon dioxide, which is cut back on livestock, see the control of food cut back, especially on the use of coal, oil and natural gas, cars, etcetera. Now we’ve had two natural experiments on that. What they said was if we cut back on the use of these fuels, we will do that to our production of- to the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been going up, but that’s controlled entirely by nature. So let me explain why in 2009, we had a severe recession around the world, almost a depression because of the global financial crisis. So when you go into a recession, you produce- you use less hydrocarbon fuels and you produce less carbon dioxide. 

So what happened to the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, you’d expect it to go like that. 

It didn’t. That’s what they told us. It went like that, continued increasing. And then in 2020, we had the COVID near depression around the world because everyone’s shut down. And again, you’d expect it to cut level of carbon dioxide to do that. 

That’s what they told us it did, that there’s not even an Inflexion, not even an Inflexion because people don’t realise that according to Henry’s law, the oceans control the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because the oceans have in dissolved form 50 to 70 times more carbon dioxide than in the entire atmosphere. And that’s, that’s from the United Nations figures themselves. So what it means is that if you have slight increases in temperature, carbon dioxide gets released from the oceans. If you have slight decreases in temperature, carbon dioxide gets absorbed into the oceans. So that’s what controls it. And you can see every year there’s a seasonal level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And- 

Adam Hudson: It’s fascinating.  

Malcolm ROBERTS: It’s just- 

Adam Hudson: We’re running out of time. So we’ve got Eric here. I’d love to just run through before we finish. And I’ll get Eric to just some of these policies that you and Pauline announced from, it looked like you’re in Parliament House when you were- 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yeah. 

Adam Hudson: -Press conference. I’d love to run through those quickly. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Sure. 

Adam Hudson: If people are thinking of voting for One Nation, you can run through the reasons why before we wind it up. Did you have a question, Eric? 

Eric Machado: Yeah. Earlier you mentioned people saying thank you, keep going, job well done. And Pauline Hanson said the same thing off camera. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: She’s a walking logo, they see the red hair and just flock. 

Eric Machado: Yeah. But she says that it’s not reflecting in the voting as much as she wants. Why is that? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Two reasons. One is that people are ingrained to vote like mum and dad. If their mum voted Liberal and dad voted Liberal, they vote Liberal. If they vote Labour, they vote Labour. That’s entrenched. Another part of that, Eric, is that the media you watch, it’s already started. They will focus on Labour, Liberal, Labour, Liberal, Labour, Liberal Albanese, Dutton, Albanese, Dutton, Albanese, Dutton. They’re indoctrinating people to think that they’re the only two choices. So if you don’t like Labour, vote Liberal. So that that that’s what’s going on. We also saw in the Queensland election for example, Labour has been so bad in Queensland that they just barely got in 2020 because of COVID. Because when they had the COVID mismanagement people thought that Anna kept us safe. A complete lie. But that’s what they did so they kept her back. 

If she, if COVID hadn’t happened she would have been out on her ***. In February of 2020 she was gone. So people are misled. But the second thing is that they got so bad in the following four years that in October of 2024, when we had the state election, people were saying we got to get rid of Labour. That was the overriding thing, got to get rid of Labour. So people walked into the, into the ballot box thinking can’t have Labour back, can’t have Labour back. So I’ll vote for the other guys. The other guys, the Liberal Party. I saw time and time again people would walk out of the polling booth and say voted for you Malcolm, love your work. I put One nation #2. Put Liberals #1 because they were scared. So what we’re saying to people is we understand you don’t want Labour back. 

And I think the same is with Albanese. For goodness sake, vote conviction because we’ve got so many people who are saying One Nation’s policies are the right ones for us. Vote conviction. So put One nation #1 and I will guarantee you that whoever you put #2 we will do a better job then. 

But then the second thing is, OK, now you’re worried about Labour getting back. All you have to do is put Liberal before Labour and your vote. If we don’t get in, and the other minor parties don’t get in. Your vote will stop at Liberal. So vote two things, vote conviction and vote protection. Vote conviction, put One Nation number one. If we don’t get in, you’re at the right protection, which means your vote will go to Liberal. And if you don’t like Liberal and you want to make sure that Liberals don’t get in and just put Labour before Liberal. But above all, put One Nation number one. 

Mark Di Paola: That’s a great explanation on how that works. 

Adam Hudson: And if you are interested, we actually built this for Pauline’s visit, but we’re going to reuse it here. If you go to unemployable.com dot AU/OneNation   -ONE, not the numeral one, but the spelling ONE. So unemployable.com dot AU/OneNation, we’ve set up a page here where we had gotten all your policies from the website and we’ve put them into AI and it’s turned it into a podcast where for 20 minutes you can hear AI explain to you. And they haven’t leftied it. They’ve, they’ve left it really quite balanced where they’ve unpacked all of your policies and explained it to you and planning yourself. If you’re not a reader and you’re not going to sit there and download the PDFs or whatever. Download, go there, we’ll give you the print out and we’ll give you the audio and you can just hear it read to you by an, well, as impartial as AI can be, it’s not by us, it’s by AI and it’ll, give you a rundown of all their policies for free. Just go to our web page. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: The, the key thing is that, as I said earlier, our policies have been costed. They’re based on budget costs, based on Parliamentary Budget Office estimates. The, key part of it is putting more money in your pocket. And where do we get the money from? We get more than enough. We get 40 million, $40 billion to put money into people’s pockets. And that the things we’re doing there are productivity enhancements like cutting the cost of fuel, which is in everything, cutting through that. 

Adam Hudson: That was cool. So 50% fuel, excise cut, wasn’t it? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yeah, 26c a litre.  

Adam Hudson: 26 cents a litre. You’re delivering that by cutting the fuel excise for the first 12 months of your election, straight away. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yeah, I’m, working on getting Pauline to make that three years. 

Adam Hudson: OK.  

Malcolm ROBERTS: That’ll send a stronger signal to the Reserve Bank. These policies the Reserve Bank will love. 

Adam Hudson: So that’s one getting aged care, sorry, older people back to work, who want to be in work? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Well, there’s a really powerful one called income splitting. So if a male and female or husband and wife, spouse, whatever partner, whatever you want to call it, if one of them’s working and the other one’s not looking after the kids, then you can combine your income and divide it by two as it so, so that dramatically drops your tax rate. So that will for a typical family on an average income with one stay at home parent, that will save about $9500 to $10,000 a year. 

Adam Hudson: Yeah. So that brings the threshold, I think before you pay taxes up to 35 grand. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Well, that’s for the self managed super annuit.  

Adam Hudson: Oh, sorry. Oh, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So income splitting is one.  

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yes, and the other thing is cutting the electricity prices because of the- at the moment coal is being smashed. It’s causing destruction of the, coal boilers, the generators for electricity because coal is meant to be stable base load power that’s being switched on and switched off and that’s destroying it. So there’s nothing cheaper than coal anywhere in the world. That’s why the Chinese are wanting it. We produce 560 million tonnes of coal roughly a year. Chinese produce 4.5 billion and they’re heading for more and they’re importing, they’re heading for five and they’re importing out. So coal is not dead. The forecasts for coal are dramatically increasing. We are shooting ourselves in the head economically in this this country. So, So what we want to do is change the national electricity- what we will do is change the national electricity market rules which govern the allocation of electricity rather than being artificially favouring solar and wind which destroys coal, makes it uncompetitive. We want to just let the cheapest go. 

Adam Hudson: And I know one of the things we hear over and over and over is we are just not getting anything for our resources. What’s your plan? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yes, we want to put an excise, a tax, sorry, not an excess, a tax on production and exporting of, of natural gas. At the moment, Norway does that, Qatar does that and they get so much money from doing that. Norway gives it to a wealth fund for their citizens. Qatar, I don’t know what happens to it, but in our country, Bob Hawke and John Howard, Labour and Liberal basically gave our gas away. And what we want to do is tax that based upon volume of production, not on profit and loss. Because as you know, with profit and loss, you can make it anything you want. 

Hosts: Exactly. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: So you can cut your tax dramatically to almost zero just by just by allocating costs to fire- 

Adam Hudson: So you’re basically proposing to tariff it, right? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yeah. 

Adam Hudson: Yeah. So you would tariff it so we get paid for it. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: We’re in a crazy situation, Adam. I’m told that the Japanese import our gas- 

Adam Hudson: And resell it. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Well, not only that, but they import our gas and they charge their importers $3 billion as import duty. And we get sweet FA and, and, and, but think about that. 

Hosts: *inaudible*  

Malcolm ROBERTS: We have got the world’s largest tax evader in Chevron, basically an American company taking our resources and paying zip and John Howard introduced, introduced the exporting of that gas. He authorised the exporting, his government. Prior to that, Bob Hawke changed the petroleum rent resources tax. It sounds wonderful. It guaranteed that they won’t pay any tax. So  both parties are doing it and then they don’t want to tax it. We also want to get a pipeline across the country because we know that our net Northwest shelf gas can be converted to liquid fuels, diesel and petrol. We can be self sufficient. 

Adam Hudson: OK, guys, you know, JFK said every country gets the government they deserve. That we live in a democracy. You can vote actually, guys, and you know how to vote if you want to, if you like what Malcolm’s saying anything else? What else are you guys going to get stuck into to put more money back in our pockets as a nation and as a people? I’ve got here some notes. NDIS, Medicare fraud. Fraud is huge in NDIS. Fraud is huge in Medicare. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Well, there are four components, as I said. The first one is putting more money in people’s pockets. So the second one is where do you get the money from? Third one is that the money that we can get from shutting down waste and duplication in the federal government is around about at least $90 billion. So that means $40 billion to put more money in people’s pockets. That leaves another 50, so another $20 billion a year in investing in infrastructure for the future productivity and the future wealth and the rest can go after paying the debt because at the moment we have got a debt of about $800 billion, eight hundred and something $860 billion in 2026/27 that will be- the interest payments will be the largest single budget item there is. That’s if NDIS doesn’t go rampant. So where are we getting the money from? From shutting down government waste and duplication. Shut down. Abolish the, the climate fraud department. Sorry, the climate change department, because that is that’ll, that’ll save us at least $30 billion a year. Then all the regulations, the subsidies, all the rest of the go to that and it’ll free up the price of electricity, reduce the price of electricity dramatically and it will also get the government the hell out of interfering in people’s lives. The government through the climate change, climate fraud policies, net zero from the United Nations Paris Agreement for the United Nations, which both the major parties are pushing. What we will do is take the government out of every aspect of your lives. It if you look at energy, it’s in everything.  

The second thing is the health and health, education, housing under the under the Constitution are state government responsibilities. And when you have states, this is really important. When you have states being responsible for something, then they compete on being better than other people. That gives us accountability. So what happens is if, if NSW does a better job on education than Queensland, people will actually leave Queensland and go to NSW because you’ve got choice. So when you’ve got no choice, you’ve got no accountability. So at the moment, the federal government has come in, John Howard again introduced the national curriculum, which has come, which has come in from the United Nations. That’s why our education standards are dropping, plummeting, because there’s no accountability now, because when the federal government has a curriculum, there’s no competing curriculum. So federal waste in duplicating the state and then on education and health and aged care and housing, that’ll go. That saves billions there. 

We also want to abolish the federal government looking after, well, no, they don’t look after. They destroy the federal government department of, of Aboriginal Affairs, well, all the racket and the white and black Aboriginal industry. And instead we would, we would fund grants to the local communities, bypass all the all the white and black Aboriginal aboriginal industry. There are other departments, NDIS bring that back into shape. That’s a real disaster. And it’s because, well, not only is, is there so much fraud going on, Adam, but people who deserve care are not getting it. And people who, who are, who are not entitled or are getting huge amounts spent on them. 

Adam Hudson: Providers are just milking it at a lot of providers. I’ve, I’ve just had story after story. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: You know, I didn’t learn about this until yesterday. I haven’t checked it out, but we had two really well-spoken a man and a woman from one of the they’re privately owned, but they’re one of the biggest providers of NDIS care, right? And they’re Australian and, they employ employees. Some of the foreign equity firms, you know, that signals they’re after money also have provide providers. They don’t employ them. They put them on an Uber type contract. So they don’t pay compensation, workers compensation, they don’t pay superannuation, they don’t pay payroll tax. And so what’s happening is the federal government reimburses them, and they skim off what, what would that be? 12, 14 15%. And that’s going straight overseas. It’s rampant. But there there’s a lack of accountability. So these guys were telling us, I forgot what I was going to say about that, but it’s just rife. I learned so many new things just when listening to these people. And we thought we’d have done our research on NDIS. It’s just been rorted.  But the important thing is it’s got to be brought into control because if you don’t, the people who need care won’t get it. 

Adam Hudson: That’s the sad irony of the whole thing is that that that’s what always happens with these things is the scammers get paid and the people who actually need it end up. 

To jump through more hoops and they’re already under enough stress and duress. 

It’s the mismanagement of the programme. It’s always problematic. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: It was brought in by Julia Gillard to try and win an election. She brought in the Gonski report which was for education. She brought in the NDIS just to get headlines for an election and they had no bone, no meat around the bones. And the late Liberal Party came in. What do we do with this? And then they became paranoid about fraud because- 

Adam Hudson: It’s approaching our military budget, isn’t it? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yes. 

Hosts: Yeah. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: I think it’s above. 

Adam Hudson: It’s above the military. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: I think so. 

Mark Di Paola: Isn’t all of the two biggest line items NDIS and interest rate payment? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: I think you’re right. Medicare, welfare, social services would be up there somewhere. 

Adam Hudson: I think as much in the vicinity of what it costs to defend the country on disability support. I mean, that to me is like that just does not sound correct. 

Mark Di Paola: Well, the numbers don’t- 

Adam Hudson: It just doesn’t work. In closing, probably one of the hottest topics right now with housing affordability and just the state of the nation is immigration. What’s One Nation’s net zero immigration policy? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Zero net, I call it because net zero, no, no, Net zero is the carbon dioxide scam. Zero net is immigration. What we want to do, I’ll make these very, very clear. There is no bigger threat to the housing prices to no bigger cause driver of housing prices which are now at record levels and unaffordable for many people and also rents than immigration. So what we want to do is both reduce the demand for houses and, increase the supply of houses and also reduce the cost of new houses and that’ll all drive down rents. Rents are just sky rocketing. So we want to stop immigration, not forever. So really it’s a pause. We want to deport , people who are here illegally. The federal government’s just, I don’t care. Both Liberal and Labour and the big immigration policy was brought in by John Howard and perpetuated by each of the prime ministers. Since then, Liberal, Labour, Nationals, all of them have perpetuated the big immigration. One of the one of the really sad things, inhuman things is that Albanese, Albanese said when he first came into power.  

We will continue big immigration until we catch up with pre COVID levels. Pre COVID there are 1.9 million people here on resident visas or temporary visas, temporary visas, I should say temporary visas. There are now 2.5 million people here on temporary visas and they each need a roof, they each need a bed that taking up houses. We’ve got so many of them here illegally. We want to deport them. So that will- stopping immigration until their infrastructure catches up because they haven’t been doing spending on major infrastructure for decades. Dams, railroads, roads, hospitals, schools that haven’t done that. That’ll allow the infrastructure to catch up, allow the housing to catch up. The quality of people is also something that’s really important. Albanese is telling us that we’re bringing in construction workers. That is complete ********. The percentage of people in amongst our immigrants that are construction workers is 0.6%. They’re supposed to build the houses for the other 99.4%. It is crap. What the reason Albanese is doing this massive immigration is that we have a per capita recession. So on the basis of per person, we’re in recession. So if the only way you can stop that becoming a recession and then him, then Charmer’s being labelled as the treasurer and Albanese the Prime Minister when the recession occurred is by bringing in more people to pump up the gross domestic product. That’s what it’s all about. 

So we would so, so that would stop, that would reduce demand by stopping immigration, pausing immigration, deporting people who are here illegally. Then the other thing about freeing up supply, stop all foreign ownership of housing and farms, stop it.  

Adam Hudson: Permanently or temporarily? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Permanently. And, the Liberal Party and Labor Party have both realised that people are waking up. We have been pushing this Adam for about 3 years now. Really severely. 

Adam Hudson: So like Indonesia, you can’t buy in Indonesia, you can lease the land-  

Malcolm ROBERTS: China you can’t. 

Adam Hudson: China so you can’t own you, could they do leasehold or something or what’s the plan? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: No ownership. 

Adam Hudson: no ownership. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: No ownership. New Zealand’s just done it. When I say just fairly recently. 

Adam Hudson: Even Australians, I think in New Zealand have to apply now for owning in New Zealand. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: The Canadians have done it though. But we wouldn’t say sell overnight. We’d say give them two or three years to sell, but well, I would say 2 years. 

Adam Hudson: You mean if they own, they have to sell?  

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yes. 

Adam Hudson: Even OK retrospectively. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: If they own it now they have to sell it. 

Adam Hudson: Wow. Wow. 

Mark Di Paola: Do you think that it’d stop like foreign-  like one of the big things that Trump seems to be running on and executing on is getting foreign investment into the USA, getting Japan and all these other countries to invest into the US economy. Do you think that would hurt our, our Australian economy stopping foreign investment? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: We don’t, we don’t mind in, in housing- 

Mark Di Paola: bringing housing prices down is one thing, but destroying the economy through a lack of investment, Not that far. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: We’re not opposed to foreign investment. We’re opposed to foreign control and ownership. 

Adam Hudson: Do you know, do you know any other numbers around that? Like how much of our property is owned by foreigners? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Housing property? 

Adam Hudson: yeah,  

Malcolm ROBERTS: OK. 

Adam Hudson: Residential. Yeah. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: According to the Australian Taxation Office and the Foreign Investment Review Board, it’s less than 1%. But that’s complete rubbish because the National Australia Bank have done surveys and it’s around about 14.9% in New South Wales. 

Adam Hudson: So OK. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: And then you’ve also got real estate agents telling us the same thing. 

Adam Hudson: So your policy would see 15% of residential properties in Australia all of a sudden come onto the market in two years? 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Over 2 years, Yeah, not overnight, but over 2 years. 

Adam Hudson: That’ll bring property prices down. I would say yeah, but I’m not saying, I’m not saying it’s a good or a bad thing. I’m just processing it. It’s an interesting idea. 

Mark Di Paola: It is a bad thing because it’ll crash the economy. 

Eric Machado: I just know that there’s a lot of Australians wealth is in property, right, Compared to US. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Yeah, and the banks are holding back lending to small businesses, medium sized businesses and just going for the property market. 

Adam Hudson: I think it’s interesting because you sort of got a divided nation right now. And so the, the young people are probably who don’t own assets are probably cheering and the rest of the country who are, who own assets are probably not. But it’s, well, I think Australia does have to make some hard decisions. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: We also want to take, stop the GST on building on house construction materials. 

Adam Hudson: That’s a great idea. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: which would reduce the cost of housing, making land more freely available because that’s being held back at the moment by some developers, but also by the regulations which are, which are way above what’s needed. There’s something else I was going to mention in there. 

Adam Hudson: I’ve got some notes here from the press conference, but I think you’ve covered most of them, energy prices was a good one, NDIS, Medicare. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: So just on energy prices and the excise for cutting 26 cents off the cost of a litre of fuel. They’re, very, very positive because they’ll improve productivity and they’ll reduce the cost. 

Energy transport and electricity are input costs right across the economy. So they will drop prices. These are not inflationary, but, but we’re putting more money back in people’s pockets. We’ll improve the productivity of the economy, which is generate wealth, not inflation. 

Adam Hudson: Senator Malcolm Roberts, it’s been an absolute pleasure listening to you and hearing your ideas for the country. And yeah, I really just want to say thank you on behalf of us and all the listeners for taking the time to actually have a long form discussion and all the work that politicians in this country do. I think it’s a tough job and you cop a lot of **** and the pay is not that good. So you, you must do it for, and it’s really clearly evident here, you do it because you believe in the country and you want to make a better place for us here. I was genuinely surprised by some of the aspects of the conversation pleasantly and I really enjoyed the chat. So thank you for coming in. Drop a comment guys below the video. By engaging in this content, guys, through a like or a comment, it sends a message to other politicians and people of power that, hey, we’re paying attention here. We’re paying attention to these alternative channels of communication and we’ll get more guests of this quality and calliper into the studio.  

Malcolm ROBERTS: And I want to thank you not only for the invitation but thank you all for what you’re doing. Because as I said, there is nothing more important than freedom of life, but very, very, close on the heels. And what makes freedom of life possible is freedom of speech and the only way to avoid the direct and also the implied censorship of the mouthpiece media, that globalist Big Brother media is free independent podcasters, because that’s the only way to get real opinions and facts out. 

Adam Hudson: Our pleasure. It’s days like this that I feel good about what we’re doing. Like we’re not-  

Eric Machado: It’s, education, right? Like in the Australian people. I think the Western world need to be a lot more educated and a lot more interested in politics because it’s not something that’s really learnt in school.  

Malcolm ROBERTS: It’s deliberately taken out.  

Eric Machado: Yeah. And it’s not something that, you know, my parents never really gave me the, you know, the birds and the bees. Talk about Pol-  you know, politics. It was basically, hey, my parents voted liberal. So what do you do? You vote liberal. It’s exactly what you said, right? You’re basically entrenched in that. So I think these pieces are very important because a lot of people don’t realise how much business and politics are intertwined. 

Malcolm ROBERTS: Harry Truman said, The former U.S. President, once U.S. President, said the only thing new in the world is the history you have not read. It’s all happened before. What they do, the globalist curriculum, is to take out civics, which you aren’t. You know how our political systems work, how democracy works, how the Constitution works, history. Because then people are completely ignorant and they don’t understand the significance of even voting.  

Adam Hudson: Yep, I agree. That’s it for today guys. Thank you for watching. We’ll see you on the next episode of Unemployable. 

22 year olds today are going to be caught up in Labor’s new super tax supported by the greens.

Inflation means eventually almost everyone will be paying the doubled tax rate and unrealised gains tax means the government wants to come after money you haven’t even earned yet.

Index the threshold, abolish taxes on unrealized gains or better yet, throw out the whole bill and start again.

As inflation rages on, the Government is making money out of it through “Bracket Creep” – collecting more taxes.

I moved an amendment to a bill so that tax thresholds are indexed to inflation, meaning you won’t pay more tax because of inflation. Predictably, the major parties voted it down. They rely on squeezing more and more tax out of you and making money out of inflation.

This clip from the Centre for Independent Studies is a great explainer on how “Bracket Creep” works so that the Government benefits from inflation at your expense.

Watch as these climate change bureaucrats deflect and squirm when trying to answer basic questions about what their department has been doing.

This session looked at why they sold millions of barrels of oil held in the United States and Labor’s new tax on petrol and diesel cars. Like always, the Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water (DCCEEW) is completely out of touch with reality while trying to tell you what you can and can’t do.

Abolish the net-zero goals.

Transcript

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you, Chair. Can we just continue with this strategic reserve? So Australia sold all of the oil reserves in the United States strategic reserve?  

Mrs Svarcas: Correct.  

Senator ROBERTS: That was 1.7 million barrels, around June 2022?  

Mrs Svarcas: Correct.  

Senator ROBERTS: What was the sale amount? $220 million?  

Mrs Svarcas: I would have to take that on notice. I don’t have that in my folder.  

Senator ROBERTS: Who was the oil delivered to?  

Mrs Svarcas: I would have to also take that on notice, Senator.  

Senator ROBERTS: How much was paid in seller’s fees, commissions or whatever it is? 

Mrs Svarcas: I’m happy to break that down for you on notice.  

Senator ROBERTS: How much is the continuing empty lease in the US strategic reserve costing?  

Mrs Svarcas: We do have an ongoing contract for that. I will, again, come back to you with the leasing costs on that.  

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. That’s all I had there. I’d like to move to the ute tax, please.  

CHAIR: I think you’ll find it’s not called that, Senator Roberts. 

 Senator ROBERTS: Sorry?  

CHAIR: We don’t have such a thing. Would you like to refer to the correct program?  

Senator ROBERTS: Your new car tax.  

Senator McAllister: We don’t have a new car tax, either.  

CHAIR: No new car tax?  

Senator ROBERTS: You know what I’m talking about.  

CHAIR: How about you just say it, Senator Roberts, so we can get the right people to the table.  

Senator ROBERTS: I’d like to know the new fees for petrol and diesel vehicles.  

Senator McAllister: It’s possible you’re referring to the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard.  

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you very much.  

CHAIR: Yes, that sounds a bit more familiar.  

Senator ROBERTS: Yes, that’s another way of saying it. Minister, why were you so secretive about it? You passed it under guillotine with no debate. Yet again, another bill with no debate.  

Senator McAllister: The New Vehicle Efficiency Standard brings Australia into line with the very significant majority of the international vehicle market. It’s a policy—  

Senator ROBERTS: Excuse me, Minister. The people of Australia elected your government to govern. They didn’t elect the United Nations World Economic Forum, the United States, Great Britain, or other global players. They wanted you to govern this country—not on behalf of others.  

CHAIR: Senator Roberts, could you allow the minister to finish answering the question?  

Senator ROBERTS: Sorry, Chair.  

Senator McAllister: The government was very clear and we had extensive public discussion about the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard. I believe there were Senate hearings, although I did not participate in them. We discussed it here in the estimates forum and also in the neighbouring committee at the last estimates hearings as well. Officials can talk to you about some of the public consultation that took place, including the position papers that were released. And senators had many opportunities to express their opinions about this particular policy initiative through the course of the Senate’s work.  

Senator ROBERTS: So we don’t need to debate anymore in the Senate?  

Senator McAllister: We do need debate in the Senate, Senator Roberts. These were important—  

Senator ROBERTS: Second reading, third reading and committee stages?  

Senator McAllister: I thought you had asked me a question.  

Senator ROBERTS: I am! But I was continuing—  

CHAIR: Senator Roberts, I’m going to ask you again to allow the minister to answer the question you have just posed and to not speak over her.  

Senator McAllister: The government’s view was that this was an important reform, and that there was some urgency to this reform. It was a reform that had been proposed under a previous government, during a previous parliament, and not progressed. The consequences of that were that Australians continue to pay more than they need to at the bowser because the vehicle fleet in Australia is less efficient than it could be, because the range of vehicles available to Australians is considerably less than we expect it will be under the standard. We think it’s an important policy. We wanted to progress it, and we judged that there was a majority of support in the Senate for that, so we brought it on for consideration.  

Senator ROBERTS: You’re afraid of letting the people participate through their views, expressed through senators in debates in second reading and third reading and committee stages, and assessing amendments?  

Senator McAllister: I wouldn’t characterise it like that at all. 

Senator ROBERTS: Okay. Minister, are you aware, with an increasing amount of smart metres being installed—despite some people saying they don’t want it—and electric vehicle charging happening overnight offpeak, that’s when coal-fired power is supplying most of the electricity. So there’s potentially going to be an increased demand on coal-fired power stations as petrol and diesel vehicles are set aside in favour of electric vehicles. So you’re actually increasing the carbon dioxide intensity of energy.  

Senator McAllister: Senator Roberts, I will ask some of the officials to talk you through the expectations that we have for demand on the grid. But the Integrated System Plan, which is produced by the AEMO, includes demand that is predicted to arise from the introduction of greater numbers of electric vehicles into the Australian fleet, along with a range of other changes. It also, as you know, shows a very significant shift to renewable energy, so the emissions intensity of the National Electricity Market is expected to decrease over time, of course.  

Senator ROBERTS: So, are they like the projections where you told us we would be having lower power costs, and instead we’ve got far higher?  

Senator McAllister: Do you want to talk about the issue that you originally asked me about, or do you wish to move on?  

Senator ROBERTS: I just wanted to know what your projections were like and how accurate they are.  

Senator McAllister: The Integrated System Plan is a long-established piece of analysis undertaken by the Australian Energy Market Operator. Officials at the table can talk to you about the expectations there and any other information we have of that expected demand on electricity.  

Mr Ryan: To start with, I’ll talk about some of the different charging solutions we’re seeing and what impact that’s having. ARENA, who I know will be appearing, will certainly be able to tell you about some of the investment and some of the innovations they’re looking at in charging. You’re right, a lot of charging is done at home—80 per cent, we think—but that’s not just from the grid. A lot of those people—not all, but a lot of them— actually have batteries that charge and store solar energy from during the day. So when they’re charging overnight—it might be from a battery but it also might be from the grid—note that the grid is slowly decarbonising as well. So that’s increasing, day to day. There are other innovations where we’re seeing EV charging being provided at places people visit on a regular basis, whether that’s at carparks during the day or the workplace during the day, whether it’s at the kerbside, at the local gym, at the movies—places where there’s charging, more and more. Sometimes that’s in the evening, but a lot of the time that’s during the day. So we’re seeing some innovation, and there’s certainly been funding—not just from the Commonwealth but from the states and territories—to develop that innovation and look to maximise the solar in there. The last thing I’d say on the projections is that I do know that they take into account the grid and the impact on the grid for the uptake of EVs. So they are in the figures that are provided each year when they do the projections.  

Senator ROBERTS: Minister, do you still maintain—  

Mr Fredericks: Senator, sorry; could Ms Rowley just give you 30 seconds on that, because it is quintessentially the answer to your question about how all of the emissions impacts are brought to bear.  

Senator ROBERTS: Sure.  

Ms Rowley: In relation to the annual emissions projections, we look at the change in the vehicle fleet, including the uptake of electric vehicles, which is helping to reduce the direct emissions from transport. But we also take account of the electricity required to meet the growing share of electric vehicles. Just by way of example, for 2030, in last year’s emissions projections, we estimated that there was a seven-million-tonne reduction in transport emissions and a one-million-tonne increase in electricity emissions to meet that additional demand from electric vehicles, so the net effect in 2030 was an estimated six-million-tonne reduction in Australia’s emissions, taking into account both transport and electricity.  

Senator ROBERTS: Sure, but I remind you you can’t tell me the impact on climate of that, so you’re basically going with a policy of spending money but not realising the benefit. Minister, do you still maintain—  

Ms Rowley: I would note that the new vehicle efficiency standard is projected to save consumers money and reduce the impact of things like health costs on the Australian economy.  

Senator ROBERTS: Minister, do you still maintain—  

CHAIR: Senator Roberts, we’re going to rotate the call.  

Senator ROBERTS: Last question?  

CHAIR: Last question. 

Senator ROBERTS: Do you still maintain, Minister, that punishing manufacturers of petrol and diesel vehicles won’t reduce the number of petrol or diesel cars available to Australians?  

Senator McAllister: Senator, I don’t accept that characterisation of the policy setting.  

Senator ROBERTS: Thanks, Chair. 

Transcript

Why? That’s one question that I want to ask repeatedly in this speech. I see the government’s changes as a welcome step, but it’s a tiny, tiny step and we need many, many more. It could be one of my footprints, Senator Ayres! We see the government’s previous tax changes. They weren’t cuts; they were changes. As a result of those changes, we will see the government increase revenue by about $38 billion over the next four years—so much for tax cuts. They’re tax changes that will lead to an increase in tax for mums and dads. 

Why are politicians scared of tax reform, and why do they place the burden on families and individuals to pay tax and let multinationals off the hook? Why are politicians scared of tax reform, but they continue tinkering with the system to affect mums and dads, who end up by paying, by far, the lion’s share of tax in this country? Why did Senator Sharma, in a very good speech, say that he wants to end bracket creep and the Liberals want end to bracket creep, yet, three weeks earlier, they voted against ending bracket creep with my amendment? They want enduring bracket creep. Why do the Labor Party say they want to end bracket creep—I remember Senator Gallagher said at the time, ‘We want to end bracket creep’—but vote against it? My amendment to abolish bracket creep once and for all was defeated. 

Why is taxation not transparent? I’ll tell you why. It’s so that governments can continue to steal money from families to pay for their uncosted bribes. The Senate and the House of Representatives have turned into auction blocks using taxpayers’ money to buy votes. That’s what they’ve turned into. That’s how the governments of this country work, the uniparty of Labor and the Liberals. Why is the uniparty looking for new ways to tax people? Cars and utes—the foundations for tradies—are now going to be taxed. Clothing is going to be taxed under the Labor Party. Food will be taxed with a new biosecurity levy. Inflation was caused by the Labor and Liberal uniparty during the COVID response—the COVID mismanagement. State premiers were largely Labor, and the federal Prime Minister was Liberal-National. Inflation is a tax, especially on the poor and those with low incomes. Inflation is a huge tax burden. Greenwashing requires corporations to buy carbon dioxide credits. How do they pass the costs on? They pass them on in the form of higher prices. 

Why do they require diversity, equity and inclusion and ESG reporting, which are ridiculous and unfounded? No-one has provided the evidence for that policy. It’s a compliance tax. Where will the cost of that compliance tax go? Onto the things that mums and dads and families pay for. Whole departments have been created in corporations, and that adds to the prices families have to pay. Why more tinkering? Why more complexity and less productivity? Think about the behaviours this drives with regard to allocation of resources and the behaviour of executives and decision-makers. Why is it that every problem in this country comes out of this building, like housing and excessive immigration, which is putting inhuman catastrophic pressures on people now? People are living in tents, cars, caravans, out in the street and under bridges in Brisbane in one of the richest states in the world. This is happening in our regional cities right up and down the east coast of Queensland. It’s a long coast. The Murray-Darling Basin is a disaster. It’s climate fraud, a lie and a scam. It’s a hoax. Stealing farmers’ property rights—the Liberal-National government did that from 1997 to 2007. 

We’re still living with COVID mismanagement. I had a gentleman in my office today who is vaccine injured. It’s been stated by doctors We had to turn the lights off because of the glare. He couldn’t look straight at the windows. He had to look down. This was a vibrant healthy person now with COVID vaccine damage. He’s almost incapacitated. This was a lively human being now pulled up. 

We’re still living with the COVID mismanagement. There’s inflation from the money supply, as I mentioned. There’s inflation from crippling the supply chains during the COVID restrictions. Crippling our supply chains led to higher prices. 

Senator Bilyk: President, I raise a point of order on relevance. We’re here to speak about the Treasury Law Amendment (Making Multinationals Pay Their Fair Share—Integrity and Transparency) Bill 2023. Not once has the senator mentioned anything to do with that bill, and it’s been five minutes. I’m just wondering if you could draw to the attention— 

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT (Senator Polley): Thank you, Senator Bilyk. I will remind Senator Roberts of the topic, but as you and other senators know, it’s a broad-ranging debate. 

Senator ROBERTS: For those senators with poor hearing, let me say again: we support this bill. That’s what I opened with. We support this bill—I’ll repeat it. I said that. 

I’ve just laid down a litany of problems that are coming from this building in betrayal of the people in this country, my fellow Australians. I’m now getting to the point of that betrayal. The most destructive system in government under the uniparty for the last 70 years has been the taxation system. It focuses our brightest and best people, some of our lawyers and accountants, not on serving our country in competition with foreign companies overseas—the Koreans, the Japanese, the Taiwanese, the Chinese, the Europeans and the Americans—but on screwing the government and getting away from complex, ridiculous taxation systems. They’re focused not on competing with foreign owned corporations but on competing with our government. Think of the behaviours that are driven at the corporate level, the allocation of resources, the inefficiency of resources and the behaviour of executives. 

Taxation is highly complex. How many pages are there in our taxation act? It’s highly inefficient directly in terms of allocation of resources and indirectly in terms of the behaviours that are driven. It’s directly inefficient in terms of the way taxation is levied in this country. James Killaly was a former deputy commissioner of taxation in charge of large companies and foreign matters. He said in 1996 and 2010, ‘Ninety per cent of Australia’s large companies are foreign owned and, since 1953, have paid little or no tax.’ This bill does go a little way towards addressing that, but we need to address it full on. 

Why does that happen? Why are foreign companies getting let off the hook? I’ll tell you why. It’s because many of even our large Australian companies are part-owned and controlled by foreign corporations. The major predators are Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street and First State. They own 10 per cent of the four banks combined and they own the controlling interest. They tell the banks what to do—BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, First State and others in that little cohort of multinational predatory organisations. We don’t have four main banks. We have one main bank that is hiding behind four logos. That’s what we have. They have the same policies, principles, strategies, products and services. 

Coles and Woolies, again, are part-owned by BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard. If you go right through our corporations in this country, the corporations we thought were Australian owned, they’re foreign owned and controlled, and where does the money go? The profit goes overseas. What did the Morrison government do, along with the state premiers? They loaded it up so that foreign multinationals that own the large companies in this country made a killing out of COVID at the expense of small companies and small businesses. 

On the other hand, look at Qatar and Norway. They have bountiful natural resources, just like us—not as much as we have, in fact, and yet they make so much more. Qatar made $78 billion out of its gas exports. We export more and we made a tiny fraction of that, around one per cent of that. 

So why are we doing this? What I’m saying and have been saying for many years, ever since I got into the Senate, is that we need comprehensive, proper and honest tax reform. Let’s have a look at the person who introduced GST into this country. Paul Keating was the Treasurer and, I think, Deputy Prime Minister under Bob Hawke. He came so close to introducing the GST, and, at the last minute, the Prime Minister at the time, Bob Hawke, fell over and lacked the courage to do so. Paul Keating was very upset with that. A few years later, John Hewson introduced the GST as part of Liberal Party policy, and who smashed him over it? Paul Keating, the man who introduced the concept of GST to this country. 

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT (Senator Polley): Senator Roberts, I will remind you to use people’s correct titles when referring to former prime ministers. 

Senator ROBERTS: He was the Treasurer at the time. What I’m saying is that the taxation system was mooted for change, and the person who introduced the GST actually smashed the GST, for purely political reasons. 

On another aspect of comprehensive tax reform, Treasurer Peter Costello—who has been admired as a Treasurer—found out that Senator Pauline Hanson, who at the time was a member of the lower house, was keen on the transaction tax. As a way of trying to destroy her, he destroyed the transaction tax, even though he had previously said publicly that it had a lot of merit. 

The point I’m getting to is: taxation has become a political football. It’s not an honest debate anymore; it’s about smashing a system. So what I propose is that, instead of proposing a system, we should look at basic principles. We should first of all agree that the taxation system is one of the most destructive systems in this country, if not the most destructive, which is my opinion of it. Once we get agreement on that, we should then put forward a set of principles that we can agree on.  

I’ve been putting some thought to principles. First of all, a fair, efficient and honest taxation system would enable us to receive far more income because the multinationals would be paying their fair share of tax. It should be fair and equitable to all people and to all economic entities, including Australian businesses, and with no exemptions for foreign companies, which are now largely exempt. Making foreign companies and speculators pay their fair share of tax would quickly end the budget deficit and overseas debt and fund future infrastructure without borrowing. The second principle: it should be in the national interest.  

The third principle—and this is very, very important for a country, and the reason why I went through the problems that are coming from this building: it should be incorruptible and impossible for politicians to fiddle with. A major source of political power is the ability of politicians to make legislation that punishes or advantages particular groups. This ability gives politicians from the uniparty enormous power over others because they can enact, for example, taxation provisions that assist their supporters or hurt their supporters’ competitors. An honest tax system removes this blatant abuse of power. 

The fourth principle: it should comply with and support our Constitution’s intent and written provisions—not contradict our Constitution but comply with it. The fifth principle: there should be simplicity in understanding, administration and accountability. It should be completely transparent, unlike the current taxation system, which is deliberately opaque. There should be an objective basis for levying tax. Instead of assessing tax on profit and loss that can be fiddled, use objective measures. These do exist and include, for example, market sale price or straight-out unit cost. 

The taxation system needs to be constructive, not punitive. It needs to be efficient to administer, with low administration costs, not the unwieldy behemoth that is administering, or mismanaging, tax at the moment. It should increase people’s purchasing power. A good taxation system, an efficient taxation system, will increase people’s purchasing power so people are economically far better off, because the burden will be shifted more towards multinationals. 

The next principle is: there should be minimal disruption to the economy, with no ability for politicians to manipulate the tax system across industry sectors or industry groups. The taxation system could be a wonderful way of getting aggregate economic data and detailed data. 

The next principle is arguably one of the most important: accountability. When properly designed, a tax system develops accountability in the government and in the people, through being a restraint on the cost of government. Taxes are necessary to pay for the cost of government, but what happens at the moment, because politicians from the uniparty can ratchet taxation up freely, is that they tend to abuse it and neglect their accountability to the people for managing costs. Politicians will have to manage within the country’s means. The next principle is: it should help people to become independent of government.  

What I want to do in wrapping up is say, again, to the senators who didn’t hear me in my opening comments: we support this bill. But it is far too little. Why is it too little? We have got plenty of money in this country for investment. We have got super funds holding enormous sacks of gold, from rivers of gold. I’m asking the government to change your ways. Put families before large, foreign multinationals—Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard, First State. Put national interest before large, foreign multinationals. Reclaim our national sovereignty, and put it before large, foreign multinationals. Put Australia and Australians first. 

I asked this question at the start: why? I ask this question now: why not? 

I spoke with Daisy Cousens last Friday on increased land values in #Queensland and how the government benefits. As well as Digital ID and the upcoming rallies around Australian capital cities.

Watch ‘The Daisy Cousens Show’ live and on demand Fridays 7pm AEST at ADH TV: https://adh.tv/videos/the-daisy-cousens-show

Transcript

Daisy Cousens: Well, it’s abundantly clear by now that despite trying to con Australians with a $15 a week tax break, Federal Labor is ideologically perfectly happy to rob citizens blind by taxing them out the wazoo. The beginning example of that was the reinstating of the 37.5% tax bracket, which ensures bracket creep will continue in perpetuity. However, in an even sneakier ploy, Labor is now taxing by stealth by increasing land values. Joining me this evening is One Nation Senator, the wonderful Malcolm Roberts. Senator, fabulous to have you here this evening. How are you?

Senator ROBERTS: I’m very well, thanks Daisy and thank you for the invitation. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Daisy Cousens: Well, it’s wonderful, wonderful to have you here. I’m very, very keen to get your take on this Senator. There has been a lot of upset up north about an increase in land value. And look, at first thought this might sound like a great thing for farmers, that their land is now worth more. But when you take tax into account, the tax hungry Labor government, this all you know, starts to make sense from their point of view, doesn’t it?

Senator ROBERTS: Well, I’d love to talk about the tax hungry Labor government, but we also must talk about the tax hungry Liberal opposition and former Liberal government. But we’ll come to that hopefully.

Daisy Cousens: Hmm.

Senator ROBERTS: Inflation, as you quite rightly pointed out, is a stealth tax.  It’s stealthy thing that people don’t see but it reduces disposable income and what we see is land values going up for, and I think an 11% increase in the number of properties that that will be subject to land tax because it’s a threshold of 600,000 and above, but also remember the land valuations are bases for rates and  councils right across the state are under pressure, some through mismanagement, some through mismanagement from the state government. But the systems are so complex and so confusing, and the accounting systems, that local councils will be increasing rates as well.  So, this will slug everyone – it’ll mean less disposable income.  So, people’s stand of living will be going backwards.

Daisy Cousens: Gosh, which is appalling in this cost-of-living crisis. I hate this sort of ideological bit that political parties have that it’s okay just to tax people into oblivion, because as you rightly mentioned, the Liberal Party. I’m always on about how, you know, Labor is so happy to tax citizens, but the same can actually be said quietly about the Liberal Party can’t it?

Senator ROBERTS: It can be. I moved a motion, an amendment, sorry, recently into one of the pieces of legislation that Labor had introduced to the Senate and that was simply to remove bracket creep. It was done properly. The Liberals even stood up and said they commend me for it, they like the way the bill was written, but they’re not going to support it because they love bracket creep and so does the Labor Party. They love bracket creep.  They love seeing people go unconsciously into higher tax bracket, not even doing being aware that that’s the case and that’s an immediate increase in tax and so people don’t realise that they’re being, that they’re having more money stolen from them.

And then Dave Sharma, the new Liberal Senator, when he gave his maiden speech, his first speech in the Senate recently, he said he’s all in favour of removing bracket creep, but just two weeks before he he voted against removing bracket creep.  So, there was nothing wrong with my bill, they said it was well done but they couldn’t do it. So, both the Liberal and Labor Party.  And we’ve also got to remember that net-zero, putting in place net-zero foreign policy, increases energy prices which flow right through the economy. The energy sector is the most important sector in the economy in terms of the foundation for prices of goods and services because they flow right through and when you increase energy prices, you decrease productivity, you decrease wealth and that applies not only to individuals – it applies to businesses, it applies to communities. And the Liberal Party is the one who first said in government that they would support UN 2050 net-zero policy. So, the Liberal government is putting heavy impost on every person who uses electricity and every person who lives in this country.

Daisy Cousens: Hmm gosh! It’s so hypocritical of both the major parties because they both go on this bent, don’t they, pretending they’re for the little guy, or we’re for the workers, we’re for ordinary people, but how can they possibly say that with a straight face when they’re so happily happy to tax people?

Senator ROBERTS: Well, they’re used to the lies that they’re putting out. The climate scam is a lie. The climate fraud is a lie. The whole basis for these energy policies is a lie. And then we see – every major problem, Daisy, in this country comes out of Parliament House, Canberra, every major problem. Some of the problems come out of states, but they’re exacerbated by the federal government. So, we see inflation, was driven by the federal government and the Reserve Bank of Australia by printing far too much money during the COVID mismanagement.  The whole of that COVID mismanagement shut down supply routes, the supply side, so we had fewer goods, which meant that raised prices, and we had more money chasing those fewer goods, which further raise prices. So inflation, which is a hidden stealth tax as you rightly pointed out, is the cause of people going backward in disposable income. So inflation is the number one enemy and it was created by the Morrison government with the Labor Premiers in hand and by the Reserve Bank of Australia.

Daisy Cousens: Ohe absolutely.

Senator ROBERTS: So what we need to so is actually open these people up to the truth.

Daisy Cousens: Hmm. Oh no, I agree with you and what people just I think conveniently shove under the rug or forget, certainly the Liberal Party does, was that it was the Liberal Party’s fault when they were in government a few years ago that we are in this inflationary position because they kept capitulating to the states’ demands for money for their ridiculous COVID policies. So, thank you for bringing that up and let’s never forget it. Now, Senator Roberts, according to this chart, the greater the rate of primary production, the higher the valuation increase. Is this justly proportional?

Senator ROBERTS: Daisy, let’s keep flogging everyone who’s successful. Let’s see how many successful people we have left in this country. That’s exactly what they’re doing. So, someone that works their land better, their business better, someone invests in their land, their business, and they have a higher productivity and what do we do? We slug them for it. That’s no way to reward talent. That’s no way to reward creativity and hard work and enterprise. That’s the opposite. It’ll cripple this country and it is crippling this country. That’s what we need to remember. This will do enormous damage to our primary producers and we call them primary producers for a bloody good reason. They’re the primary producers of the whole economy. Everything is based upon agriculture and mining, the two primary production sectors. Manufacturing is based on that. Goods and services in the services sector or the tertiary sector are all based upon it. So, we’re killing the primary sector and what it’s doing is it’s hollowing out the bush – they want us all to move from the bush and into the slums and cities – high density high rise living. Thomas Jefferson said it so well and Tim Ball, the expert climatologist from Canada, echoed those words. You can have farms without cities, Daisy, but you cannot have cities without farms. We are crippling this country.

Daisy Cousens: And that is such a good point. You know they are so important, our farmers, and they’re being treated so shoddily by the government and certainly, think of the cost-of-living crisis, as taxes increase for our farmers, won’t that in turn flow onto our grocery bills? Will they become even more expensive?

Senator ROBERTS: Yes, it will. And we’re seeing the prices increase already, quite dramatically, because of the recent increases in energy costs, which have been artificially driven by basically lies and also by inflation. And also, we must remember that we’re seeing the consequences of previous Liberal-National governments that stole farmers rights to use their land and to comply, that was the Liberal Party government’s way of complying with the United Nations Kyoto Protocol. They said they wouldn’t sign it, but that they will comply with it. The moment they did that they started putting in restrictions on land use. They got the state government involved, particularly in NSW and Queensland to put those land use restrictions in and now we see the Queensland government, two years ago, three years ago, bringing in legislation to cripple the farms right up and down the East Coast of Queensland which, as you know from our states layout, are fundamental agricultural areas.  They’re the richest agricultural areas – all in the name of the environment. And I asked questions in a Senate inquiry of the QLD experts -they don’t have any evidence for it. We must remember that the farmer, the owner of the land, is the most important custodian, the best custodian, because a farmer, if he ignores the environment around his land, his land deteriorates. The farmer is the best person for understanding the management of the environment.  The farmer is the one who’s going to miss out the most if he abuses that or she abuses that because they’re superannuation goes, they have got nothing to hand back to their kids. Whatever they want to do is gone. So the farmer is the best person to manage the land and the environment around his or her property. And what we’re doing is we’re putting it in charge of bureaucrats in Canberra, bureaucrats in Brisbane and bureaucrats in academia that are crippling our agricultural sector.

Daisy Cousens: Oh, absolutely. I mean, they’re just handing it over to people who have no idea what they’re doing. It’s outrageous! Now look, Senator, before we go, I have to talk to you about this Digital ID bill. You have been a real campaigner against the Digital ID bill. What is there left for Australians to do to stop this nightmare becoming imprinted as a reality?

Senator ROBERTS: Well, Daisy, I’m normally a very calm person and I don’t get upset too easily, but on Wednesday night, before Easter, after this bill went through without any debate, not one word of debate.  Amendments were moved and passed without one word of debate. And so that’s the first thing to recognise, the guillotine. So, I was shattered. But on Thursday I came into my office the next morning and found everyone in my office happy and I thought, what’s going on? And they said, Malcolm, the House of Reps was kept back late, the bill was introduced in the Senate and once it was passed in the Senate, it was supposed to go to the House of Reps, for passage through the House of Reps.  Well, it didn’t go to the House of Reps. And we believe that that’s the case because the public kicked up such a fuss, social media gutted Labor, social media gutted David Pocock the Teal, David Pocock the Teal senator and what we think is going on is that Labor is very, very worried about the consequences of passing this bill. And so, what we’re saying is 2 things. Every citizen get out there and hammer your local representative in parliament, in the House of Representatives. Not just the Labor Party but also the Liberal Party. Now the Liberals introduced this bloody bill into the parliament three years ago and I opposed it from the start. But the Liberals have voted with us against the bill two weeks ago in the Senate. So, we know the Liberals are sensitive in the lower house. We know that the Labor Party is sensitive in the lower house and the Teals and the Greens, so get out there and tell your lower house representative, your house representative member to vote against it.

Daisy Cousens: Absolutely.

Senator ROBERTS: The second thing is we saw the public rise up and I must congratulate everyone for doing that. We heard it in Canberra. Now what we need to do is – One Nation put out a petition opposing the digital identity bill. It got 60,000 signatures in the space of two days. Phenomenal.

Daisy Cousens: Fantastic.

Senator ROBERTS: And what we’re doing now based on that strength, we’re running a national protest day on May the 5th, Sunday May the 5th and we’ll be having protests in each of the major capital cities in Australia. So, it’ll be a very important that the public gets out and shows its voice.

Daisy Cousens: Absolutely. Thank you so much for letting us all know about those protests. And Senator, thank you so much for coming on the show this evening. You do wonderful work and I do hope we can see you again soon.

Senator ROBERTS: I look forward to it. Thank you very much and have a good weekend, Daisy.

For every drink you get, the taxman takes two – and he wants to take more. It’s just another tax that’s out of control.

One Nation believes that you should keep more money in your pocket rather than letting Canberra have it.

I spoke to Alexandra Marshall of Spectator Australia on the outrageous tax that is being floated, which will impact those on smaller incomes and families.

The Environment Minister, Tania Plibersek, has warned the fashion industry to turn its back on the concept of fashion that encourages people to buy too many new clothes. This idea is straight out of Chairman Mao’s China where everyone dressed in the same uniform, reducing the need for clothing to just a few sets of clothes.

This is your future under the most radical government in Australian history, who are actively promoting the World Economic Forum’s war on clothing under the guise of ‘saving the environment’, but really they just want us to have less.

Minister Plibersek is trying to justify their levy on clothing by saying it will create a ‘Green Fund’. Based on flawed science, this tax on clothing comes just after the WEF suggested on its website that people wash their clothes less often — you will wear old clothes and be dirty. This is literally what the WEF thinks of us. It’s impossible to be “happy” about this out of control, UN agenda followed loyally by this government.

One Nation opposes any new taxes. For the Prime Minister to even consider more tax on clothing shows how out of touch he is.

Spectator Australia

Watch

Both Labor and the Coalition voted to collect billions of extra income tax dollars because they need more money. Yet foreign multinational corporations in Australia are paying little or no company tax.

Bracket creep is a secret tax that means government makes money out of inflation. The government is not indexing the tax brackets to fix bracket creep meaning Australians will collectively pay $38 billion extra in tax over the next four years.

I moved an amendment that would eliminate bracket creep by indexing the tax thresholds. This means the inflation rates would be adjusted for inflation so Australian’s pay the same rate of tax instead of continuing to pay more which is the current situation the government is failing to address.

Instead of giving tens of billions of dollars back to Australians, both Liberal and Labor are happy to keep secretly collecting more and more tax, and by their own admission, they’ll only ever give it back when they can afford to. When can we expect that to occur, considering the current government’s focus is on funding UN climate goals and inflationary COVID debts?

Transcript

Senator ROBERTS: Minister, do you agree bracket creep is a problem for taxpayers in Australia? 

Senator GALLAGHER: I think all governments recognise bracket creep is an issue. That’s why governments of both major parties return bracket creep when it’s affordable and sustainable to do so. You’ll notice that, in the reforms to the tax proposal that was outlined by the former government, this does that by lowering the two thresholds and dropping the two tax rates; sorry, I’m getting back into tax land! That’s how we’re dealing with bracket creep. It provides relief, and 84 per cent of taxpayers will be getting a bigger income tax cut than they would have under the former government and paying less tax. By 2034-35, someone earning an average income will pay $21,635 less tax than they otherwise would have without these tax cuts. 

Senator ROBERTS: Minister, you said you return bracket creep when it suits you and when you can afford it. Doesn’t that mean that you’re taking money off taxpayers, and that it’s really a stealth tax because taxpayers don’t know they’re moving into a higher tax bracket? Bracket creep is when the brackets stay the same but people’s wages inflate and they move into a higher tax bracket—so they automatically pay a far higher rate of tax in the next bracket and they don’t even know it. Isn’t that tax by stealth? 

Senator GALLAGHER: No, I don’t agree with that. I think Australians understand marginal tax rates and the interaction between their earnings and those tax rates. I would say again that’s why, regularly, tax cuts are provided to taxpayers—to deal with bracket creep and provide other assistance where that’s possible, where it’s affordable and sustainable to do so. I say that not to say ‘when we choose to’ or ‘when we feel like it’ but because we have to manage a budget responsibly as well. People expect that because taxes pay for all the services that people consume and expect to receive from their government. 

Senator ROBERTS: Minister, I remind you, before asking my next question, that former deputy commissioner of taxation Jim Killaly, who was in charge of large companies and also international matters for the Australian Taxation Office, said back in 1996 and 2010 that 90 per cent of Australia’s large companies are foreign owned and have paid little or no tax since 1953, due to Liberal legislation that was passed in 1953 letting major foreign owned corporations off the hook. Bob Hawke made sure that the Labor Party was also giving gifts to major foreign corporations by letting the world’s largest avoider of tax, Chevron, off the hook for tax in the North West Shelf. Surely the fix to bracket creep is to index brackets. If we’d done that 10 years ago we would have saved the people $44 billion in tax. You say, ‘Where can we get the tax from?’ I get that tax is the cost of government, that tax is the price of government and that tax has to be paid, but foreign corporations in this country are paying little or no company tax. That means they’re using our services that every mum and dad and family and small business is paying for in this country, and they’re doing it for free. We used to be the world’s largest exporters of gas, we get very little for it, and these foreign companies are sending it overseas. Japan gets $3 billion a year off import duty for our gas going into their country, and we get very little for it. So what I say to you is that we can’t afford it because you’re not taxing foreign multinationals adequately. You’re letting them off the hook. Because you didn’t index brackets in this attempt, over the next four years Australians will pay $38 billion more tax than if you indexed brackets. Surely, you can look at the spending and cut some of that back. Surely, you can look at the taxation of foreign multinationals and make sure they start paying their fair share. Then let Australian families off the bracket-creep hook. Why can’t you do that proper budget for the Australians? 

Senator GALLAGHER: There was a lot in that, Senator Roberts. I think your final question was around budget management, and the work we have done in the last or two budgets and MYEFO has been to repair the budget. The deficits are a lot less, going forward. We’ve had a surplus budget, we’ve lowered our debt, we’ve contained spending despite the pressures the budget is under, and where we’ve had revenue windfalls we have returned the vast majority of it— over 80 per cent, 88 per cent I think—to the budget to repair it. We do have to manage the budget responsibly and we’ve been able to do that and provide bigger tax cuts to more Australians. On your point about multinational tax reform, I don’t necessarily agree with all of it because I haven’t been able to verify some of the things you’ve said. We agree that we should be making multinationals pay their fair share of tax—we’ve got a bill before the parliament on that, we’ve got a bill on PRRT and we’ve got a bill on high-balance super, and that is about making sure we are putting the budget on a sustainable footing, that we’re able to pay for defence, aged care, hospitals, the interest on our debt and the NDIS, and that we are able to pay for those services that people expect. But this plan does deal with bracket creep, so I don’t accept the position that you put saying we don’t. That’s part of the reason why we’re doing it. The Treasury advice there is very clear. Our plan provides better protection against bracket creep for 70 per cent of all taxpayers over the decade, including the average taxpayer and those on low and middle incomes. 

Senator ROBERTS: Minister, how can you say it fixes bracket creep when over the next four years Australians—families and individuals—will be paying an extra $38 billion due to bracket creep? You are not indexing the brackets themselves; you’re just making a one-off adjustment. As soon as that happens, with inflation continuing, you will continue to increase revenues. Inflation hits families in two ways: first of all, goods and services cost more; second of all, they move into a higher tax bracket and they pay more tax. They actually end up with less take-home pay. So I don’t buy your argument. Why doesn’t Labor want to fix bracket creep? 

Senator GALLAGHER: I think we’re just agreeing to disagree, Senator Roberts. This plan does deal with bracket creep by reducing two tax rates and increasing two tax thresholds. It does deal with bracket creep. In particular, as I said in my previous answer, for average taxpayers—those on the average wage, and low- and middle-income earners—this substantially improves the money they get back in their pockets, and returns that bracket creep. But you disagree with me—I will keep making that point and, presumably, you will keep making yours. 

Senator ROBERTS: Minister, you cannot argue with the fact that someone who is just below the next tax threshold will soon be paying higher tax because of inflation. That is a fact. The only way to beat that is to index the tax thresholds. As to supporting my amendment, it shows you do not want to stop rampant increases in tax or you want to keep bracket creep to exploit taxpayers. Why don’t you want to fix bracket creep properly by indexing it so that brackets rise as inflation rises and wages rise, so people stay within the same bracket and there is no creep? Why don’t you want to fix bracket creep? 

Senator GALLAGHER: The tax rates haven’t been indexed, that’s right. I understand your amendment seeks to do that. I don’t think you’ve moved your amendment, but I may as well cover off. We are not supporting your amendment. The approach in this bill is preferable to your amendment because it provides governments—I’m talking about not our government but all governments; this is the way it’s been done—with greater flexibility to respond to fluctuations in the economic cycle. This proposal does deal with bracket creep. It does return money to taxpayers. I don’t know where you get your $38 billion figure from over the forward estimates, but I think your point there is that there will be—that’s assuming, wherever that number comes from, that there will be no change to tax rates in that. History will show that governments have made decisions to implement tax cuts where it’s affordable and sustainable to do so on the budget, and I expect governments of both political persuasions will continue to take that approach. 

Senator ROBERTS: Minister, in my view, I don’t think you’re being honest with the people of Australia, because bracket creep is a stealth tax. Inflation helps your tax revenue. How many pages are in our tax act? 

Senator GALLAGHER: We might have to take that on notice. I’m just seeing if we can provide you with an accurate answer, but it’s quite detailed and there are obviously pages that underpin the tax act as well. I’m not sure we’ll be able to do that accurately tonight, but we’ll see what we can do. 

Senator Scarr: To the nearest ten thousand! 

Senator GALLAGHER: I was going to say: it’s a lot! 

Senator ROBERTS: To the nearest thousand would be fine, thanks, Minister. The point I’m trying to make is that we already have a very complex tax system, which is confusing for small businesses and confusing for people who don’t have access to lawyers and deep pockets. It’s confusing for individuals and families. We always support returning more money to taxpayers, and $15 a week is a lot of money to many people. In the overall scheme of things, it’s not very much. In a few years, you’ll be recovering far more. Is there any plan to actually reform taxation properly, to do a comprehensive reform so that the tax system becomes simple, clear, effective, efficient, fair and honest? Is there any stomach within the Labor Party to be honest with the people of Australia and really reform taxation comprehensively? 

Senator GALLAGHER: I think the government’s been clear about what our tax changes are. They are the Treasury Laws Amendment (Cost of Living Tax Cuts) Bill 2024, the bills I referred to before on high-balance super accounts, multinational tax reform, PRRT—they are the government’s tax plans. Am I missing one? 

Senator Hume: Negative gearing! 

Senator GALLAGHER: I don’t accept that interjection. That is the government’s tax agenda going forward. 

Senator ROBERTS: I move Pauline Hanson’s One Nation amendment (1) on sheet 2342. 

Senator HUME: For the benefit of the chamber, I just want to inform you that the opposition is going to oppose this amendment, Senator Roberts. We won’t be supporting it, because the stage 3 tax cuts were originally designed to address bracket creep but do it in a very structural, costed and fiscally responsible way. While this measure would address bracket creep, you’re absolutely right that the fiscal cost of this change isn’t known, and that’s why we couldn’t support it at this stage. The Prime Minister’s broken promise means that delivering the stage 3 tax reforms as they had been legislated originally is now impossible, but the coalition remains committed to fighting bracket creep and to enshrining aspiration, because strong leaders keep their promises, even when it’s hard to do so. 

Senator GALLAGHER: I made some comments previously, but we will also be opposing this amendment. The bill before the chamber does deal with bracket creep. It delivers tax cuts for 13.6 million Australians. It’s carefully calibrated to provide more cost-of-living relief. I know that Senator Roberts said that it was $15. I think that figure he is using is the extra that people will get. Those people will get $15 extra on top of the tax cuts they otherwise would have got, and, for many people, that is a substantial amount of money. We recognise there are other things to do on the cost of living. That’s why our other measures are being put in place. But in terms of your amendment, we oppose it. We think the way we’re approaching it in this bill is preferable, and it’s the way it has been done in the past. It gives government the flexibility to make those decisions when it’s affordable to return bracket creep in a way that can maximise those returns. 

Senator ROBERTS: Minister, I want to take you back briefly to a previous answer you gave when you implied the surplus—which is correct in the budget. The surplus has only been around for two years because of the strength of our agricultural production and our coal and iron ore exports. That’s the only reason. What we’re seeing is a country that is at the mercy of international prices for its major primary products. If something happens, then we have to rely upon bracket creep to pull us out of the mess, and that’s not fair to Australian families and individuals. 

Senator GALLAGHER: I accept that our export industry and our resources certainly contribute to our tax revenue through company tax receipts and others, but the strength of the revenue upgrades has also been improved and strengthened by the strength of our labour market. We’ve had many more people in jobs earning money and therefore paying tax than we have previously. Unemployment is at a record low; participation is at a record high. It’s kicking up a bit now, but that has contributed significantly to the improved position of the budget. Yes, we acknowledge that. Part of that has allowed us to pay debt down so that we’re not paying as much into the future and generations of the future are not paying those interest costs—the fastest-growing cost on the budget is managing the interest costs on our debt— and it’s allowing us to deal with all of those areas of pressure that we talk about all the time in here: the NDIS, aged care, hospitals and defence. They are all big costs coming at the budget, and we do have to manage it in a responsible way. 

Senator ROBERTS: I’m not pretending to say it’s easy. It’s complex, but it’s excessively complex. You’re addressing the need for increasing tax revenues for the extra expenditure, including interest payments, but what you’re not saying is that a lot of that money is coming from individuals through immigration, which is putting enormous pressure on house prices and inflation. That’s a real impediment to people looking for houses right now. We’ve got people in Queensland sleeping in tents in showgrounds in Gladstone, in parks in Bundaberg, in parks and on the banks of the river in Brisbane and in Ipswich, Logan and Townsville. I think we’re making a rod for our own back. When are we going to see comprehensive tax reform to take the load off individuals and put it onto large corporations so they start paying their fair share? 

Senator GALLAGHER: Well, I’ve outlined that we do have a bill around multinational tax reform to ensure that those big multinational companies are paying their fair share of tax. I think if you talk to many domestic companies they’ll say they’re paying their fair share of tax right now. People have a view about that, I guess. Individuals do contribute substantially to the Commonwealth budget through income tax. We need to generate revenue in order to pay for services. On your point around population and housing, obviously you can’t do everything through tax cuts, and that’s why all those initiatives we’ve got in housing are so important and why we want the chamber to support the latest part of our housing initiatives, which is Build to Rent. We’ve got a full suite of programs. We acknowledge that supply is the problem, and the Commonwealth is right in there with our sleeves rolled up, working with states and territories, to do whatever we can to generate more supply. Also, as you know, some of the changes we’ve made to the migration system have ensured that those net overseas migration numbers that we’ve seen rise post-COVID are coming back down to our more traditional rates.