While travelling through North Queensland, I held a number of events including in Mackay, Bowen and the Whitsundays. This is what I had to say to attendees on the current issues in Australia before we went into Q&A sessions.

Transcript

Malcolm Roberts:

Well, thank you for being here and thank you for being awake and thank you for making an effort for our country Australia and for our state Queensland, and for the region of Bowen and the Burdekin electorate, and also the Mackay electorate and the Whitsunday electorate. We have got fine candidates who are doing their role as citizens, so thank you so much.

I want to make a confession. Well, before I make the confession, I used to work at Collinsville because when I graduated from university with an Honours Degree in Mining Engineering, I decided I better go and learn something. And I’m serious. I went to the underground mines, mostly underground, one open-cut mine Queensland, New South Wales around the country to get practical experience. And one of them was Collinsville number two, which has since shut. It was an underground mine, so you know about that.

So I used to come into Bowen on some weekends because we used to work five-day weeks in those days. My confession is that I used to vote for the uni party. Now, the uni party is a name we’ve coined because the Liberal National Party and the Labour party are almost identical in policies. There is a reason why I generally put the liberal nationals ahead above the Labour Party in my preferences because the Labour Party, if you stand up, you’re gone. In the liberal party, you may be gone. A few LNP do stand up on a few issues, but they recently demoted who I think is their best senator, to an unwinnable position. That tells you everything you need to know about the LNP, apart from looking at David Cristafulli, who stands for nothing. So we have got to get away from the uni party. I used to vote for the Liberals, used to vote for the uni party. Not anymore. Put the Greens last Labour party, second last and Liberals generally third last. That way my vote if the minor parties don’t go in, gets to the LNP rather than the Labour Party.

I’ll be mentioning one of the gods of the LNP in my talk. He’ll probably come up several times. I thought he was wonderful, then I got the facts. And I’ll show you some of those facts. Our constitution is the only constitution in the world in which the people voted for it before it came into place. Did you know that? This is the only country where the people voted for the Constitution? Who are the only people who can change the constitution? The people. Who elects the government? In our constitution, we have a constitutional lawyer here who’s taught constitutional law at universities. In our constitution, the people are the supreme sovereign entity. Did you know that? The reason we’re in a mess under the leadership of the Uni party, the LNP and the Labour Party with policies almost identical is because we as a citizenry have fallen asleep and I include me in that, I said we.

When I started waking up, I started getting active and I’m going to show you what we did, but I want to compliment the candidates, Julie, Kylie with Andrew for standing up because it’s what we need to do. Government has three roles. Protect life. Both parties have taken lives in the last four years, both parties have taken lives with abortion bills. The second role is to protect property. The man I’m going to raise repeatedly because it just so happens that the facts show that I will repeat his name repeatedly is the number one thief for property rights in this country and it will stun you when I tell you who it was.

The third role of government is to protect freedom. The Uni party, liberal Labour, and liberal Labour have stolen freedoms not just in the last four years, but for decades in this country. Won’t you consider our Queensland? Consider Australia. Look at our resources. The UN itself has said second to none in the world, second to none. We have wonderful people. We’re starting to become less educated because of our indoctrination rather than education in schools now, but we’ve still got very talented people, people willing to have a go. We’ve got the world’s largest market to the north in Asia. We’ve got huge potential.

And yet look at us. We’ve got people in Mackay sleeping in tents, but now that you mentioned it, we’ve got them in Cairns, sleeping in tents under bridges, in cars, working families sleeping in cars, going home at night to their kids in a car, good working families sleeping in tents, caravans, getting moved on by councils. Cairns, Townsville, Mackay, Rocky, Maryborough, Bundaberg, Gladstone, city of Brisbane, city of Ipswich, Beaudesert. And a lady’s mouthing to me, Bowen. This is disgraceful. We should be the world’s richest state. We’ve got huge debt under both parties.

So I want to talk first about housing. The great Australian dream of owning your own home is increasingly out of reach for many Queenslanders as housing supplies dwindle, housing demand increases and construction costs soar and people are sleeping in tents. We visited some yesterday. We visited two lots in Mackay, one out near Marion-

Speaker 2:

Out in Julie’s electorate.

Malcolm Roberts:

… Julie’s electorate.

Speaker 2:

And then the one in the city.

Malcolm Roberts:

In the last five years, homelessness has increased 22%. That’s under liberal labour Uni party, tents, cars. People are trapped in the jaws of unaffordability. Think about why. Now, Julie talked about the details of our housing policy, I’m not going to go there. I’m going to talk about why. 1.9 million residents with visas in this country before COVID all wanting houses, 1.9 million foreigners. When Anthony Albanese came in, he said, “We will increase migration until we catch up with pre-COVID.” In February last year, 2023, the residents numbered 2.3 million. We were well above already.

But it gets worse than that. We have in the last financial year, 737,000 arrivals in this country, three-quarters of a million arrivals. The net migration, when you remove those who left, 518,000 additions, half a million. When you look at the ratios, that builds a need for 200,000 houses. We are in a housing crisis and Morrison increased their immigration and then Albanese drastically increased immigration.

Why did they do that? I’ll tell you why. Because under the latest stages of Morrison’s prime minister ship under the Liberal National Party and under the Anthony Albanese’s prime minister ship, we have been in a per capita recession per person, and our economic growth is negative, negative. We are in a per capita recession. How do you hide that? Because you don’t want to be the prime minister who’s blamed with a recession, but what you do is you bring a whole lot of people in, bump up the GDP, we’re not in recession barely.

But when you’ve got people sleeping in tents with their kids under bridges, that shows you just don’t care. They don’t give a damn. They just want to make sure they don’t get tagged with the recession. Since John Howard, he was the first to raise immigration dramatically, he almost doubled it and put us on the big, big immigration path, the big Australia path. It got raised from him to almost double under Turnbull and Morrison and then it’s quadrupled under Anthony Albanese. And Peter Dutton has said he will reduce immigration back to very high levels. Insane. I’m saying we need to not only stop migration, we need to, and migrants have been wonderful. I’m part migrant.

We need to actually send some of the resident visa holders home until we catch up with the housing and the infrastructure. So we need to reduce demand. I’m going to get onto some of the key policies that until every Australian in a tent has a roof over their heads, we shouldn’t let foreigners buy houses. New Zealand and Canada have recently said that no foreigners can buy houses in their country. We’re the holdouts. We want to stop foreigners owning houses, residential real estate in this country.

But I also want to talk about a couple of other things. We want to offer the option for a personal super to be invested in primary residence. It’s your money. And then on the sale of the house later down the road, decades down the road, the proceeds are restored to the super fund. What’s wrong with investing in your own house? It’s real estate. Second and thirdly, we want to create 5% mortgages. Ditch Labor’s Housing Future Fund. Sounds wonderful. They said it’s $10 billion. What they didn’t tell you and the media didn’t tell you was that it’s $10 billion put in a fund and then the return on investment of that fund is invested in houses. Could be $300,000, $300 million. That’s it. It’s not a $10 billion fund and they didn’t tell you that three lots of bureaucrats come with that future fund. It’s bullshit.

So we want to replace that with a new people’s mortgage scheme, which will pump out 5% mortgages, low interest rate mortgages to people who qualify. Then the next one. Some people have done what they think was the right thing and gone to university and developed a HECS debt. And then when they go to the bank to get a housing loan, they can’t get one because they’ve already got the HECS debt. So what we’re saying is allow people with a HECS debt to roll the HECS debt into their people’s mortgage scheme debt so they’d have one debt that will take longer to pay off, but at least they can get into a house and start paying the damn thing off. So that’s unique to us too.

Julie mentioned we want to review and revise taxes on homes. Currently, 45% of a new house price is tax. Did you know that? Those figures came from the Real Estate Institute in New South Wales and the federal government, government fees, taxes, charges, duties. So we believe One Nation believes in the great Australian dream of owning your own home and we are alone in saying and having policies that will make it easier for Australians to own homes.

Let’s move on to energy. When coal reigned in this country, we had the cheapest electricity in the world. Did you know that? Now as a result of John Howard’s policies and subsequent labour ramping up of those policies, we have the world’s most expensive electricity. We have coal coming out of power state, coming out of mines, going straight into a power station and the electricity costing 25 cents a kilowatt-hour. We take that same coal, put it on a train for a couple of hundred kilometres, transship it at a port onto a boat, send it what? A couple of thousand kilometres to China, Asia, another boat, another port, another handling fees, and then they put it on a train to their port, to their coal-fired power station and they produce electricity and sell it at eight cents a kilowatt-hour.

Why is that? Because they don’t have the subsidies that we have for solar and wind. Your price for electricity, our price for electricity is so damn high because of the solar and wind subsidies that we are giving to parasitic globalist corporations and giving to parasitic billionaires in this country. We’re stealing your money. That’s all it is, for a dream. We’ll talk more about that.

It is a fact that as nations around the world increase their proportion of solar and wind, their electricity price does what? Increases dramatically, not just increases, dramatically. Warren Buffett the most astute investor ever in the world. You know Warren Buffett, ma’am. He says wind turbines are a terrible investment. Subsidise wind turbines, wonderful investment. We have large solar and wind complexes, industrial complexes in the north and west of Queensland and in the western Victoria that have rapidly been built and no thoughts been put into it. They’re not even connected to the grid, but they’re getting money for income for producing electricity or having the ability to produce electricity. Who’s paying for that lack of electricity? We are. So always the people pay.

And then we’ve got subsidies going to these people. We’ve got subsidies for a Eraring power station, Australia’s largest coal-fired power station. We’ve got subsidies going to solar and wind to destroy Eraring. We had commitments to shut Eraring early. Now we’ve got subsidies for Eraring to stay open. It’s funny, but it’s bloody sad. This is an indictment on the LNP in New South Wales and federally and an indictment on the Labour Party in New South Wales and federally. And if you notice the men’s government, the Labour government in New South Wales, it took over a couple of years ago, on the night of the election, the incoming energy minister, she said, “About this Eraring, we might have to think about shutting it.” They know it’s stupid. And then two years down the track, “Oh, we’re going to keep it open.”

And then while we’re subsidising Eraring to shut through solar and wind and we’re subsidising Eraring to stay open now because it’s desperate and the Australian energy market operator is saying that they were forecasting massive blackouts in New South Wales at the end of this year. At the same time, they’re bringing in, and they’ve got in, energy price relief for your electricity bills. It’s insane. So they’ve done it all of their own. And every major climate and energy policy was introduced by which party? Which party? LNP, correct, not the Labour Party. LNP introduced them, Labour comes in and turbocharges them. Then Liberals get in, they introduce more policies to shut down our electricity sector and Labour Party comes in and turbocharges them. Safeguard mechanism, one of the first things Chris Bowen and Anthony Albanese did. That was introduced by Hunt and Turnbull very quietly in 2015 in December. It is dishonest.

Coal, nuclear, and gas, and hydro made us independent of the weather. Until then, humans relied upon the weather. And if the weather blessed them, we flourished. If it didn’t, we died. It’s that simple. Coal in particular made us independent. Before coal came along and coal-fired power stations, what did we use for lighting at night? Whale oil, the best friend of the whales is coal. Before coal came along, what did we use for heating and cooking? Wood. I have yet to see a piece of wood that doesn’t come from a tree. So we chopped down trees. The area of forests in the developed continents is now 30% greater than it was a hundred years ago. Thanks to coal. The best friend of the forest and the trees is coal.

But coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, and hydro have another great friend, that’s the human race. Our human, if you think about it, we were scratching around, basically most of our ancestors were scratching around in the dirt trying to find food for their kids 170 years ago. 200 years ago, a king or queen would’ve lived shorter, more dangerous, more unhealthy, less comfortable, more rigorous life than someone on welfare in Australia today. That’s a fact. Look at this, everything around us. Everything in this room, including the clothes you wear, is a result of steel, which is comprised of coal and best energy comes from electricity.

Low cost energy, and the prices of electricity and energy generally were on a relentless decline from the start of the Industrial Revolution until 1996, 1997 when the UN Kyoto protocol came into existence. And John Howard said, “We won’t sign it, but we will comply with it.” And as a result, he introduced a renewable energy target. His government stole farmers’ property rights, which is the worst thing a liberal can possibly do. There’s nothing more sacrosanct other than life. He put in place the national electricity market and those things are destroying our agricultural sector and destroying our manufacturing sector and destroying our electricity sector. So we had low cost energy, and when energy decreases in price, it increases productivity, which increases wealth and prosperity, which decreases our cost of living, which increases our standard of living. That transformed our human civilization. And in one fell swoop, John Howard and the liberal party reversed that and started artificially increasing energy prices. And now we’ve got amongst the world’s highest electricity prices. So electricity prices are vital for human progress, vital for productivity.

I was a boy in the Hunter Valley. I grew up in Central Queensland and the Hunter Valley and I used to cycle the high school from the bush, we lived out in the bush, past the Alkan Aluminium smelter. It came to Kurri Kurri in the Hunter Valley, look it up because of cheap coal-fired electricity. That’s what’s fundamental for aluminium. It’s gone because of these policies. And when you increase the energy price, it cascades right through the economy. Everything becomes a multiple and all your prices rise. It’s not just Morrison’s high inflation due to his massive spending during COVID mismanagement, inflation. It’s also due to high energy prices and that’s what continues it. We are the largest exporters of hydrocarbon energy, coal, oil, natural gas. They’re the hydrocarbons. We’re third largest in gas now. We used to be the largest, we’re the third largest because America under Biden has passed us in gas exports even though it produces carbon dioxide. So when you add our coal and our gas, we are the largest exporters.

Other countries, China, Asia, India use our coal in abundance. But we can’t use it here because of a lie from the United Nations that is pushed by the Uni party, the liberal labour Uni party. Oh, by the way, I didn’t mention that six years after he was booted from the office, and I was a massive fan of John Howard, a massive fan of John Howard until I started doing my research under climate fraud. Six years after he left office in 2013 in London, he gave an address. And in that address he said, “On the topic of climate science, I am agnostic.” He didn’t have the science. But weren’t we all told that the science is driving his policies? It’s a lie. And I can go in question and answer through the many ways that I have proven that’s a lie by holding people accountable in parliament and in the energy agencies and the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology. But I won’t go into that now.

What I can tell you as a summary is that there is no scientific or policy basis for the climate bullshit. There is no policy basis, no scientific basis, no policy basis for the energy policies that are destroying our electricity sector. None. I’ve asked many, many agencies, not one can give me it. And yet the LNP and the Labour Party are together pushing this down our throats. There are some billionaires behaving like parasites. Do you know what parasites do? They suck the blood out of you and they kill the host, whether it’s a tree or it’s a human. These billionaires behaving like parasites include Holmes a Court who funds the teals, who push subsidies for solar and wind. Is there a conflict of interest there?

I know of no one getting a check from a coal company for opposing this. I know of no one getting a check from a NOAA company opposing this. But here we are, the accusers of that, these lies are involved in a scam, a conflict of interest looking after a billionaire. Have you heard about that in the media? Not more billionaires acting like parasites. Twiggy Forrest. And what did he do in the last couple of weeks? He said his green schemes are falling over and he’s withdrawing them, putting a lid on them for the interim. Then we have Mike Cannon-Brookes, another billionaire. Ross Garnaut is hoping to be a billionaire. And then we’ve got parasitic major corporations, mainly Chinese who are getting the money for our solar and wind. And who pays for all of this? We do.

Chris Bowen, the Ministry of Madness, he says that the transition to solar and wind that’s currently underway, it’ll never be completed. It’s the biggest transition since the Industrial Revolution. And it’ll need this, 40 massive wind turbines every month for eight years at a cost of $12 billion. Now there’s one crane I’m told by Steve Nowakowski, who was agreeing and converted when he realised the environmental damage of solar and wind, he converted. He’s now opposing them and doing a marvellous job, Steve Nowakowski. He said to his knowledge, and I haven’t checked this, there’s one crane capable of assembling wind turbines. It takes two days or so to assemble the crane, then two or three days to assemble the wind turbine, then around two days to dismantle a crane and move it to the next site where you go through the same again. So it takes what? What’s that?

Let’s be generous. Six to seven days to instal a wind turbine. We need 40 massive turbines every month. It’s bullshit. It’s impossible. We need 22,000, these are Bowen’s figures, 22,000 solar panels every day for eight years. A nine kilowatt home solar system the government says we need, that’ll be about $8,000 each, nearly 4 million homes. It would cost $32 billion total. It’s impossible. 22,000 solar panels every day. Come on. So that’s a total of $44 billion for a potential maximum of 54 gigawatts of power. Then the power’s intermittent. On average you get 12.5 gigawatts out of that capacity of 54 gigawatts.

They have a low capacity utilisation. If you build a power station for, coal-fired power station, for a hundred megawatts, it’ll pump out a hundred megawatts. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click. It’ll go down every now and then for schedule maintenance. So it has about 95% or higher availability. And you can plan the outages. Solar and wind their capacity is 23% of nameplate capacity. Instal solar and wind, you’ll get 23 megawatts out of it. On average. On average. But it gets worse. On peak hour early in the morning and late at night, it’s 10% capacity. So that means you need 10 times the number of solar and wind that you’ve installed. You need a thousand megawatts to get a hundred megawatts. And then the life cycle of solar and wind components is about 15 years. So in the life of a coal-fired power station of 60 years, nuclear power station may be a hundred years, you’ll have to change the solar and wind four times. That’s why they’re called renewable because you’ve always got to replace them.

So can you see the huge cost? But then think about this, the huge footprint because you need vast quantities of land and you need 28,000 new kilometres of new transmission line, 28,000. And those costs according to the CSIRO, nonexistent because their costs are forecast at 2030 and all the transmission lines would be built then so we don’t need to include the costs in solar and wind. They’re only being built for solar and wind. We are driving off a cliff with packed in a double-decker bus with Anthony Albanese, Scott Morrison, Malcolm Turnbull, Chris Bowen at the steering wheel.

Speaker 3:

Is that such a bad thing?

Malcolm Roberts:

We’re on the bus! Then you’ve got to add firming costs because wind and solar are asynchronous. They’re inherently unstable. Coal, hydro, gas, oil, nuclear, all synchronous, stable. Then you’ve got to have batteries for when the sun doesn’t shine or you’ve got to build a coal-fired power station for when the sun doesn’t shine. This was all forecast 20 years ago, and labour and liberal are paying no attention. And then on top of that, you’ll be dependent on the weather. And that means very expensive. And who pays for all of this? Who? We do. And then you find coal, not only subsidies for wind and solar, but you find coal is penalised with massive artificial regulatory burdens and solar and wind have to be taken first and coal shut down. That destroys a coal-fired power station. Before everything was fine, it was all humming along.

And then get this. Labour Party’s policy is uncosted. Uncosted. Richard Miles, the Deputy prime minister has refused repeatedly to rule out that the total cost of transition will be more than a trillion dollars. Yes ma’am. What? Dutton says it’ll cost around $1.3 trillion or more. He says he’s being conservative. An independent study says it’s 1.5 to $1.6 trillion for nothing, for a worse system and unreliable high-cost system.

The CSIRO, when John Howard was prime minister said this. This is John Howard’s words, The CSIRO said, quote, “that the only reliable source of base load power was fossil fuels and nuclear.” Why the hell did he bring in the national electricity market? And favours require force the use of solar and wind. So let’s find out why.

Who benefits? First of all, let’s talk before we go into who’s making money out of this. This is going to be very detrimental. The whole of Brisbane’s water supply if some of these proposals goes ahead with solar can be contaminated with toxins, not only Brisbane, Toowoomba, Ipswich, Ben Lee, Logan, Gold Coast. Not here. They’re not going to pump the water up to here. But your own local developments may do that. Wind causes people physical sickness, scientifically proven. Infrasound. It sends businesses broke and families bankrupt. And where do these businesses start manufacturing? China, which produces four and a half billion tonnes of coal. We produce 560 million tonnes of coal, one-eighth. See that in the media? India has ramped up its coal production to be about 1.3 billion tonnes, which is more than double what we produce. This is insane. They’re saying they want what gave us our standard of living. And I certainly agree with them.

They’re killing our competitive advantage solar and wind. Solar and wind are killing our lifestyle, killing our security, killing our future. And I want to compliment Andrew for talking about the 120 byproducts of coal that are in every day use in our society. People are now waking to the solar and wind killing our environment, killing koalas. There are instructions on how to kill koalas to instal a wind turbine, killing our birds, killing our trees, killing our bird breeding lakes in north Queensland, killing our forests, killing our creeks, killing our prime farmland, killing our food production.

And then you’ve got to ask the question, what is clean energy? Right now, you and I are all exhaling carbon dioxide. We take it in at 0.04%. It’s called a trace gas because it’s bugger all of it. There’s just a trace of it. We’re inhaling that and we’re increasing it by more than a hundred times. And we’re exhaling it at four to 5%, 100 to 125 times what we took it in as. You’re all polluters. It’s bullshit. It’s essential for life on this planet. This is being done by the liberal labour Uni party, the ones that I used to support until I woke up. And this is what woke me up. This is what woke me up, realising this. Why are we doing it? Because the United Nations wants to keep Australia in the Paris Agreement, which Tony Abbott signed and the following year, Malcolm Turnbull ratified. Liberals.

The United Nations wants to keep Australia in the Paris Agreement because developed nations are called on by the United Nations to finance the developing nations. China is a developing nation. We’re going to finance China and compensate these developing nations for past emissions and damage due to the climate. Has anyone seen any damage due to climate? Have you? There isn’t any.

So the United Nations is all about revenue raising because it currently relies upon grants, donations from member countries. They want their own revenue and they want half a trillion dollars a year, 500 billion. This is a uni party sellout of Australia, Australian taxpayers and Australian industry. The journal, supposedly scientific journal, it’s pretty crappy nowadays. It’s sold out to vested interests. But the journal nature said that rich countries like Australia would owe middle income countries an estimated 100 to $200 trillion by 2050. Australia’s share would be 5%, which is five to $10 trillion. How about that? Did you know that? The United Nations wants a 5% sales tax on technology, fashion, and defence firms plus a tax on hydrocarbon fuels, coal, oil, and natural gas? Did you know that? Did you know that Tanya Plibersek has raised the policy in parliament of a fashion tax, tax on clothing because they don’t want you to buy so much clothing to feed this mob? Did you know that? Just a few months ago.

Neither the Labour Party nor the LNP, the uni party, nor the Greens, nor the Teals have any kind of plan for doing this.

The solutions with one nation are to consider humans, the environment, and national security and to tell the truth and base our decisions on fact. Our number one policy on energy is to use the cheapest energy that is safe, reliable, responsible. That’s hydro, coal, nuclear, gas, oil. Restore competitive federalism, so the states provide a competitive basis. That is a fundamental tenet of our constitution. It’s been trashed by John Howard bringing in the national electricity market, which is a national electricity racket because it’s not a market. It is controlled by bureaucrats who make the rules to favour solar and wind. So we want to embrace coal. We never have let it go. We want to continue to embrace coal. We want to amend the national electricity market so it’s fair and realistic for all sources. Stop artificially inflating coal-fired prices. We want to end the national electricity market. It’s bullshit.

We want to develop new mines and coal-fired power stations. I’ll talk more about that in Q&A if anyone wants. We want to continue to embrace nuclear. We say to Peter Dutton, welcome to the debate on nuclear. We’ve been advocating that for years. Let’s debate it. We have 25% of the world’s uranium reserves. We export them from South Australia, maybe the territory too. We want to repeal the legislative nuclear ban. Support nuclear. We want to base decisions on facts, data, and truth, not lies and emotion. Thirdly, we want to embrace, continue to embrace true hydro, not pumped hydro. That’s garbage generally with very few exceptions, it’s garbage. But real hydro, Tully, Hells Gate, we’ve been pushing them for years. We want to phase out taxpayer funded subsidies for solar and wind. Large scale, immediately stop. Small scale houses, keep going with the subsidies until your contract runs out and then stop. We are tired of subsidising other people’s electricity for a bogus scam.

We want to force rehabilitation on land that solar and wind are heavily impacting. If you’re a coal mine and you uncover so much land to dig the coal out from underneath it in an open cut mine, you have to pay a bond for every hectare that’s disturbed. And at the end of the life of the mine, when you rehabilitate it, you get the bond back, which seems fair to me. Solar and wind, no bond. Just walk off after collecting billions in subsidies, walk off the land and leave it to the farmers to clean up at their cost. So we’re saying no new subsidies. Well hell, why should we have new subsidies when the CSIRO and Labour and Liberal are claiming that solar and wind are the cheapest? It’s bullshit.

We want to amend the national electricity market rules so that energy price reflects the true generating cost in the market value. But I want to get rid of the national electricity market. We want to prohibit solar and wind on prime agricultural land, pristine, natural forest and where there’s a fire risk. We want to prohibit offshore wind turbines. Prohibit them. They’re complex and dangerous. We want to put in place a solar and wind bond. We want to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. There is nothing simpler. We want to end net-zero. It’s a United Nations scam. We want, listen to this one please, we want to use our valuable resources for Australia first. That’s what we want. Now I’m finished. I’m three minutes over time, but we’ll be taking questions.

Julie asked me to talk about the power of the cross bench. Who knows what the cross bench is? Okay, most people. Thank you for being open and honest and saying no, you don’t know. That’s great. That’s the best way to learn. What happens with our federal parliament, it has two houses of Parliament. It has the lower house, and whichever party has the majority forms government. That is currently the Labour Party with less than a third of the vote. So our government doesn’t reflect the country, but that’s the way it is. Okay. So the government has the majority of members in the low house. They do most of the introduction of bills, most of the policies, most of the decisions for governing the country.

And then they produce bills that come up to the Senate, which is proportional representation, which is a fairer system of representation because it means that if you get, say a third of the vote, well hang on, that’s not a good example because the Labour Party’s in government with a third of the vote. But strictly speaking or theoretically speaking, if you have a third of the vote, you’ll get a third of the members in the lower house. Okay? Sorry, you might not get any like Nigel Farage got four and yet had a bigger vote than the Liberals in Britain who got a fraction of his vote. So the direct representation through electorates, you might get 30% in every electorate and not get one electorate in the lower house. But in the Senate you’ll get 30% of the senators because it’s proportional representation for the state. So the Senate is a fairer system and what they do is they’re supposed to protect states’ rights.

So Pauline and I are pretty rare because we fight for Queensland. So what happens then is you’ve got a break on the government and you’ve got a better representation to represent the population as a whole. In Queensland, the Labour Party abolished the upper house, the equivalent of the Senate, as Julie said, 102 years ago. So whichever party has the majority in the lower house just pushes everything through. And the Labour Party has done you no favours. The liberal party under Chris Ofili is promising to do very little. I liked Campbell Newman. Last time when he was in power, he got things done and he was punished for it, punished most severely by his own senior members of parliament in the liberal party. That’s fact. They’ve told me. Liberal members of his parliament told me that.

So we need a balance of power. So there’s no upper house to put a brake on the parliament. So that means rather than let whichever party is in the majority in the lower house, be bullying everything through, we need a brake. So if you get liberal party, say with more representatives than the Labour Party, but not enough to have half, then they won’t form government other than with the cross bench. It’s called a minority government. They will need the votes of the cross bench, the independents, the one nation, the cadders between. So they need those votes. So with Pauline and me, the Liberals under Turnbull, because we had a balance of power part of the time, they would come to us and we would say, “Go to hell with that until you modify these things to make it better for Australia.” And if they didn’t do it, they didn’t get our vote. And if they did it, they got our vote. They quickly worked out which ways up.

So we don’t have the power to govern, but we have the power to put the brakes on the bastards. That’s fundamental. That’s the balance of power. That’s what Julie was talking about the cross bench. So we’re not asking for the power to run the state. We haven’t got any chance of getting that many people into parliament in the near future. But we want, and we’re seeking for your benefit, the power to put the brakes on the bastards. That’s what we mean by cross-benchers. If we have three or four cross-benchers, we will be able to stop the bastards whether it’s the Liberals who have more than Labour or Labour have more than Liberals.