Australia’s trillion dollar debt is eye-watering. But here’s the government wasting money on ridiculous grants and schemes. We have to turn this boat around.

Transcript

Alan Jones:

We’ve heard endless overtures from the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, about his budget on October 25, there’ll be no new taxes. And yet, as I said earlier tonight, we have unconscionable levels of debt. Labour has to honour more than $2,000,000 of election promises. The growth in spending for the NDIS is forecast to be over 12%. That’s just growth. And in defence spending over 4%. And, of course, then there’s aged care and health and, of course, the cost of servicing the Commonwealth debt will increase by 14%. That’s why they’re carrying on about Stage 3 tax cuts, but that won’t get them out of trouble.

The way to go, if you’ve got the guts, is to cut waste. Let me give you some examples. I’m all for the arts, but how do we give a female artist $20,000 for her Yawning Room at a Woolloomooloo gallery? How do you give $20,000 to an art group for Project Immaculate where a Melbourne artist is filming and recording, listen to this, quote, “monthly live self insemination to elevate the experience of queer reproduction and disrupt heteronormative parenting narratives.” Why is $80,000 given for drawing a bum puppet with the image of the then Prime Minister Scott Morrison, on its posterior? $80,000 went to a Chinese Australian poet writing about toilet rolls and bodily fluids. Another $80,000 went to a bloke, this is last year, and what were the Labour Party saying about it in Opposition. It should have been a field day, but $80,000 to a bloke who said he was an experimentalist and a poet and that quote, “Poetry always accompanies bowel movements. There is a mysterious connection between the two.” $80,000. Is that a palpable waste of taxpayers money? Ideologically driven rubbish? And Government and Opposition have done nothing?

Then you get the staff levels of politicians. As I’ve said many times, I worked for a Prime Minister. We had five staff. Now I know things have changed, but does any Australian leader need almost 60 staff? If Dr. Chalmers wants to talk about waste and saving money, which he should, rather than raising taxes, let him start with his indulged ministerial colleagues.

Senator Malcolm Roberts is an outstanding, highly intelligent, splendidly credentialed One Nation Senator from Queensland. Only this week he has raised what he called wasteful Federal Government spending, where two government departments alone spent nearly a quarter of a million dollars of taxpayers money last financial year on lavish business class flights. He cited one public servant charging taxpayers $4,955 for a 55 minute business class flight from Canberra to Sydney.

Senator Malcolm Roberts joins me. Malcolm Roberts, thank you for your time. Hang on. $5,000 for 55 minutes. What was going on?

Malcolm Roberts:

Well, he must have been very, very tall and very cramped to justify the extra room in business class for just 55 minutes. I think he should be able to hang on. But, Alan, this just is symptomatic of the sense of entitlements, the low accountability and the absolutely atrocious governance in this country.

Alan Jones:

I mean, you’ve provided a list here as long as your arm. I mean, if it’s someone else’s money, of course, taxpayers’ money, away they go.

Malcolm Roberts:

Well, Alan, when I walk on board a plane, I walk through business class and I go to the back of the bus. I walk past the Greens and business class, past the Liberals in business class, past the Nationals in business class, past the Labour in business class and plus past the bureaucrats in business class. Why can’t they go to the back just like I do? And in fact, you get a better flight because you listen to people. You have a good natter to people. Isn’t that what it’s about? Listening to constituents?

Alan Jones:

Yes, I mean, you make this point, don’t you? And it’s so true that many hardworking, tax paying Australians who are watching you tonight have never flown business class in their life. Yet here is workers’ money, taxes, being used for staff to fly up the front of the plane.

Malcolm Roberts:

That’s right. And these people are paying their wages. These people are paying their flights. These people are paying the premium for the business class experience, the free booze, and yet they’ve never been on a plane, some of them, and yet they’ve never been, certainly on business class.

Alan Jones:

There is a case for ministers and others flying business class where they get some work done and whatever, but on a 55 minute flight, for God’s sake, I wouldn’t know how you’d run up a bill of $5,000. But, why, ministerial staff, Malcolm? I mean, you’ve never been a minister. Your boss has never been a minister. This is completely over the odds. The indulged way in which these people have staff that could never, ever be fully occupied because there’s the department as well. I mean, if you’re the Minister for Industrial Relations with a stack of staff or the Treasurer, then there’s a Treasury as well full of bureaucrats. How the hell can these staff numbers be justified?

Malcolm Roberts:

Well, they can’t be, Alan. You made a very good point at CPAC. Let me just quote your figures. The gross national debt was at 20% of GDP in 2013. That was the end of the Labour party, time in Canberra. We are now at over 42% of GDP. And that’s with what? Nine years of Liberal National Party government.

Alan Jones:

Absolutely.

Malcolm Roberts:

The so-called restrained ones, the fiscally conservative party.

Alan Jones:

Oh yes.

Malcolm Roberts:

And yet we’re at 42% of GDP.

Alan Jones:

I mean, it used to be raison d’être that the coalition, the Liberals would manage your money better. And those figures that I cited indicate that it’s just been an extravaganza. Look, Malcolm, it might be unfashionable to say it. And I’m offering no reflection on a court case currently taking place in the ACT, but here were ministerial staffers, plural, out on the town, getting drunk. Now, when I worked in Canberra, we had no time to be going to clubs or bars, even if we knew where they were. We were just too damn busy. It prompts a question, doesn’t it? What kind of worldly informed advice could any 24 year old give to a government minister?

Malcolm Roberts:

Well, Alan, I find the same problems at Parliament House. I never stop. I haven’t got time to go out into the clubs. I haven’t got time to go and get boozy. But what it is is the rot always starts at the top. The fish rotting starts at the head of the fish. And the same with government. What we’ve got is a very lax system in Parliament. We’ve got very low accountability between the Labour Party and the Liberal Party. And what we see is, I mean, we are talking about $5,000 flights to Sydney. We’re talking about the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, $5,500 flights, $4,300 flights, $4,184, $4,095, $5,063 flights on business class. We’re talking about that. But the bigger malaise in this country, that is almost insignificant compared to the bigger malaise. We are talking about policies in this country that are not based on data and that contradict the real world data. We’re talking about policies that are costing people trillions of dollars, not billions, Alan, trillions of dollars. You know that from the energy consequences.

Alan Jones:

Well, I’m going to talk about …

Malcolm Roberts:

We’re talking about …

Alan Jones:

I’ll cover that energy thing in a moment. I just want to finish on staff. See all this nonsense about the Teals being refused staff by Anthony Albanese. I give Anthony Albanese full marks. These people automatically have four staff and they want more. I’d like to know what Zali Steggall has done that benefits any constituent in the seat of Warringah.

Malcolm Roberts:

There’s no reason for that in a small seat of Warringah. Look at Anthony Albanese’s seat. It’s three kilometres across in radius roughly, 32 square kilometres in total area. Queensland is, what was it now? I’ve forgotten the figures, but you know it’s 2,800 kilometres from north to south. It’s 2,000 kilometres east to west. We need staff to get around and listen and with us. So there is a need for some staff for senators, but not for MPs in inner city suburbs.

Alan Jones:

I don’t want to let you go without talking about this cost that you talked about, which was a very valid point. What are the costs to the taxpayer of policies? Now, we’ve seen this week, the very thing that you and I have warned about, energy price is going to climb through the roof. Up to 35% increases next year. Business and households won’t be able to cope. You and I have warned of this. We talked about 17 internationally respected climate scientists from six nations including Australia and covering many disciplines of climate science and climatology who have confirmed your conclusion that CSIRO, our leading research entity in this country, had never presented logical scientific points needed as the basis of policy in climate change.

Malcolm Roberts:

That is correct. And what’s more, what we find is that the CSIRO in their first presentation to me, which lasted two and a half hours, as did the other two presentations, the first one, they admitted that they have never said to any government that there is danger from carbon dioxide from human activity. So I said, “Who has said that danger?” And they said, “Well, you’ll have to go and ask the ministers who’ve been saying it.” The second presentation, they admitted to me, Alan, under cross examination of their presentation that today’s temperatures are not unprecedented. Yet the whole global warming, global climate live was based on the premise that we’ve got unprecedented temperatures. Complete rubbish. Complete rubbish. And now we’ve got trillions of dollars going to be blown and wasted and opportunity costs. We’re going to have Australia decimated.

Look, Alan, when I was a boy, I was born in India for first seven years there. Then we moved to the Hunter Valley. I lived in the bush outside of a town called Kurri Kurri. I used to cycle to school and I went past the aluminium smelter at Alcan. That was built, as was the Tomago smelter, because they were attracted to Hunter Valley because of our clean, high quality, coal, which made cheap electricity. Australia had the world’s cheapest electricity. We’ve now got amongst the world’s highest.

Alan Jones:

We certainly have.

Malcolm Roberts:

But the primacy of energy is really fundamental. You don’t get human progress without ever decreasing energy prices. From 1850 to 1970, we had a relentless reduction in the unit cost of electricity, which dramatically rose productivity, which dramatically gave us our standard of living. We went from scratching in the dirt in famines in the course of 120 years to being free of all of that.

That’s human progress. In the last few decades, we have reversed that. And instead of having a decreasing price of electricity, we’ve had a doubling and a trebling of electricity prices. Now the significant thing of that is that not only does human progress get reversed, but manufacturing, these days, the largest cost component is not labour. The largest cost component has been electricity for quite some time in manufacturing. When we increase our electricity prices due to the highest subsidies of solar and wind in the world, we are double the next highest per capita. We are sending our manufacturing to China. China is manufacturing with our coal, wind turbines and solar panels, shipping them to here where we subsidise the Chinese to instal them. We subsidise the Chinese to run them. We are gutting our manufacturing. We have got farmers in North Queensland, Central Queensland, Southern Queensland, during the last drought, not planting fodder crops because the cost of electricity for pumping water was too high. And this is absurd. We are destroying our country. I call it the solar and wind, a kamikaze malinvestment. Kamikaze malinvestment. That’s what these things are. Parasitic.

Alan Jones:

Well, I’ve called it a national economic suicide note. We’ve run out of time, Malcolm, but I just want to commend you, this man called the Climate Change Bill. Talks in simple language, and I’ll say it slowly. Malcolm Roberts, Senator. Malcolm Roberts, that’s this bloke here, has said, and I’ve said this too, but he’s put it in different lingo. The Climate Change Bill is the biggest change to Australian lives, the Parliament of Australia has ever considered. I’ve called it a national economic suicide note, and that’s where we’re heading.

Malcolm, good to talk to you. We’ll keep talking to you. We’ll have you back. Thanks for your time tonight.

Malcolm Roberts:

Thank you, Alan. Thank you for what you’re doing.

Alan Jones:

Not at all. There he is. Senator, Malcolm Roberts.