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Stop Hollowing Out the Bush

The Infrastructure Australia Amendment (Independent Review) Bill 2023 will gut investment in infrastructure.

It’s PEOPLE that build a nation. What do they need? They need the infrastructure in place to build upon. This supposedly independent bill proposes to review any previous government infrastructure project that has not yet had spades in the ground with the purpose of stopping previous government commitments. This bill guts the Infrastructure Australia board, reducing the number from 12 people who know about infrastructure and business to three people for whom there is no requirement to know anything about infrastructure at all.

This bill requires Infrastructure Australia to take account of government policy. Where there is expertise, it will no doubt be in solar, wind and battery backup, because this is the point of the bill: more taxpayers’ money sacrificed on a pointless quest to save the world from cyclical, natural climate variation—natural warming and cooling cycles.

By facilitating the destruction of native Australian forests and replacing them with industrial wind and solar landscapes energy prices are inevitably forced up. The energy scarcity from ‘renewables’ destroys employment in small and medium businesses and contributing to a massive transfer of wealth from everyday Australians to billionaire climate carpetbaggers.

To guarantee Australia’s power supply, we only need to build coal fired power stations using new technology that captures the carbon dioxide and turns those into useful products, fertiliser, fuel and hydrogen. This is new technology. This new technology provides clean energy to meet Net Zero targets while providing reliable baseload power at a fraction of the cost of solar and wind.

I don’t give a damn about the UN’s Net Zero targets, but here’s a way of doing it productively. It is a solution that should be supported across this Parliament. Yet these hypocritical Net Zero vandals will not admit that transition is a disaster, harming everyday Australians and will never deliver cheap, reliable energy.

One hundred years ago our country’s per person income was the world’s highest – number one! We can return to that number one spot. All it requires is freedom and infrastructure.

Transcript

As a servant to the many different people who make up our one Queensland community, I speak to the Infrastructure Australia Amendment (Independent Review) Bill 2023—supposedly independent! This bill proposes to review any previous government infrastructure project that has not yet had spades in the ground, to stop previous government commitments. This bill guts the Infrastructure Australia board, reducing the number from 12 people who know about infrastructure and business to three people for whom there is no requirement to know anything about infrastructure—nothing. I expect the government to appoint three bureaucrats who appreciate that advancement in the Public Service is based on giving the government whatever it wants to hear. To call that an impartial board is a joke.

This bill requires Infrastructure Australia to take account of government policy. Where there is expertise, it will no doubt be in solar, wind and battery backup, because this is the point of the bill: more taxpayers’ money sacrificed on a pointless quest to save the world from cyclical, natural climate variation—natural warming and cooling cycles. This bill will facilitate the destruction of native Australian forests and replace them with industrial wind and solar landscapes. These are parasitic misinvestments forcing up energy prices and, as a result of energy scarcity, destroying employment in small and medium businesses and contributing to a massive transfer of wealth from everyday Australians to billionaire climate carpetbaggers.

An amendment from Senator David Pocock will force this exact outcome. The bill ensures every project must have a sponsor, meaning Infrastructure Australia can’t advance its own projects. Good ideas aren’t always commercial or may be so large that a project sponsor risks bankruptcy to do the homework to advance the project to the funding stage. In this case, Infrastructure Australia should be allowed to step in and develop an initial business case with the expectation that, should the project proceed, their investment would be recouped using private Australian capital. It’s fair to say that the Future Fund needs to contribute much more towards growing our national infrastructure. Snowy 2.0 is a salutary warning about what happens when the government takes a project through to the decision stage first and does the maths later and then rubs out the maths. The process behind Snowy 2.0 should never happen again, and both sides of parliament have been culpable.

The bill requires Infrastructure Australia to take account of government policy. It’s interesting to note some excellent amendments moved in the other place, the House of Representatives, designed to put commercial expertise into the bill while excluding conflicts of interest. Those amendments all failed. I have circulated a committee-stage amendment that Independent MP Dai Le originally moved to require the disclosure of conflicts of interest. Why wouldn’t anyone want that? How can a government do a bill like this, which may spend $100 billion over 10 years, and not be worried about conflicts of interest? I’ve spoken in the last few days about the negative influence of foreign investment funds on government policy. I can see nothing in this bill that would stop these predatory billionaire funds using this bill for their own interests.

Other amendments that were not and still would not be supported are as follows. The first is an amendment to introduce a cost-benefit analysis for any project over $100 million. Apparently, the government doesn’t want cost-benefit analysis on investment projects, no doubt because there isn’t a solar, wind or big battery project in the country that would pass the cost-benefit analysis—not one. David Littleproud MP asked for one of the commissioners to have substantial experience in rural and regional Australia. The Albanese government stopped that amendment from passing. The same happened to amendments improving transparency and reporting to parliament. They don’t want transparency and reporting to parliament. I know every opposition will talk about transparency before they get elected and then, upon election, make transparency worse, which is exactly what this government is doing. The Albanese government seems worse than most at breaking their election promises and killing transparency.

Senator Rice proposed an amendment to make infrastructure more social since we are all going to be stuck in our 15-minute cities—or ‘prisons’ to use a more accurate term. Not if One Nation can help it! I do thank Senator Rice for her amendment around continuity of existing projects. In this regard, the legislation is poorly worded. It’s true that some of the Infrastructure Australia projects which hold so much promise are lagging. Many Queensland projects, like the Urannah dam, have not advanced since April 2022. There’s no doubt that this is to prepare these projects for abolition. And rather than Minister King being blamed, the independent Infrastructure Australia will be blamed for implementing government policy—as this bill requires.

Infrastructure minister King has terminated the Hells Gates dam north of Charters Towers and the Saego dam at Hughenden. This is yet another clear indication of the Albanese government hollowing out the bush and delivering our best farmland to foreign multinational superannuation funds and merchant banks for the benefit of foreign interests and to the exclusion of everyday Australians. Minister Plibersek’s water policy changes introduced this week prove just how much this government hates the bush. The proposed measures will destroy rural communities. Country towns have a critical mass for population and services, below which a town is not viable. This government will wipe many Australian towns off the map and return that land to Gaia. The major banks know this already and they’re acting like rats leaving a sinking ship with their branch closures. In effect, this Labor government is hollowing out the bush and using that money to line the pockets of climate carpetbaggers in order to buy votes off the Teals and the Greens—city votes.

The east-west railway and multifunction corridor with associated steel parks have been progressed to the next stage at Infrastructure Australia following One Nation initiating a Senate inquiry. I look forward to the new board continuing those projects. Real infrastructure—dams, railroads, baseload power stations and ports—will never be built outside the capital cities because the government wants to hollow out the bush. It is hollowing out the bush. That’s why real infrastructure will not be built outside the capital cities. The only infrastructure the bush will get is unwanted infrastructure: wind turbines, solar panels and a spider’s web of high-voltage power lines growing like a cancer across rural Australia. And, like a cancer, these infernal things kill productive farmland, destroy native forest and destroy the native fauna that used to live there. They’re killing pristine creeks. No-one in the bush wants these kamikaze, parasitic misinvestments.

There’s support from city folks who are eager to feel like worthy climate warriors while driving their petrol cars and living in freestanding houses, taking overseas holidays and dialling their air-conditioning up to the max. It’s all justified because they support the campaign ‘saving the planet’ with solar and wind power—as long as they’re built in someone else’s backyard.

Infrastructure is supposed to make life easier, not harder. Infrastructure is designed to add to our productive capacity and to grow the pie for all Australians. We hear so often that workers don’t deserve pay rises because they’ve stopped working hard and productivity has declined. Let me ask: what happened to the government working harder? What happened to infrastructure that makes the internet faster, freight-forwarding faster, electricity cheaper and products like timber, cement and steel readily available and accessible? This is what makes workers more productive: better tools and better supplies. Make no mistake: under this Albanese government the lives of everyday Australians will be harder, pay packets will not go as far and opportunities for advancement will become harder and harder to find.

One Nation’s Queensland infrastructure program includes building the east-west railroad across the Top End, from Western Australia to North Queensland, to provide market access for the extraction and grazing industries. But that’s not all it will do. These industries frequently have Aboriginal owners or employ a high proportion of Aboriginal staff. And there’s tourism. One Nation will build a multipurpose corridor in the same footprint as that railway line to bring power, water, the internet and local train travel to Aboriginal and rural communities. We would build the steel parks and take more of the $2 trillion steel market for Australians, growing our economy with breadwinner jobs and solid foreign exchange earnings. We would build the Great Dividing Range project: a dam, hydro and irrigation project to deliver environmentally-friendly economic growth to North Queensland—G power will unleash North Queensland! One Nation will build the Emu Swamp Dam, the Urannah irrigation project, the Big Rocks Weir and the Hughenden Irrigation Project. One Nation will run the inland rail from Five Star into Queensland, along the Moonie Highway alignment and then across to Miles, then through Wandoan to Banana, to terminate at the port of Gladstone. We will connect the port of Gladstone to the east-west rail line to create a national rail route that will take hundreds of thousands of heavy truck movements of the roads while improving transit times. We will not build the Pioneer pumped hydro project, as this not only destroys the environment of the Pioneer Valley but is also a complete fraud on the part of Premier Palaszczuk. This project is a fake big idea to win votes in the city in the next election and take attention off the Mackay Base Hospital’s many problems that the government has caused. It will also waste millions in feasibility studies that will ultimately showed this is a really stupid idea—a dishonest idea.

To guarantee Australia’s power supply, we need only to build coal-fired power stations using new technology. This new technology shows the public the hypocrisy of their renewable lobby. They criticise coal as being dirty so that industry develops the technology that captures the carbon dioxide and turns it into useful projects—fertiliser, fuel and hydrogen. This new technology allows clean energy to meet our net zero targets providing reliable baseload power at a fraction of the cost of solar and wind, I don’t give a damn about UN net-zero targets, but if you want to meet them, here is a way of doing it productively. This should be supported across this parliament, yet these net zero vandals will not admit the transition is a disaster harming everyday Australians and will never deliver cheap, reliable energy. Why are you doing it? Why? What’s your agenda? I suggest it is to orchestrate a power shortage in transport and production in order to usher in a new era of Soviet-style control. You have already shown it—the complete subjugation of Australia, as has been occurring since the signing of the UN’s Lima declaration in 1975 by Prime Minister Whitlam under Labor, ratified the following year by Liberal Prime Minister Fraser.

Labor destroys; One Nation will build. One Nation will build so that people can build. Human progress and economic prosperity depend on human initiative, and that needs opportunity and support. Opportunity and support flourish on freedom and on infrastructure for businesses to grow. Small businesses rely on infrastructure and start growing. There are eight keys to human progress in my belief. The first is freedom—the freedom to come up with ideas, exchange ideas, implement ideas. The second is rule of law—we have seen that smashed in the last three years. The third is stable, solid, sustainable, continuing governance—a Constitution. We have that. We have one of the world’s best Constitutions. Number four is securing of property rights, which were stolen by the Howard-Anderson Liberal and National Party government from 1996 through to 2007. They stole farmers’ property rights, the key to human progress. The fifth thing is strong families—they are being destroyed by policies put in place by the United Nations since 1975 with the Family Law Act—the slaughterhouse of the nation.

Cheap energy is fundamental and the most significant factor for human progress—affordable, accessible, reliable, dependable, secure and stable. A taxation system that is efficient—not inefficient as the current system is. Lastly is honest money—we need to return to a people’s bank in this country. The Commonwealth Bank, when it was the people’s bank early last century, was responsible for human progress in this country—dramatic progress. We had only five million people, but the Commonwealth Bank took care of building our country into a big country. Australia 120 and 110 years ago had the highest per capita income in the world.

To build a nation, people need infrastructure. People build a nation. People need infrastructure to build a nation. Australia has done this—we rose to number one in the world. That is instead of what Labor is doing now, which is a complete subjugation of Australia. Labor destroys; One Nation will build. The people of Australia have already proven we can build, and they have done it many times.

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NATIONAL WATER REFORM: DEAD IN THE WATER

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I spoke on the National water reform 2020: Productivity Commission draft report. There have been way too many desk audits from bureaucrats in the big cities, falsely declaring the Murray-Darling Basin Plan is working just fine.

I ask our rural supporters listening to this speech: when was the last time you saw someone from the Productivity Commission on your farm, asking you about how agriculture really works?

Transcript

In serving the people of Queensland and Australia, tonight I will review the National water reform 2020: Productivity Commission draft report, dated February 2021, a periodic review of the operation of the National Water Initiative. Put simply, this report is a celebration of profit over people. Let’s go through the many failings of this report.

Failing No. 1: the National Water Initiative has resulted in water being taken from family farms that were producing food and fibre for the world. Instead, large corporate agriculture purchased that water. The result has been a huge reduction in the number of family farms growing varied crops that support a wide range of local services and local communities. Commercial agriculture, also known as monoculture, uses large acreage devoted to crops like almonds, grapes or oranges. These properties are highly mechanised, reducing local employment to just a handful. Compared with family farms, corporate agriculture puts a fraction of the wealth back into local communities. The profits from corporate agriculture are moved to capital cities and then to overseas tax havens. There’s nothing in corporate agriculture for everyday Australians and their communities. The Productivity Commission celebrates this increased profit, even though it comes at a massive cost to employment and the health of regional Australia.

Failing No. 2: corporate agriculture uses its ability to run at a loss during the growth phase to purchase water at whatever price it takes. That’s forcing family farms out of the water market and ultimately off the land. This water is then moved downstream through natural constraints like the Barmah Choke in search of cheaper land. Water has to be stuffed through these constraints to meet downstream irrigation requests. The environmental devastation in the Barmah Choke, the Goulburn River and elsewhere in the connected basin is not included in the Productivity Commission’s calculations, yet protecting the national estate matters. The extra profits accruing to the big end of town must be balanced against the environmental damage that the creation of these profits causes. Money might be all that matters to the Productivity Commission. One Nation suggests it goes back and factors environmental damage into its calculations now, not at some point in the future. These natural constraints can’t wait for the next review in 10 years, as suggested on page 13, table 2. By then, the damage will be irreparable.

Failing No. 3: the Productivity Commission failed to quantify the risk to Australia’s economy from shifting agricultural production from diversified family farms to monoculture. For example, one negative movement in the price for almonds, for oranges or for table grapes—and that has happened before—will decimate billions of dollars of agricultural production. The Productivity Commission might not understand risk; One Nation does. Before the National Water Initiative corrupted the water market, Australian agriculture was resilient and diversified; not now.

Failing No.4: the report praises water trading as transparent. This government tried to introduce a transparent water scheme register in 2012, and it failed. Following this sole attempt, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority simply gave up. We do not have a national water register. Water trading is a feeding ground for ruthless water traders and speculators. If the Productivity Commission considers this system to be transparent, the Productivity Commission must be using X-ray glasses. It’s not transparent; it’s broken. Shortly, the Senate will be asked to vote on a bill to create the office of the inspector-general for water compliance. The key responsibility of this office will be to investigate water trading. Since its inception in 2007, the Water Act has provided for a water register on which to record these trades. No such water register has ever been created. The Liberal-National government continues to break its own laws. How does the inspector-general inspect water trading when there is no register of water trades? It doesn’t and it can’t. A complete, transparent, basin-wide water register is 14 years overdue and should be started immediately.

Failing No. 5: water licences, once taken from family farms through unequal economic power, are then being traded into different valleys. The Productivity Commission report applauds this. There’s no analysis in the report of the effect on the land of this changed distribution of agricultural production. Corporate agriculture is buying up marginal farmland cheaply, then miraculously it’s brought to life with water transferred from traditional agricultural areas.

This is not for cropping purposes where the land can rest. These new areas are being devoted to permanent plantings that require continuous watering and continuous run-off. The result is massive salination and environmental damage. This is a time bomb with a short fuse. Just a few years of this irresponsible agriculture due to unrestrained water trading and the issue of salination will be back in the headlines. At that time we’ll ask: how did this happen? Well, it happened because we listened to the Productivity Commission. We valued corporate profits and so-called market efficiency over careful custodianship of the land, custodianship that family farms practised for almost 200 years successfully.

Failing No. 6: custodianship of the land goes back much further than just 200 years, and the Productivity Commission has ‘provided some views on Aboriginal submissions for consideration by the committee’. Meaningless nothing words is all the Productivity Commission has to offer, because Aboriginal use of water can only be quantified by volume, not by utility. Soon after my return to the Senate in 2019, I flew over the whole Murray-Darling Basin and then toured the whole Basin, including the northern Basin, which is northern New South Wales and southern Queensland. In Wilcannia, I spoke with Aboriginal community leaders, Wadi and Eddie Harris. I thank Eddie and Wadi for explaining that their people are a river tribe. At the heart of their culture is their connection to the river, the Darling River. Kids used to spend the day in the river entertaining themselves in a healthy and constructive way. Sometimes there were fish or yabbies for dinner. Elders used to take the young ones and sit in the river and tell Dreamtime stories to encourage respect for themselves and their culture. When mismanagement drains the river, these things are not possible. River tribes can’t move downstream chasing the water; they need water where they are—there.

Wilcannia has the same problem many country towns have; their town weirs are insufficient. Wilcannia’s weir is in the wrong spot and frequently suffers blue-green algae blooms. The New South Wales government has been promising a new weir for 30 years yet still construction has not started. What a metaphor that is for the way in which the Nationals have abandoned their so-called country constituency. That’s why One Nation’s weirs for life program will build new weirs in country areas to increase water storage for human needs. One Nation listens to and engages with rural Australians, with family farms. I ask our rural supporters listening to this speech: when was the last time you saw someone from the Productivity Commission on your farm, asking you about how agriculture really works?

In summary, the Productivity Commission report into water policy does not consider the damage to rural communities. It does not consider environmental damage in a meaningful and responsive way. It does not consider the risk to Australia’s economy and exports of having billions of dollars of production tied to monoculture. It does not consider employment lost from monoculture. It does not consider the final mile of the financial transactions, where the money winds up and who pays tax on the income. It does not consider that water-trading accountability must have a transparent accurate water register. It does not consider custodianship of the land, in particular, salination from corporate agriculture’s permanent plantings in areas that are not suitable for permanent plantings. Finally, it does not consider or factor in the dislocation of Aboriginal river tribes for whom water is the centre of their culture.

There have been way too many desk audits from bureaucrats in the big cities, falsely declaring the Murray-Darling Basin Plan is working just fine. They are audits that cannot quantify environmental damage, damage to rural communities and deprivation of Aboriginal cultural use of water. These things are ignored, and a glowing report card issued—falsely. Meanwhile, the Nationals, the self-proclaimed party of the bush, is busy chasing city votes and saying ‘yes, Sir’ to the Liberals. Rural Australia can’t take this. Rural Australia has had a gutful. If the final report does not widen its calculations to include the full issues, One Nation will move to reject the report.

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