I ask the Liberal Party, what’s changed since Malcolm Turnbull left? The answer is nothing, not a single policy has changed.

What we see in this budget is a complete lack of vision to enhance our productive capacity with dams, rail, ports and visionary infrastructure. Just sugar hits in the lead up to an election.

Transcript

[Gary Hardgrave] Yeah I mean, Malcolm Roberts, I, for what it’s worth, one of my grandfathers was a truck driver. The other one was a labourer, his last job pick-and-shovel work on the Gold Coast Council. I mean, it’s not exactly absent from my family, that blue collar tradition.

What I don’t get is where Labour and these trendies in the inner suburbs think they can actually relate to the workers and the doers, many of them now forgetting team red and team blue and looking at one nation and other independents, because they want to see real government action when it comes to liberating their right to earn a living, liberating their opportunity to own their own home. Surely you must be hearing and seeing all of that.

[Malcolm Roberts] Oh, well and truly, Gary, you have hit the nail on the head. And perhaps I can go back to something Bronwyn said when I was on with her last year, and that was she was talking about Malcolm Turnbull’s book release, because it’s not just the Labour Party that has lost touch. And she rattled off several things that Turnbull had done.

One was the Water Act, the submarines contract, and she rattled off two others, just so easily as Bronwyn always does. And then she said, “You know the real problem “that Malcolm Turnbull brought to this Liberal party, “he brought socialism here, “and he’s driven socialism into the Liberal Party.” So I ask the Liberal Party, what’s changed since Malcolm Turnbull left?

Nothing, not a single policy has changed. And what we see in this budget is a complete lack of vision to enhance our productive capacity for the future. There’s no infrastructure spending other than trains and, city trains and roads. We need much more than that to restore our productive capacity, to give people a good job.

The other thing, the other point I raised with this budget is that there’s nothing done on the basics. The basics, exactly as you just said, Gary. We need tax reform. Look at, look at a person pays now, the median income in our country is only $49,000 a year. Thanks to Labour and Liberal, our energy costs have gone through the roof. We’ve gone from the being the lowest-priced electricity in the world to amongst the highest in the world. That is destroying manufacturing.

It’s putting cost of living out of the range of families, especially, median income, 50% of the people earn less than $49,000 a year. And electricity is now a huge tax burden. So, and the third thing is fantasy. We’ve got good coal-fired power. We can build hydro electricity, reliable, synchronous, and cheap. What are we betting the house on in the future? We’re burning down our current house and the future house we’re gonna build is hydrogen. We’ve gone from fossil fuels to fantasy fuels. And, you know, this is just bloody ridiculous.