I’m very, very privileged to be here. Great honour to be here to address you as my first address as leader to a Federal Nationals conference.
And I am just so lucky to have a great team around me. Fantastic men and women in the Nationals Party Room. And I couldn’t have done this the last few months without their support. So the first thing I want to do is thank them. Thank them for their support. Thank them for their fight, and thank them for the work they’re going to do in the lead up to the next election to take back our country.
I do also want to recognise Brad Robertson, someone that should have been there. Brad, thank you for all your work in Farrer.
Yes, he deserves a round of applause there. He did feature in a couple of clips there in the background, but I know we haven’t heard the last of Brad.
I want to thank the state leaders who have come, Gurmesh Singh there and Danny O’Brien. We need you to win in the next year too. Definitely need you to win.
So we’ll be there supporting you. I want to thank Andrew Fraser. You’ve been a massive support in my first few months. I want to thank Lincoln Folo, who did a tremendous work for us as director, as you heard before.
And I particularly want to especially shout out to Meg Keating, who has taken over temporarily. Meg deserves a massive round of applause.
I feel like a kindred spirit with Meg, because I don’t think neither of us thought we’d be in these roles a few months ago. I know how you’re feeling. Yes, and Darren too.
But she’s taken to it with a blom and we’re very, very thankful, Meg and Beth, for all your team at the Secretariat.
Can I also recognise my wife, Andrea, who’s here today. Yes, she deserves a round of applause.
Just before I became leader, a few weeks before I became leader, my wife, Andrea, started a new job as a teacher, an ongoing teaching role.
And she was a bit worried about taking that on and having five kids to look after as well. And I said to her, hey, look, it’s fine. I can help out. I’m just a backbencher. I don’t have a lot on. It’s all good.
But she takes on more than me. So thank you very much, Andrea. And look, finally, thank you. Thank you all for your support in the last few months. Said I couldn’t do it without my team, but I definitely couldn’t do it without you.
And we have been travelling all around the country, as you’ve seen there in the video. And, you know, you come out to events, organise things.
We could not do it without you. And thank you for coming here in Canberra for this very important weekend as we discuss the future of our nation at a very, very important time for our country.
And today I want to start by just looking a bit deeper into one particular issue. The most important issue, it’s how we grow our food and our food security as a nation.
Now in good news, if you like, for the Prime Minister, his government agency does not collect specific data on the production of melons.
So I can’t use that as an example. So I’m going to start with apples. And you’re meant to have an apple a day, right? You’re meant to have an apple a day, so I’ll start with one.
They’re very nice Australian apples. I encourage you all to have good Australian healthy food. And we don’t actually eat an apple a day as a country. We don’t take the doctor’s advice.
We eat about an apple a week as a country. Each person eats one apple a week roughly. In the year 2000, we produced about 1.7 billion apples as a country. We grew 1.7 billion.
It was actually enough for 100 apples a week, about double our annual consumption. This last year, we’ve produced or grown 1.6 billion apples. About the same, about the same as what we did 25 years ago.
But of course, we’ve had rapidly growing population since then, and we now only produce about 60 apples per person in our country.
Still enough to meet the average annual needs of Australians but pretty close to not being enough and if these trends continue sometime in the next decade in the 2030s we’ll become a net importer of apples as a nation.
In fact by the year 2040 we’d have to import one in six every apples on these trends, if we don’t change things.
Now it’s not just apples this same trend is repeated across the range of just everyday items in your supermarket, cheese, dairy, chicken, butter, pork.
All of these things would have to be imported in the next 15 to 20 years unless we reverse this trend. It’s the same thing happening in all these food groups.
We’ve had pretty much stagnating production, maybe a little bit of growth, a little bit of decline. In some, although some like butter and milk have been in a pretty big decline.
And we’ve had massively growing population. And so we haven’t kept pace. We haven’t supported farming. We haven’t supported our farmers. We haven’t grown our nation as we have our population.
And we now face this pretty stark and I think unexpected situation for most Australians that we may not grow enough of every type of food.
Now, we’re still going to be a net food exporter because some might be a bit shocked by this because, we’ve got various governments championing the fact that we’re now producing around $100 billion of food every year. It’s massive. That’s been growing massively.
In fact, the value of Australian agriculture has actually more than doubled this century. But that’s hid, that masks this underlying problem.
Because the volume, the volume of Australian agriculture production, not its value, not taking away the price, the volume of it’s only grown by 30%. And our population this century has grown by 50%.
So just do the math. Our food security is in decline. And we are sleepwalking into a food security crisis unless we rediscover the principle that you’ve got to work pretty hard to grow things like this.
It doesn’t just turn up in the supermarket. It is a bit of a modern miracle that we can get on our phones, click on an app and have prepared food for us delivered within a few minutes. We’ve forgotten how hard it actually is to do that and create that environment.
And we’ve taken for granted the hard work that our farmers and farming communities do to put that food on the table.
Now, we will still have enough food in this country, but really what’s happening is we’ve just produced a lot of beef and grains, and we could survive on a sort of first settlers diet of damper and corn meat but we’d probably have pre-captain cook levels of scurvy too right unless we produce a balanced diet of all these foods.
And why have we got ourselves into this situation well we’ve been focused a lot on rainbow morning teas but not so much on the hard work it takes to get the food there in the first place.
And that’s got to change. We haven’t been building dams and opening up new food, producing areas of our nation.
The first budget that this government put in place, they slashed $4.6 billion from dams funding.
Every, and I mean every, budget update. Each year, the government updates the budget twice. The big budget you’ll see on the TV, and then the mid-year one that comes before Christmas, everyone this government has done, they have cut funding for dams and water infrastructure. Everyone.
And now the sum total is up to $7 billion of cuts to that infrastructure funding.
When we left government, we left them the funds to build the Hells Gate Dam, to build the Paradise Dam, to build the Hughenden Irrigation Scheme. To build the Big Rocks Weir, to build the Dungowan Dam. All of that is gone. All of that funding is gone.
The government has put $3.6 million towards a food security plan. All of this produces consultant reports. There’s absolutely nothing there to grow more food.
And so even the government has kind of admitted we’ve got a food security issue. They’ve set up this task force. You might not have heard about it. It hasn’t got a lot of focus.
So the Prime Minister is focused on melons, just not on growing food. But there’s nothing there. There’s nothing there to actually tackle and deal with this major, major issue.
And so we need to recognise what we have to do to turn this around.
It’s not just the dams funding that has been taken away. It’s the increasing red tape that’s imposed on farmers.
Just last year before Christmas. This government passed a law with a deal with the Greens that effectively took over Australian farming right across our country.
They’ve ended the continuing use exemption under our environmental laws that let farmers just continue to continue to farm without federal government approval. Now they have to go to Canberra for that.
In the Great Barrier Reef Catchment area, a massive area in Queensland, you now have to get federal approval if you do anything within 50 metres of a watercourse.
And I don’t think the bureaucrats really understood that in some areas, some farms, that’s pretty much your whole farm. When it rains, there’s water everywhere in these areas. They just don’t get it.
Our carbon emission programs. We haven’t really cut emissions, by the way. You might hear the government spruik that, oh, yes, we’ve reduced emissions by 28%. That hasn’t happened.
We haven’t reduced emissions in industry, in cars, in driving, in waste. Where have the emissions reductions come from?
They’ve come from converting 7 million hectares of farmland to what they call forest, but really just becomes a hotel for pests and weeds. That’s what’s happened.
And the government’s own agency, the government’s own advisory body says that we need another 18 million hectares to reach net zero. How’s that going to help our food security? It’s not going to work.
And so we need to turn this around. We need a new focus on building dams and water infrastructure in this country. We need to get back to that again.
And today I’m going to announce that we are going to set up, Angus Taylor and I are going to set up a task force to go around and find all these dams that the Labor Party’s lost.
They’ll be like Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.
They’ll be Raiders for Labor’s Lost Dams around the country.
We don’t want to have another generation with all the work that was done, to put these dams in train are left on a bookshelf to grow cobwebs. That’s what happened. That’s what had happened.
And then we came to government, scrubbed off those cobwebs. Thanks to Michelle Landry and Ken O’Dowd, we built the Rookwood Weir.
There are now 500,000 macadamia trees being grown there in the Fitzroy River, thanks to that. And then we had plans to do these other dams as well. We’ve got to rediscover those to get that done.
And it doesn’t just mean dams are the big sexy things, but there are lots of little water infrastructure projects we can do to increase efficiency. We’ve done that right through the Murray-Darling, through various schemes. All of these things, all of our attention must go towards making sure that our nation does not run out of food.
And so we will focus on that again as a party. We also must make sure that we can make these decisions without interference, of overseas bodies who try and tell us what to do.
Those law changes last year that I mentioned in our environmental laws, they happen because this government has weaponised and various Labor governments for generations have weaponised the external affairs powers of the Commonwealth to take international treaties that no one’s ever heard of, and then use those as an excuse to ride over, roughshod over the rights of farmers, miners and other people just trying to create the wealth for our country.
About 30 years ago, a Senate inquiry looked into all of this and, you know, they found, and we still don’t know, we still don’t know how many international treaties we’ve signed up to. We still don’t know.
You can go to a website, the Department of Foreign Affairs has a database, there’s over 4,000 agreements on there. It’s not clear exactly how many of those are actually in force. Some of those agreements were signed by the King of England on behalf of his British dominions. At some time before World War II, we took that power off him. Not even sure what year it happened, but they’re still on the books.
Some of the agreements were signed with countries that no longer exist. They’re still listed there. We don’t know the status of them. That Senate inquiry recommended that there should be an audit of all of the agreements.
Let’s find out what we’re actually signed up to. Maybe it’s a good idea, finally. Never happened. And so it’s about time that audit occurs. And we are going to focus now on finding out what we’ve actually signed up to. Is it in our national interest?
And does it restrict the rights of farmers, miners and the people that create the wealth of this country? We’ll get to the bottom of this. Now, we don’t need to touch things like defence and trade treaties. They don’t trigger those issues.
But we do need to establish the rule that we only should sign up to international agreements that are the interests of Australians.
Because we’ve all seen over the last few years this growth in an international bureaucracy that seeks to tell us all what to do. They want to tell us what energy we should use, what cars we should drive, what food we should eat, even what we should say.
And I’ve had enough of them. I’ve had enough of them.
The only people that should decide what happens in this country are the Australian people that elect an Australian government.
That should be the principle.
It’s our country. We’re in control of it. And sure, we work with other countries, but only in the pursuit of our own national interests and at the heart of everything that’s gone wrong in the country in the last few years. Is this the loss of that principle? That actually, if you’re the Australian Prime Minister, your job is to look after Australians. That’s your job. And you focus on that exclusively.
And now we’ve instead got ourselves entrapped into all of these arrangements overseas that don’t serve the interests of Australians. And we need to re-establish the principle of national sovereignty for Australians.
At the heart, the first shot we’re going to fire to restore our national sovereignty is to scrap this absurd fantasy of net zero.
Net Zero is hurting our food security too. We no longer make urea in this country.
It’s the most important fertiliser. This is the last plant we had shut down under this government in 2022. Late 2022, shut. No more urea production in this country
We now import that guess where we’re importing it from until recently we’re importing it from the middle east it’s got ourselves into a little bit of a pickle right.
Because we’ve forgotten so we’ve forgotten how many people in the Labor party reckon even know what urea is right. I don’t need to explain it to this room but for those tuning in at home it’s made from gas too by the way it’s made from natural gas.
And so if you demonise gas, if you demonise fossil fuels, if you run around with placards saying you can’t eat fossil fuels, well, eventually you can’t eat because half of the world’s food comes from fertilisers that are made from natural gas.
Just not here anymore. So we’ve got to end that. And I’m very proud of the role the Nationals have played in getting us away from this net zero fantasy.
Because it was here last year at our national council, where Llew O’Brien, sitting down the back there, Rick Collis, somewhere I can’t see, moved a motion to scrap net zero.
And we passed that, you passed that. And as Darren said, it was your motion then, it was your motion that changed the country because the very next day the Nationals party room met and we endorsed your decision and ourselves decided to scrap net zero.
A few weeks later, the Liberal Party met and they followed us, as they sometimes do. They followed us and they scrapped net zero too. And now we’ve got this fight that we’ve got to take up to restore sanity in Australia’s energy policy, to save our country and focus again on developing our nation.
We saw this week, we’ve seen this week, the costs of net zero. We saw it. We saw it added up, tallied up. You saw a few days ago the Prime Minister have to go up to Newcastle, the Newcastle area, the Tomago aluminium smelter, and hand over two and a half billion dollars of your money to save those jobs. A thousand odd jobs.
Those jobs do need to be saved. I don’t want to see them go. Alison doesn’t want to see them go, in her electorate.
But we can’t as a nation continue to make things if we have to only on life support. It’s not going to work long term. The $2.5 billion is just one drop in the ocean.
This comes on the top of $8 billion now, almost $8 billion in total, of industrial subsidies the government has had to roll out since it signed up to Net Zero.
Up at Mount Isa, at Nyrstar, at the other aluminium smelter at Gladstone. Time and time again now. We were told, remember we were told that renewable energy was cheaper? Remember that?
And so what’s happening up there at Tomago, just to explain the details, they’re getting $2.5 billion and they’re going to go and build a whole lot of wind, solar and batteries.
To do that, they’re going to say they’re smelting aluminium with green energy.
But, and they’ve been planning, Rio Tinto has been planning to do this for some time. But if renewable energy is cheaper, as we were told, why does it need so much taxpayer money when they didn’t need it when it was run on coal-fired power?
They used coal-fired power for years, for decades. Didn’t have to come here to Canberra to get your money. We didn’t have to hand over $2.5 billion to one of the biggest companies in the world. That’s what’s happening here, right?
They’re one of the biggest companies in the world. Good luck to them. But now we’re bailing out. They’re bankrupt, net zero green agenda, and you’re all having to pay for it.
And so it’s even worse than that. The power that goes to these batteries, you know. They could fill it up with coal-fired power, right? They probably will have to because sometimes the weather doesn’t line up. So they’ve got to fill up with coal-fired power. They can then use that coal-fired power out of the battery and call it green. And you pay for it. You pay for it. It’s a total scam.
And that scam’s got to end because this is not a transition. This is not a net zero transition. This is a transfer. A transfer of wealth from hard-working Australians to some of the biggest companies in the world.
A transfer of jobs from our country to other countries that are not endorsing this net zero madness. That is what is happening to our nation and that has to stop.
And to stop that and stopping that, we will rediscover the wealth of this country because we can, we can get energy prices down again. We’ve got all the resources we need to do that.
We do need a new plan to save our country because our nation is in dire straits right now. We saw some data this week which showed that real wages, real wages have gone down again. They’re down 5% since this government came to power.
The Prime Minister keeps telling us, in the Senate, in the Parliament, we keep hearing speeches about how wages are up. Wages are up.
What they’re talking about is the nominal wage, you know, the dollars on your paycheck are going up. What the Labor Party doesn’t tell you is, well, the price of everything at the shops is going up too. They don’t mention that.
This economic analysis from our government is simply gaslighting on an industrial scale.
It’s a bit ironic for the Labor Party to be engaged in gaslighting because I thought they didn’t like fossil fuels. But they are telling absolute lies to the Australian people.
People’s wages are not going up. They’re going down. They can buy less things. That means they’re getting poorer under the Labor Party.
And the fundamental problem we have, everyone can see that. Everyone, when I get around, that’s the biggest issue. People are getting poorer. They’re going backwards. You hear that all the time.
Our problem is, if the government can’t admit that we’re in a cost of living crisis, how in the hell can they fix it? If they can’t even admit to it, how can they solve the problem?
Because they’re running around saying everything is fine. But real wages are down. Our inflation and interest rates are the highest in the developed world. Energy prices are up 40%. Families are living in tents. Migration is out of control and we’re losing our industry and manufacturing to overseas. But none of these things are being admitted by the government.
A year ago, this next week will be a year. It’ll be a year to the date this week, since Jim Chalmers convened what he called a productivity roundtable in Canberra. Remember that?
It was going to be the biggest issue. They were going to focus on productivity. Well, again, productivity’s gone down again, gone down since that roundtable. Gone backwards. And there’s been nothing done to fix our productivity.
What we need, ladies and gentlemen, is a real plan to lift our economic growth, to lift our country back. And that’s what Angus Taylor and I have been working very hard on and the whole team. Angus is a great guy.
He’s got the smarts, the work ethic, and he’s got the brains to bring this country back.
We have developed a plan, ladies and gentlemen, that’s available here today to bring back our economic growth, restore our standard of living. It focuses on a few simple things. It’s very simple, the plan. Because I agree with what Ronald Reagan said that it’s not easy things to do. Nothing’s easy. It’s worthwhile in life. But there are simple things. There are simple answers.
And there is a very simple answer to the problem we have today. We just need to lower taxes.
We need to lower energy prices. we need to lower migration.
That’s our plan. It’s lower taxes, cheaper energy and less migration.
That’s it. Just do those three things that will mean higher living standards for the Australian people. And we’ll get those things down because we’re going to scrap all of Labor’s taxes.
Who would have thought that putting taxes on property will make it harder for people to buy property?
I mean, they’re out there saying it’s great. I mean, I was on Sunrise a few weeks ago with Tanya Plibersek. She said, there’s never been a better time for first-home buyers.
Well, yesterday the data came out and surprise, surprise, there are fewer first-home buyers taking out loans since the Labor Party’s budget. Fewer. It’s gone down.
Well, that’s what happens when you put tax on something. Less of it happens. So it’s not good news for first-home buyers. It’s not good news when our most important asset for almost all Australians is destroyed in value.
It’s not good. And so, we’re going to scrap all those taxes, but we’re going to go further than that. We’re going to cut taxes by more. We’re going to make sure that no longer will inflation take away your money every time you get a raise.
Because every time you get a raise, you get pushed into higher tax brackets. More of your income is in higher tax brackets, and you lose income from that.
Well, in the future, we’ll make sure that tax brackets are indexed with inflation. If we’d done that with no income tax rate when it was last increased in 2012, that would be $27,000 now before you pay tax. So it’ll have a massive impact over time.
For the average family, it’ll save $1,000 a year in the first four years, in the first four years of our government. A big, big impact for families in this country.
It’ll do one other thing too. It’ll make sure it’s not as easy for the government up the road to keep spending your money.
Because they won’t get money in every year. Government spending has increased $35,000 per household since before COVID.
And so what we’ll do with this tax change is starve the beast that is Canberra spending. And so I like to call it in that regard, the Ozempic of tax policies. It’s going to put Canberra on a diet it needs. No longer will they just be able to waste your money time and time again.
We’re going to make sure that we get those energy prices down by using our resources again. We’re going to use our gas. We’re going to remove the ban on nuclear. And we’re going to build coal-fired power stations again. We can do that too.
It’s a very simple proposition. We just use our resources. It’s even simpler than that. If we’re going to export something to another country, we should be able to use it too. Right?
We’re going to send it to another country, right? Otherwise, we’re just letting them, giving them the resources to take our jobs. It’s insane.
And that’s going to end by us scrapping net zero.
And we’re going to bring those migration rates down. They’re far too high. They’re far too high. We’re going to do all these things. We’re going to be able to do all these things because we in the Nationals, with our friends and Liberals, have a great team to get these things done. As I said earlier, I’ve been blessed with a great team.
And I do want to myself recognise the work that David Littleproud did as a leader before me. He led the charge to get rid of net zero last year here at that council. He also defeated the Voice as leader. We should always be thankful for him for that.
Darren’s an absolute champion. The best grassroots politician in the country. And he’s been there the longest. That’s a testament to what he does down there in Gippsland. So, he’s the father of our party room.
Bridget’s an absolute warrior in the Senate. Just this week she’s introduced a bill to repeal the government’s ridiculous gun buyback scheme. But even just Jacinta Allen walked away from. Didn’t save her skin, but she walked away from. That’s got to go. We’ve got a great team.
We’ve got Kevin Hogan, fantastic financial brains, kicking goals in a senior economic portfolio. Michael McCormack’s developed excellent policy on the Murray-Darling. He knows how important food security is. He’s just lost 90 jobs in the Riverina region, thanks to government water buybacks. Jamie Chaffey next to him. He’s fighting for that inland rail.
Susan McDonald, I see, over there, absolute champion for our resources industry and northern Australia.
Michelle Landry already mentioned, the work she’s doing up there in Central Queensland.
Andrew Willcox he’s bringing sovereignty back in our manufacturing sector.
Ross Cadell this week he’s got an important week for, he’s moving a motion to save forestry jobs from this ridiculous change in carbon credit methodology, thank you Ross. Now, I’ll put an apology on behalf of Ross. He’s got to get the Greens support for this. Ross has told me he’ll do anything to save forestry jobs, so he’s even out there talking to them. Got a fantastic team. Sam Birrell, amazing job defending food processors, as you saw on the video before.
Pat Conahan has been doing great work developing a sensible policy on tobacco excise and vaping. That’s the greatest policy failure probably ever. Funding organised crime, fire bombings, it’s just out of control. We’ve got a fantastic team and I hope I haven’t forgotten any of them.
Anne Webster. Look at her fighting for farmers in VNI West there and all the work she’s doing. And she developed an excellent proposal to give Albury-Wodonga the hospital it needs during the Farrer election. We remain committed to that.
And finally, I was leaving Alison to last because Alison is going to reinsert a definition of a woman in the Sex Discrimination Act. We know what a woman is in the Nationals party. It’s a biological female if others are confused and that will be written back into law in this country.
I also forgot my great mate Llew O’Brien down there. And David Batt. I forgot David. David’s doing a great job. We saw him. I was with him recently over there.
Colin Boyce, actually, just next to him. How could I forget Colin? Jeez.
Colin, you know, you can tell how good a local member is by how many people they piss off in Canberra. And Colin does that in spades.
So thank you, Colin. And Llew, was also leaving him out. Llew has been just appointed a special envoy for men and boys. It’s a really serious issue.
He’s doing excellent work. I know it from your applause. There’s so many men and boys who are lost in our society and feel left out. We’ve made great strides in women’s policy, but we’ve got to have the same approach to the other half of our population as well. And women need that as well.
And Llew’s been doing excellent work. He’s uncovered just in a few months a gap in our policy where the parental leave scheme, the minimum paid parental leave scheme, was changed by this government a few years ago. And we now have the situation that for a dad to get paid paternity leave under that government scheme, the mum has to be in work.
It seems strange. Why would a newborn’s right to have time with their mum and dad rely on whether or not the mum works. Shouldn’t it be for all families?
And so Llew is going to, or I think he’s prodded Charlie Plant and the Young Nationals, to move a motion this week and to fix that quirk.
It’s a ridiculous loophole and I’ve already put a proposal forward within our processes to make sure that newborns get time with both their mum and dads.
And I said when I became leader that I want to have more babies.
I kind of said that because I have been saying that to my wife for years. But we already had five. So now it’s over to you. And I won’t be involved in it.
Well, the only involvement I want to have is to bring in income splitting for families. That’s what I want to do.
Because when we have decided to have children, we do it as a team. We’re a team as a family, right? But our tax system doesn’t treat us as a team.
When we go file in our tax form, we get treated as individuals, taxed as individuals. Why don’t we treat people like they’re together and help each other at that time of life? So we’ll be fighting for that too, that we have a lot more to say about how our tax act makes it harder to have kids in this country.
Because we need a bigger Australia. We need to have more Australians. Otherwise, we’re not going to have an Australia. If we don’t lift our birth rate, I mean, there’s a few hundred people here today. It’d only be about 100 of you descended from you in about 100 years if we don’t lift our birthright. It happens that quickly, so we need to do that.
And we need to do so many things to bring our country back. As I said earlier, there’s that sense, as Darren said, people know that we’re just not going in the right direction right now.
And we can bring it back. We know we can bring it back because we’ve done remarkable things in our history. I don’t know if people have read Tony Abbott’s History of Australia. It’s a fantastic book.
I learned from that. I didn’t know this, but just 100 years after the arrival of the First Fleet, we were the richest nation in the world.
100 years. All the other countries had almost basically industrialised or were on the cusp of industrialisation at that time, and we overtook them all within 100 years.
And there’s no reason we can’t do that again. No reason we can’t be the richest country in the world again. But what we have to do is do everything that puts Australians first.
And so we will lower taxes to put Australians first. We will build our coal-fired power stations again. We will drill for oil again to put Australians first. We will make sure that our migration settings are made in a way that puts Australians first.
We will do everything to make sure that Australians do better, that we no longer have to suffer under this terrible Labor government, and our primary task and goal as the Nationals Party is to remove this hapless and terrible Prime Minister and have a better future for all Australians.
So thank you, everybody. Thanks for all your support, as I said. Good luck for the conference this weekend. We have a country to save. We are going to do as a great team. Thank you very much and God bless. Thank you.
