Look, thank you very much, Andrew, and thank you to the National Press Club for this generous invitation. I also want to thank a couple of my colleagues, Jamie and Susan, for being here today, along with a lot of hardworking staff. Thank you to the journalists, for being here as well. I think Mark from the ACT Liberal Party is here, and Nicole from Nichole Overall from the New South Wales Parliament. Thank you for being here today. Andrew said earlier, it’s my second appearance here at the Press Club, and in between that appearance and now, a few years ago, Anthony Albanese got asked about me on Gold Coast Radio, and I was a bit of a backbencher at the time, and it kind of triggered him.
He went off on a rant about how I like to take photos in front of my tools in my shed, and I sort of gave him a little bit, had a little bit of sympathy for him because we had previously just won the 2019 election, and they’d got a bit of a tower, and he was obviously still smarting about that. He said that all my tools were pristine. That’s what did sort of cut a bit deep. Because, I do use the tools. I do sort of love my shed. It’s one of the greatest things I was able to acquire was a home and also a home with a shed in it where I could make my own furniture that we use.
But I quickly learnt, I quickly learnt when I started making furniture that I could buy things a lot cheaper than I could make them. And, there are a lot of tools, behind me on my shadow board that, I’ve only used once. I’ve spent way too much money at Bunnings, but I take a lot of pride in walking around my home and seeing things that, that I built and beds. We used to have a Wiggles bed that my kids don’t use anymore. They’re too cool. They sleep in, benches we sit on, cabinets we use, a table that I wrote this speech on, things that I made.
There’s something important about real physical things that you take pride in. I even installed a Hills Hoist clothesline a few years ago that triggered other people. But just for the record, that was not a Mother’s Day present. And my wife is right here. She can confirm that. She didn’t want to. She didn’t want to, but it was not a Mother’s Day present despite the fake news saying such. But again, it was something that we made. I’ll just say, you know, Hills Hoist is not even made in Australia anymore.
It’s not made in Australia. So we didn’t install a Hills Hoist. We installed with a company called Austral. I don’t know if I’m allowed to promote companies here on this stage, but Austral is a hundred percent. We’re already here.
A hundred percent Australian made, steel, and I’ll come back to that issue. So, you know, it was a chance, when Albo was triggered by that, it was a chance to reanimate myself with my shed and my tools, and I love them. I also love the shadow board I built because it’s something that if Australia didn’t invent it, definitely popularized here. It’s a bit unclear where it came from, the shadow board. But there’s a guy called Essington Lewis, who’s a great Australian hero. He was managing director of BHP, a great Australian company, and I recognize some of you here today.
And he was a bit fastidious, Essington, and he insisted at the Newcastle Steelworks that everyone used a shadow board to cut down on the loss of tools. And one day, he was walking around the shop floor, and he he noticed a magnifying glass on someone’s shadow board, and he said to the worker, “Well, what’s that for? Why have you got a magnifying glass?” And, the worker shot back at him with a great Australian larrikin spirit, “Well, sir, that’s so I can see me pay.” I love that story because it’s a great Australian story.
But it’s also maybe a little bit relevant now because we probably need some magnifying glasses again to see our pay rise. Young Australians, in particular, have been smashed in the last few years. Living standards, real wages have gone back fifteen years. And that’s before you probably look at the real cost of land and housing. Adam Creighton did that in The Australian the other week. And on his numbers, you really go back to living standards in the 1990s for young Australians facing those costs. No wonder people are angry in this country.
No wonder they are starting to say they’ll vote for non-mainstream political parties. I’ve been angry the past few years at seeing our great country go down the toilet. I’ve been frustrated. I’ve been isolated. I felt that maybe my career was over. But I think we’re starting to get a wake-up call over the past year. We are a country that I believe wants to rediscover our pioneering spirit, wants to start making things again. And I really do think we can recapture our Australian living standards if we focus on that once more.
I think we need to do a few things that I’ll outline today, to do that. We need to scrap this crazy net-zero madness. We need to protect our industries again, so we can defend our nation, and we need to grow our country again. Grow it in many different ways so there are more opportunities, and most of all, people can feel they can have a family, have babies. It’s the most important thing in life. A year ago, when I first ran for Nationals Leader, the Australian Financial Review put a headline out saying that, the Nats’ populism, the Nationals Party populism, was a threat to the economic reset for the Liberal Party.
And look, I’m not here to speak for the Liberal Party, but I’m also not interested in an economic reset. I think given the state of our country, we need an economic revolution. We need major, major changes to get things back going again. And, unfortunately, I think the comfortable and coddled and sometimes second-rate political class in this country right here in this city aren’t thinking big enough. They’re not thinking visionary enough about the changes we need. They remain trapped in the same old thinking of what we had before. It’s as if just one more push on the energy transition, one more economic summit, one more go at sensible tax reform is going to fix things.
I mean, can anyone explain to me how changes to the capital gains tax discount is going to move the needle in a way that will revert the fifteen years loss of living standards we’ve gone through? Because we still remain trapped in, I think, the thinking of the last generation, the thinking of the Thatcher and Reagan era. But I don’t think, microwaved Milton Friedman is going to save the day. It’s not going to cut it, once more. And really, in this town, the chief cheerleader of this status quo, Captain Status Quo himself, is the Prime Minister.
He is continuing to think in these ways. He was here at this stage last week just saying more of the same. More of the same, the same status quo that has delivered, this economic disaster for the Australian people. Effectively now, Albo, who likes to present himself as a DJ, is, now a cover band. We’re seeing the greatest hits of decades ago, but they’re just, they’re not really as good as the original. And before I do seek to scrap a lot of what’s gone before and start again, I do want to recognize why we did those things at the time.
I think a lot of people have forgotten, the reasons, some of those challenges and why they were suitable then. I’ll plagiarize Paul Kelly here in going back to what he describes as the Australian settlement that existed, in his view, up to about the 1970s, where there was broad appreciation for government protection, wage arbitration, imperial benevolence from the British Empire that underpinned our economic growth as a country. But about 50 years ago, people started realizing that that’s not really working anymore, and there was a change.
There was a change. The UK joined the European community. We had stagflation. We’ve been oiled with a couple of oil crises. We’re kind of maybe there again. And there was complete revolution in thinking. And what replaced the Australian settlement became kind of known as the Washington Consensus, a mix of trade liberalization, privatization, deregulation, which swept the world. It swept all, the whole world, and it came here to this country too. For a long time, that worked. It did.
We benefited a lot by the globalization of markets. Our productivity improved significantly in the nineteen eighties and nineties, as did living standards of Australians. The world benefited from the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a whole massive new addition to the global consumption and workforce pool from Eastern Europe and communist China. That helped keep inflation low for a generation. And it’s the world I grew up in. Many of us here did. But that world has gone now.
All of those trends are reversing. The population is aging in most countries. We don’t have those increases in workforce numbers. Spending and debt have gone through the roof. Businesses now are not running themselves to be profitable. They’re following this thing called ESG, which if you don’t know what it stands for, it’s, extreme shortages guaranteed. And you can see that at petrol stations today. China came into the WTO and promised to get rid of its barriers, but it never did, and now we have a constant cycle of protection from different countries.
All of these changes should make us reevaluate whether this former consensus is the right thing for our country, and we should be very clear about how we did deliver those benefits. It wasn’t by mouthing slogans about the market or reform. It was because we took a concerted effort to when we lowered trade barriers, we also lowered the costs of doing business. It was key. It was explicit. It was part of the strategy that if we were to expose our businesses to competition in other countries, then we would have to make sure that they were match fit and could compete with other countries.
Now, of course, instead, we’ve just loaded them up with costs, and we expect them to still survive when they’re thrown to the wolves. We were in a world where trade barriers were coming down everywhere, and while we never quite got to free trade, especially in agricultural goods, you know, there were lower trade barriers. Whereas now, you know, just in the last weekend, the US has whacked on a hundred percent tariffs on our pharmaceuticals. China’s just announced that they’re not taking any more beef this year.
The export quota’s been reached. We’re not in the same world we were. We also were able to achieve a lot of efficiency gains by just sucking more lemon, more juice, sorry, out of the lemon with the infrastructure that’d been built in past generations. In the post-war period, we built the Snowy Hydro. We built lots of power stations. We built new centres like Cairns, with an international airport, a tourist destination. We were able to make all of that work more efficiently and, and that provided a gain. But the crucial thing is it was a one-off.
Once you do that and make those things work better, that’s it. You can’t keep going back to that world. And finally, finally, governments did, did reduce debt and did reduce deficits in the, I just can’t believe this stat, but, you know, I checked it out. In the eighteen years before the GFC, the federal government’s budget deficit was just point two per cent of GDP. In the eighteen years since, it’s been ten times that amount. It’s been two per cent of GDP on average, and clearly that’s not slowing down under this government. So I think, I think all of those conditions have changed, so therefore our policy settings have to change, and, and we have to listen to the Australian people and completely revolutionize how we do things.
And I want to spend the rest of today outlining what I’m terming a Patriot Agenda for our national economic revival. A few things, will challenge some people, but I think are better suited to the times we live in. I think we need a manufacturing renaissance, to protect key industries in this country. And we need to use all the tools to do so, including the use of tariffs. We need to close our borders to mass migration. What we take is far too high right now. It’s putting pressure on all types of services and infrastructure and housing.
We need, we need to deliver energy abundance. We have so much energy in this country, but we’re not using it. We’re locking most of it up through ridiculous bans, and that’s holding our nation back. We should have a new 21st century national works program. We need to build new infrastructure, new dams, new power stations, and including new technologies like space as well. We need to build new cities. Why have we stopped to just a few? We’ve got a massive continent. That’s one of the main reasons people can no longer have a house with a backyard.
We need to do that. And if we do that, if we’ve got people with a home and a backyard, I think people will start having babies again, and we desperately need that given the shocking decline in our birth rate. So I’m not proposing a replay or reset. This, I believe, as I say, is something a little bit more significant. I am proposing a revolution. Some of it will need the slaying of long overdue sacred cows, including a naive belief that open trade and open borders and open flows of people are always and everywhere going to be the best thing for our country.
They can be a good thing. They can be. And they have been in some times in the past, but they’re clearly not the right approach now. Five years ago, The Nationals Party released a paper on how to revitalize our manufacturing sector. Now, in that paper, we did suggest that it was time again to protect some key industries. We did say that the anti-dumping regime needs to be totally overhauled and better suited to the situation we have today. And part of that involves the more judicious use of tariffs.
Now, I don’t agree with Donald Trump. I don’t agree with Donald Trump on a few things lately, but I don’t agree with Donald Trump that tariff is the most beautiful word in the English language. But I don’t think it’s a dirty word either. It’s just a tool. It’s a tool we already use through the anti-dumping regime, but we just do so in a pretty ad hoc, band-aid, knee-jerk fashion. We clearly are not facing an issue now of countries just every now and again dumping goods here.
There is a more permanent strategy, explicit strategy of many other countries, including the United States and China, to steal our industries, to take our jobs, and do so with a strategy that plays that over long term. So to keep those industries here, we should respond in kind. We need a more permanent and coherent strategy to protect, what’s essential to our country. I’ve visited a lot of steel fabrication plants in the last few months, and many of them are on their heads. I visited a place called Jennmar in Mackay just a couple of months ago.
They make roof bolts. So they keep up, keep up the ceiling in an underground coal mine. Pretty important. Very important for safety. They’ve always been Australian-made, made from steel milled in Whyalla, sent to Mackay. They put a thread on it, put some plastic in it, and it goes into the coal mine industry. A great Australian supply chain creates jobs right through the country. But in the past few months, they’ve started to see for the first time the importation of Chinese-made roof bolts that undercut them to a great degree.
They currently, along with other steel plants, have an application in with the Inter-Trading Commission right now. It could take, it possibly will take to the end of the year to resolve. And I don’t know if that’s enough time. And we’ve got to keep our steel industry. We are the biggest exporter of coking coal and iron ore in the world. It is the two things that make steel. Yet, we are no longer self-sufficient in it, and we risk losing most of it. One of our steel mills is on taxpayer-funded support. We’ve got to keep this industry.
We’ve got to have a better plan to do so. I mean, the government’s already put up a white flag on all of this. They’ve already admitted that things aren’t working. In the past year alone, along with that Whyalla steel plant, they’ve also provided subsidies to aluminium, to zinc, to copper, more than five billion dollars. And, and another three billion probably for the Tomago aluminium smelter in the weeks to come. This is protection. This is we’re protecting industry. We’re not doing free trade anymore. But we’re just doing so in probably the worst way, where a few key businesses get government support, and we ignore many of the other small businesses like Jennmar like these other steel fabrication plants who don’t have the political capital.
Now, those subsidies that the government is giving are much, much higher thanks to Labor’s net zero agenda. Nobody can quite explain to me why, that you had Rio Tinto could smelt aluminium in Newcastle and Gladstone for decades using coal-fired power and not need any subsidies. In fact, pay taxes, pay into the national treasury. And then it’s only been since they decided that they would turn their aluminium smelters to green energy to follow renewable energy, that suddenly they’ve needed massive taxpayer support.
Now, I thought the idea was, uh, green energy was cheaper. That was the idea. If it is cheaper, why do they need so much government funding? There are clearly extra costs from going to net zero, and then the government’s also admitted this through its carbon tariff approach. It’s now proposing that we need carbon tariffs to save different industries. Again, if, if net zero was cheaper, why would we need a tariff on our own industry, uh, to protect ourselves from countries that are not pursuing net zero? That doesn’t add up. And just on that, just on this one, talking about net zero, it was said by, I hadn’t watched the PM’s speech until last night on the way down the plane here that was here last week.
I didn’t realize, I didn’t think after I listened to it all, and I went and searched this, the Prime Minister did not mention net zero once. Not once. I mean, he’ll say to what I’m saying, say, he wants a future made in Australia. He wants similar goals. I’d like to see that. That’s great. But the whole centrepiece of a future made-in-Australia agenda, the whole point of Labor’s manufacturing policy, is to pursue net zero. That’s what it all flows from. And yet the Prime Minister did not even mention that goal here on this stage last week.
Has he dropped it, not told us? They’ve just dropped the eighty-two percent renewable target, just announced today, have they dropped net zero too? Because if they don’t, if they don’t believe in net zero anymore, their whole manufacturing agenda is bankrupt. And nothing shows that bankruptcy more than their response to this last few weeks to the liquid fuel crisis we have. Just like steel, we’re learning we need liquid fuels. And yet now the government is subsidizing the foreign production of oil. We passed a bill last week in the Senate that would subsidize the production of oil in other countries to create jobs in those places.
Yet we put a tax, we put a carbon tax on oil production in this country. The Labor Party has put a tax on the last two refineries we’ve got here in Australia. So we’re taxing our jobs here, refusing to develop our oil and gas here, but, subsidizing it in other countries.
So to recapture our sovereign capability, we’ve got to end this net zero madness. We’ve got to invest again in all types of energy, including coal and oil and gas and nuclear. And yes, renewables too. They need to be part of the mix as well.
But it just has to be a balance. Now, it’s a great shame that we’ve had to go through a liquid fuel crisis for people to start to wake up to this, but I think, they are. And while this is a tough time for many people, and I want to recognize the many businesses that are struggling right now with higher fuel costs, in some cases, the unavailability of fuel, and in many cases, the uncertainty of whether there will be fuel to finish planting regimes and the like around the country.
I do want to give hope, though, that we can solve these challenges because we are in a lucky country. We are in a lucky situation that we are the only country in the world that has its own continent. We have our own continent. There’s a lot of stuff on this continent, including a lot of oil and gas that’s yet to be explored. All we have to do is unlock it. All we have to do is use our country again, and we will solve these problems. It’ll only be through the use of our energy, our energy reserves, our energy resources, that we really have a made in Australia agenda.
It’s the only way. If we do that, to start using our country, we’ll rediscover our pioneer spirit as a nation as well. We need to build things again. As I said earlier, we’ve relied too much on the infrastructure that was built by previous Australian generations, and we haven’t built a major dam for a generation. When we were in last office, we did build the Rookwood Weir. It’s a great water storage, and, and more than five hundred thousand macadamia trees have been grown west of Rockhampton now, thanks to it. But, we haven’t built a major one for a while. We had funded the Hells Gate Dam when we left office, but the Labor Party has scrapped all that dam’s funding, and we need to look again at expanding new farming districts.
Last week, Angus Taylor and I announced that we support and want to see a proper inquiry, a Commission of Inquiry into the Murray-Darling. Part of that is to look at the water infrastructure that’s there and making sure it can stay there, because some of that is getting so old. We’re living so much off the legacy of previous Australian generations that some of that infrastructure is now getting to a hundred years old without major investment. Things like the Burrinjuck Dam just north of here in this town. It underpins so much farming production in the Murray-Darling.
Forty percent of our food comes from there. But if we don’t start reinvesting in those areas and looking at that now, we are risking, not just having fuel security, but our food security in the future as well. We also need to look at new frontiers as well and investment in new things. I’m very proud of the work that Gilmour Space has done in North Queensland. They just launched our first attempt at an orbital, orbital space rocket, a few months ago. It was our first, and that’s great. Great to see Gilmour doing that. But, a lot of people don’t realize that New Zealand in the last few years have launched more than fifty orbital launches.
On some measures in the last few years, year, few years, New Zealand’s only been behind America, Russia and China in terms of orbital launches. So they’re doing– they’ve done about eighty in total. We’ve done one. And this government has deprioritized space. It’s not investing in it, and that is a massive mistake. Our first space port up there in Bowen, it’s a great place. Also, where Adani exports its coal from. I think last time I was here, I spoke more about that. It’s a great place. If you know Bowen, it was meant to be the capital of North Queensland. Got these huge wide streets, beautiful town.
And it could be a lot bigger than it is. And so why aren’t more of these places big cities? Why don’t we grow more? We have a situation in Australia where basically we’ve got two big cities, Brisbane, about half of those, and it’s a very unique population distribution. We really don’t have many cities at all, only a couple, that are between five hundred thousand and a million people. And that really does limit options for Australian families, particularly for young Australians, to go to a place where they can afford to own, where they can have a future, they can have a backyard they can play cricket in, and they can possibly, uh, have a family if that’s what they want.
To deliver those cities, we need, uh, to invest in them. We need adequate services. I was deeply affected recently when, I travelled to Albury and met with doctors and nurses and heard about the shocking state of their hospital.
They’ve got doctors leaving, nurses leaving, because it’s just not viable. People leaving. It’s terrible. It’s terrible. And it shouldn’t be happening in our third-biggest inland city. I’ll be back there on Monday in Albury hosting a health forum with The Nationals candidate for Farrer, Brad Robertson. We need to invest in these places. We have an opportunity with work from home too, to build these new cities, to unleash those opportunities. Because finally, we have a situation where professional jobs can be done not just in our major cities, but also in regional towns.
And to get a family to move to a country area, you kind of do normally need two jobs, not one. And if we have a greater variety of jobs in those country towns, there’ll be more options for people to move. That’ll be great for the people who do stay behind too. If people move to a new town, then there’ll be more space in Sydney and Melbourne as well. And as I say, if we’ve got people with homes and backyards, they’ll probably decide to have children. And I just want to firm up that how important this is.
Our birth rate’s below one point five. If it stays at that level, the rough rule of thumb, the next generation will be our current population times by one point five divide by two.
Divide by two because I think it’s still the case that only women can have babies. Science has gotten fast, but I think it’s still. So, on those numbers, our next generation, people descended from the current Australians alive today, will be twenty-one million. Generation after that will be sixteen million. One after that, we’re just eleven million.
So by the end of this century, just eleven million Australians will be descended from those alive today. That will completely change Australia because we actually do need to have, people that are born here, raised here to hand down the flavour of what is great about this country. Yes, we’re welcoming, we take in migrants. I’m a product of that. But we also need to have children as well, otherwise we just won’t have a country. And so I’ve supported a number of ways to do that. I’ve a lot more to say about this, about giving pa-parents more choice, but it has to be, uh, uh, correcting the imbalance of the tax system, where parents who look after their own children are taxed for that help, sometimes paying twenty thousand dollars or more a year in tax, and that is just too big a cost to bear.
If we do that, if we’ve got babies, we won’t rely on migrants. We don’t have to rely on bringing in so many people as much, which is draining our country, particularly in our universities. I hear from so many young people that they go to classes now and the vast majority of people are not Australian. And I think Australian universities should be there primarily to teach Australian students and to do Australian research. Sure, we can offer services, we can offer places to overseas students, but it’s just gotten so far out of whack under this government, and that student visa scam has to end. And, back in Essington Lewis’s days, when it started in the nineteen thirties, we had a birth rate that was well above replacement level.
We were a confident country. We did have a community that was wanting to defend this nation. Essington Lewis himself, he travelled to Japan in the nineteen thirties, and he saw that war was almost certainly going to come. He came back to Australia and with Holden and Orica set up a company called Commonwealth Air-Aircraft Corporation, on his own bat. No government support. Just did it because he wanted to defend our country. He was patriotic, as was Holden and Orica. And, within a few years, they were making Wirraway aircraft that helped us win the war.
Within a few years. Quite something. Are there Australian businesses that would do that today? It’s taking a long time, but I’m not letting business off the hook on this stuff. A few years ago, someone approached me, wanted to build a diesel refinery in Gladstone. I was Resources Minister, Northern Australia Minister, and I put him in touch with the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility, who were helpful and tried. It was a good business case to supply diesel to particularly the mining industry. He came a cropper, though. He came a cropper when no Australian bank would give him a bank account.
Couldn’t get a bank account. He wasn’t asking for a loan. He wasn’t asking for some exotic financial derivative or project finance. He wanted to open a bank account to build a diesel refinery, and the Australian bank said, “No.” This is not an isolated story. I’ve helped plenty of people in the coal, oil, and gas industries that can’t get basic financial services from our Australian banking system. And I’m sorry, those banks that did that and made those decisions, they’re not being patriotic. They’re not patriotic Australians, and they have helped put us in this terrible situation where we have to beg for liquid fuels from other countries.
We should never again, as a country, be in a position of begging for resources. We do have the resources here. We are in a situation, though, that if we don’t use our country, we’re going to lose it. We’ve got to use it. We’ve got to use Australia again. We’ve got to extract resources. We’ve got to develop our nation. We just need more of this country.
There are a lot of problems, and I understand people are doing it very tough. There are a lot of problems. But everything that is wrong in this country can be fixed with what is right. Everything can be solved if we just do more and more Australia. I call it Hyper Australia.
My son does, and I’ve stolen it from him. I call it Hyper Australia, but it’s just Australia on steroids. We just need more of it. And if we do that, we will feel like we’re lucky again as a country, and we will have a great future for our next Australian generation. Thank you very much to the Press Club. Thank you, Andrew. God bless, and happy to take your questions.
JOURNALIST
Matt Canavan, let me kick off. I too have a shed. I too like my woodworking. I’ve got this, Stanley wood plane that was, built in the nineteen sixties in a factory in Glenorchy, Tasmania. The fact is you don’t build Stanley wood planes anymore in Australia or make them because it’s much more expensive, and you can do it cheaper. You couldn’t buy anything that’s made in Australia in Bunnings that you’re paying three times the price. So who pays for your economic revolution, given that it has to be the consumer in the end who cops it?
MATT CANAVAN
Well, two points I want to make. First of all, I can do you one better. I actually have a knockoff Stanley wood plane that has, I think it has from memory CCP stamped on the front. It’s either that or the USSR or something like that.
Russia is not our future.
Maybe knocking off stuff is, I don’t know. But that’s exactly like a standard wood plane. I bought it off eBay. It’s a great little tool because I can fit the Stanley, the blades. So, uh, I would suggest to you, Andrew, that the cost of not supporting Australian industry and key Australian products is much, much greater. Look, yep, one proposal you put on the table is that we continue to buy cheap stuff mainly primarily from China.
We flood Bunnings with it. Yep, you can fill up your tool shed more by doing that. And then, and then at some point we’ll find ourselves in a situation where we don’t have basic things.
JOURNALIST
So where does the money come from?
MATT CANAVAN
So, if we’re going to do this in a more sensible fashion, we need to take the pressure off our Australian Treasury. As I said in my speech, we are already doing this. I mean, the government has recognized that we need to do something, but in what they’re doing right now is making all of us pay by handing out to the current numbers, five billion in the last year, probably another three billion next few weeks. They’ve got eight billion dollars of hydrogen subsidies they still have on the books. Millions of those have already been lost to tweaking forests. And so this is costing us an arm and a leg now.
Wt it be a lot smarter to spread the cost of that not just to Australian taxpayers, but also, in response to those countries that have taken these protective actions? I mean, you know, what I’m proposing is all, all within our rights and responsibilities as members of the World Trade Organization. If another country is going to protect its industry, and keep in mind, China today, China subsidizes its industry to an extent or to amount of money larger than it spends on its defence forces.
It is a massive, massive program. It’s very explicit. It’s not secretive. We have every right to respond and say, “Look, uh, if they are going to act in that way, that’s not consistent with subsidies that countervailing agreements under the WTO. We have a right to respond and protect our industry, protect our jobs.” And that, in my view, will be a lot, lot cheaper than relying on the taxpayers just continuing to bail out selected firms, and/or putting ourselves in the kind of crisis we’re in now where we don’t have the availability of basic essentials.
JOURNALIST
All right, the first question from Jacob Steinberg.
JOURNALIST
G’day, Senator. Thanks for doing this. You talk about how Australia’s leaders have driven us down this cul-de-sac with their insistence on economic rationalism, free trade, free market. It reminded me of an interview that Andrew Hastie gave a couple of weeks ago, which he said, “No one’s going to reward us for a final last stand for neoliberal politics.” He said, as you did, urged for a rewrite of, you know, the tr-traditional liberal economic orthodoxy.
You know, it’s open-minded to cutting property investor, tax concessions, taxing gas multinationals more. Meanwhile, you’ve got Angus Taylor, who is, you know, has maintained his belief in the Thatcher, Reagan, Friedman, you know, model of economic rationalism. I just want to ask, other than, you know, disavow of net zero, what do you have ideologically in common with the Leader of the Liberal Party? And would you not be more aligned with a Liberal Party helmed by Andrew Hastie?
MATT CANAVAN
Well, look, thank you very much, Jacob. Look, it’s always hard. I always find it hard. A lot of journalists always want me to put myself in the minds of other people and say, “What do they think?” and compare it to what you think. I don’t know exactly. A couple of things that I’ll say to your question. One, I welcome Andrew’s contributions to the debate. I think, as I’ve outlined today, there’s a need for out-of-the-box thinking right now, unconventional ideas to save this country. I’ve got a great friendship with Angus Taylor. Go back a long way, and I think we’ve shown in the first few weeks how united we are in, pushing this government to do a better job.
Opposing the cut for fuel excise, the focusing on water issues last week, stopping the increase in the size of Parliament. That would’ve been a disaster. So I’m working very strongly there. But I’m also proudly, of course, as Leader of The Nationals Party, which I can speak to, I can better speak to, The Nationals Party agenda to revive manufacturing. What I’ve said today builds almost exclusively on what we released five years ago. And I would argue that looking back, that seems a pretty prescient piece of work that The Nationals Party did and recognize the work that Bridget McKenzie did and many others did in the party room at that time to deliver this.
Back then, we were trying to respond to the COVID supply chain crisis. Now we’ve got another supply chain crisis. The question is whether we’ll take action now. So that’s what I’m focused on. As I said earlier, I’m focused on presenting The Nationals Party plan to deliver this economic revolution for people. I’m focused on the Australian people. You know, I don’t know what other people think of my ideas. All I know is that a year ago, you guys wouldn’t have given me a chance in hell to convince the Liberal Party or anyone else that they should drop net zero.
JOURNALIST
But, but to Jacob’s question…
MATT CANAVAN
And now we are. Well, hang on, let me finish this point, Andrew, because you just did, wanted to interject because I was criticizing you guys. But, you wouldn’t have given me a chance in hell to convince people on net zero. You were all dismissing me. I was a, you know, I was a crank, you know, out there. And now not only is the Liberal Party supporting net zero, the Prime Minister won’t even mention the words.
JOURNALIST
But back to Jacob’s question, you’re in a Coalition. Is Angus Taylor up for your revolution?
MATT CANAVAN
Well, as I say, I’m not here to, to speak for other people.
JOURNALIST
You’re in a coalition.
MATT CANAVAN
I know that Angus and the Liberal Party, the Liberal National Party, have always been supportive of developing our manufacturing industries. Going back to this issue around the Anti-Dumping Commission, right now we’ve got twenty-eight different commodities that are subject to different anti-dumping duties or tariffs. It’s a complete dog’s breakfast, but most of those were put in place when, you know, we were trying. But, you know, the question now is it fit for purpose? And I think that’s an agenda that all Coalition members will get behind because as I say, we are very passionate about rebuilding and manufacturing industries.
Okay. Thank you.
JOURNALIST
Thanks, Jacob.
Next question, Tom McElroy.
JOURNALIST
Thanks. Senator, thank you for taking our questions. Could you explain more how your tariff regime would work? Would tariffs be permanent? How long would they have to be in place to create the manufacturing renaissance that you seek? And isn’t it true that domestic consumers pay tariffs, not the countries importing into Australia?
MATT CANAVAN
Well, thank you, Tom. In terms of the details of this, there is a lot of detail in our manufacturing paper that I’ll refer you to. What we propose is that the Anti-Dumping Commission, investigates these key industries. We thought health manufacturing, food, clean energy, space, defence, to start with, across those industries, it looks at, well, what are other countries doing? What are our options legally to respond? Uh, and how can we put in a more coherent and permanent situation, uh, to protect industries over the long term?
As I said, if you go to the current, Anti-Dumping Commission website, and you look at, well, how, how do we protect structural steel? Right. That’s just basic building blocks of construction. You go to their ruling at the moment, you’ve got to work out what the length is, what type of, uh, channel it is. You’ve got to assess something called the ascertained export price that’s got to be looked at against the export dumping price, which is just the price that’s paid. Then you’ve got to work out whether a bad law on tariff is applied and also a floor price.
You know, look, I would imagine even a lot of businesses in this sector have no idea what this is. So what I’m saying is we could be much more coherent with this. We could provide much more certainty, and that would have not only, uh, better productive gains for our country, it would also be cheaper over the long term for consumers. To your second point, you did say, “Oh, well, won’t tariffs, uh, be passed on to consumers?” I mean, I did sort of deal that with that in terms of, um, Andrew’s question. As I say, we already are doing this. We already are doing this. Some of these tariffs in equivalent terms go over a hundred percent on these goods.
But I would argue they’re doing it in a way which does make things more costly long term, which eventually we’ll still see our industries go out the back door and be much, much costly for our country, both to save what we have left in that situation, which we’re trying to desperately do now, and/or deal with the response of not having, basic essentials available in times of crisis.
JOURNALIST
Thank you.
Next question is from Isabella Tolhurst.
JOURNALIST
Isabella Tolhurst, ABC.
You’ve described the era of free trade and liberalization as over. What sort of message would you give to some of your colleagues who are big proponents of free trade? Are you trying to bring them on board with your perspective on things?
MATT CANAVAN
Well, Isabella, thanks. I mean, I support free trade too. I’m sad this era is over, but I live on this planet and have to deal with the reality in front of me. I said earlier, this era of globalization and free trade did deliver great benefits for our country, and, it would be better if we could return to such a world. But at some point, we do have to face the fact that things have changed. It doesn’t just seem to be a one-off. Whatever you think of what the Trump administration has done on this front, there were things that were all kept by the Biden administration.
As I mentioned in my speech, China’s been doing this for a long time. The EU, which we signed a free trade deal with them a couple of weeks ago, just a few weeks before that, they’ve upped their, or they announced that their steel tariffs are going up to fifteen percent. So we’ve got this, as I say, you get this convoluted scheme for H-channel and C-channel. Europe hasn’t done that. They’ve just gone, “Whack. You know, we need to protect our steel industry. Tariffs are fifty percent, like it or lump it.” And, and so at what point do we recognize that the, the, the, the board game we’re playing is totally different?
And while it might be second best, it might not be our first best option, we still need to make choices for our country and our nation that provide the best benefits in that world as we have, because I can’t wave, wave a magic wand and make free trade come back.
JOURNALIST
Thank you.
Next question, Ellen Ramsley.
JOURNALIST
Senator, Ellen Ransley from The Courier-Mail. Thanks for taking our questions. Just on the baby boom, you’ve laid out a couple of ways you might encourage people to have more babies. But would a Costello-era baby bonus be on the cards, do you think? And would you support further expansion to childcare subsidies or the private sector adopting superannuation on paid parental leave, for example, to really encourage more people to have babies?
MATT CANAVAN
What was the last? Superannuation?
JOURNALIST
Super on, PPL.
MATT CANAVAN
Oh, right. I got you. Got you. Okay. Thank you. Thanks, Ellen. I’ll step through all of those things. Look, I haven’t been a proponent of a cash handout, to families like a baby bonus.
I think the basic principle here is better if we help people who help themselves. So if people are, are working and earning tax or paying tax, sorry, and trying their best, then we can provide some support on top of that.
Obviously, we do have schemes in place to help people that are very poor and can’t otherwise help themselves, support those. But just broad-based cash handouts for everybody, I don’t think is the best response for people in those circumstances. And, to get to the goal of what I’m trying to achieve and what I’ve pushed for my whole political career, I think it’s much better to use the tax system as much as possible to do that, because, let’s take a real-world example. If you’re a double-income family with two kids and you’re earning a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, if you make a decision as a family unit to have one spouse stay home, earn a hundred and fifty grand.
You’ll end up paying about seventeen thousand more tax than the same family who splits the hundred and fifty across two incomes. Seventeen thousand a year. Like that, that makes the decision to stay at home and look after a child very expensive. It’s, you know, at least in my experience, a decision that a lot of parents want to make. You know, that first year or two of life, it’s, I mean, nothing’s more important. Like, it’s just, you know, who cares about your work? You know, like, I’ve got a great job. I really enjoy it. But, you know, my job as a dad and a husband is way, way more, more important and, I wish I could spend more time with them.
So if we can encourage people to do that, that’s a great thing. That’s what I’d like to see. In terms of the childcare system, we obviously need a well-funded and, productive childcare system because some people have no other choice. And, eventually kids do grow out of the newborn phase and a lot of people need to use childcare as well.
That’s fine. I put to you that we have massively expanded childcare subsidies. They’re sitting at around, last time I checked, fifteen billion dollars a year now, massively up over the last decade.
I think we’re starting to see the limits of that that pressure we’re placing on the system. Some shocking examples obviously recently of a lack of standards in the sector. And I know that’s not all providers, but you know, it perhaps is a early warning of the stress in Australia we’re putting on the system, where we’re kind of making every parent do that, to afford a mortgage and, and still pay the taxes and the like. So I think we should take pressure off that system, as much as possible. As I say, I think a lot of parents would like to spend time with their children, especially with their newborns.
If we can help them and encourage them to do that, then that frees up opportunities for, or places for people to use the, the childcare system. That’s what I’m an advocate for. And then in terms of super on paid parental leave, look, I think there are a lot of options for the superannuation system that could help.
I mean, this will all be about providing more choice to Australian families. There’s a lot of my Coalition colleagues are working on this, a lot very passionate about it, and it’s another area where there needs to be major revolution how we do things. I particularly would highlight, the idea that Jane Hume has put out there.
I think that’s got a lot of merit. She’s actually got a Bill. I presume she’s like me now, she’s a leader, so she can’t do Private Senator’s Bill. But before she was leader, she moved a Private Senator’s Bill, which is a great bill to transfer the superannuation between spouses more easily. So, you know, my wife’s here, and I’m embarrassed her. If I said at the time, “If that bill goes through, I’ll half my super goes to her.” I mean, in our lives, I’ve worked more. I’ve got more super, but, it’s not my money. We work as a team. So, I’d transfer it straight to her.
As I say, we try and work as a team. Still not sure if my kids are on the same team. Working on that.
JOURNALIST
Just on the first part of your answer there. Are you saying that, you support the splitting of that one fifty between two parents as an alternative to increasing the child benefits?
MATT CANAVAN
Look, I do support that being looked at, Andrew. Most other developed countries have, some form of income sharing or splitting between couples for the tax system. It does surprise me. The tax system, about the only place where we’re not treated as a team. You get family benefits, you get treated as one household. Your Medicare levy, treated as one household. Pay tax, bang, you’re treated separately. So some degree of sharing would be beneficial. Would they be able to split their whole income? You know, that’s got to be costed and it, it comes at a cost.
JOURNALIST
Well, it’s not holding you back at the, at the moment.
MATT CANAVAN
Oh, well, well, everything will be costed. When I first came to the Senate, I wrote a detailed paper on this where perhaps a better option to start would just give everybody two tax-free thresholds. Have a good means test that looks at restricting to people with young children in these circumstances I’ve described. And that would be the reasonable cost.
So look, that’s all work that’s got to be done. But there’s lots of different models here.
JOURNALIST
Matthew Franklin.
JOURNALIST
Hi, Senator. Matthew Franklin from Capital Brief. I understand, I think I’ve heard you say, there is a lot of concern in the community about levels of migration. But I also understand, that the figures tell us that there is some pretty severe labour shortages in this country: mining, agriculture, construction, health.
In those circumstances, doesn’t the Australian community deserve something a bit more nuanced from you than close the borders? And what is the risk that not just your party, but all parties in the current attempt to respond to the public concern that we end up with some pretty dumb policies that actually leave employers without the ability to get workers?
MATT CANAVAN
Well, Matt, I don’t think I said we’d close the borders to all migrants. I said we should end the student visa scheme. And I don’t, I don’t see how those student visas are helping those workforce shortages in mining and construction and agriculture. Don’t think that’s happening. I might be wrong, but I think what’s happening is migration agents are marketing Australian universities as a pathway to Australian citizenship or permanent residence. That’s what’s happening. Why don’t we just call a spade a spade? Like, it’s clear as day. Everyone can see that. And yes, Australian universities are making a lot of money off that, but I don’t think that should be their principal purpose.
So look, that should be the start of any change. We did run a skilled migration program for many years without a lot of controversy, and we should still do that, get back to that. But, we do this, do this need to do so in a way that’s calibrated to the needs of the Australian people. And, despite the Prime Minister promising that he would halve migration before the last election, he’s gone nowhere near that figure. It’s still sitting at three hundred thousand people a year. It’s taken only one point three million in three years, the fastest migration rate in Australian history by far.
The previous record was just over eight hundred thousand.
Under the rug then is five hundred thousand over that in three years. And we did need to open our borders after COVID, but that opening’s been completely botched. It’s now tearing at the social cohesion of this country, and I just don’t think this government’s taking it seriously enough.
JOURNALIST
Next question, Rosie Lewis.
JOURNALIST
Rosie Lewis from The Australian. Senator Concannon, you may be the right Nationals leader to fend off One Nation. We’ll find out shortly in the Farrer by-election. Given you’re the parliament’s number one critic on net zero, are you the wrong Nationals leader for the Coalition to win back teal seats? And before you dismiss that, without those seats, aren’t you condemning the Coalition to a lifetime in opposition, or do you see another path, a different formula to win back government?
MATT CANAVAN
Well, Rosie, the formula is to focus on the Australian people. Primarily, we’ve got to deliver results for them, not focus on winning seats. Like, we obviously need to win seats to be a government. But if that remains the focus of what we’re doing, we’ll miss the mark and people will switch off. We won’t win anywhere, most likely. So, we’ve got to stay focused on what we think is best for the Australian people and argue for that fight for that, as hard as we can.
In terms of your question about teal and climate seats, there’s what, these concerns. We’re winning the net zero debate. We’re clearly winning. As I said before, why didn’t the Prime Minister mention net zero last week? I mean, if it was such a winner for them, and I’m such a liability for my team that you suggest in these areas, why didn’t the Prime Minister call me out and say, “Oh, Matt Canavan doesn’t support net zero.” At least people can see that.
Why? Why? I mean, the Labor Party are very ruthless. I mean, as I’m not focused on seats, I’m focused on winning. They’re focused on winning for Australian people. I’m focused on them. They’re focused on winning seats. Clearly, they’ve done the sums and realized that this is not an issue. This is not a winner for them anymore. And we’re winning that debate. We’re winning it because we put pressure on them about it. We’re winning it because we’ve called out the absolute absurdity of this situation that we would, we would, tax our own country, our own industries, and let other countries. God forbid we save Teal seats. And one thing I didn’t mention in the speech that, you know, definitely comes through in my communities and deserves greater recognition is we have not really reduced our emissions across the board. More than ninety percent of our emissions cuts have come from locking up farmland and creating these magical things called carbon credits. More than ninety percent. Look at the stats. And we have lost seven million hectares of land to that process. If you tick the box, you know, if you’re a good person, tick the box on the Qantas ticket and say you want to be green. I’ve never done that because I’m not a good person. I don’t do that. If you tick the box and do that. Let’s say you’re flying business class from Brisbane to London, you and your spouse. I worked that out the other day. That was sixteen tonnes of carbon you’ve just emitted.
So if you tick the box, you know, guess how much land you have to lock up? Well, ABARES says something between ten and twenty-five tonnes of carbon are abated for every hectare of land. So you have to lock up a hectare of land for a year to be a good person. Is that really being a good person? Does that benefit the environment? Just shut down farm. That’s what happens. You shut down farm production.
There’s no cattle grown, no crops grown, no jobs being created. It’s worse for the environment. It goes back to scrub, you know, in the bush. It doesn’t get managed. Pests and leaves come in. It’s terrible. So that’s seven million hectares. The government finally released ABARES, which snuck it out before Christmas, the Agricultural Advisory Body. Before Christmas, they put out a report showing that to get to net zero, we need to, to lock up another eighteen million hectares. Eighteen plus seven, twenty-five. That is four times the size of Tasmania of farmland. Guys, is this really a good plan?
Now, that’s why they don’t talk about net zero. Beause we point out those absurdities. We point out the emperor has no clothes. And we’re going to win. We’ll win on that basis.
By the time of the next election, then you do more than half of the Australian population will be against net zero, and that what will get you elected.
Well, I saw a poll the other day that, saw a poll the other day, Rosie, that forty percent, four zero, forty percent of Greens voters now support drilling for oil and gas. It’s changed pretty quick. So I made the comment the other day that, well, on that note, if that, if those averages apply, if forty percent of Greens voters support oil and gas drilling, that means all Greens senators support it too. If we can just find them and convert them- -we take control of the Senate. So I think things are looking good.
JOURNALIST
Next question, Britt Bush.
JOURNALIST
Thanks. Senator. Britt Bush from The Age and The Herald. Just on that Farrer by-election, your predecessor predicted that The Nationals could come last. Do you agree with David Littleproud on that front? And how much weight are you putting on the outcome of that race and what it says about the future of The Nationals and the Coalition more broadly?
MATT CANAVAN
Yeah, look, thanks, Britt. I always approach these sort of races like a racehorse. Racehorses don’t know their odds, and I don’t want to know them either.
I’ve just got to race and run as fast as I can, particularly for the people of Farrer. And, yes, I want to win this by-election, but even more important, it’s times like these that I can take up the ball for those people. You just asked a question about the people of Albury, of Griffith. If there hadn’t been a by-election, you wouldn’t have asked about the people in those areas. That’s the hardcore reality we’re on.
So I have an opportunity in the next few weeks to get solutions for the Albury hospital, stop this ridiculous water buybacks the government is continuing, and instead give back to the farmers of this country that grow our food. I have an opportunity to make sure that I get across all the infrastructure needs of that area and take us to its great potential because this part of the country, I’ve spent a lot of time there across my political career, mainly with my great mate Barnaby Joyce. But in between the Murray and Murrumbidgee there, it’s just a beautiful part of our country. And as I say, it is our nation’s food bowl. So much opportunity.
And, I want to win the election, but it’s even more exciting to be able to bring focus to that area and provide some solutions for the people, in fact.
JOURNALIST
Rianne Tamler.
JOURNALIST
Thanks, Senator. Rianne Tamler, SBS. You’ve been vocal about the US president, criticizing his rhetoric around the war in Iran. In this, as you say, uncertain world and with an already suffering global economy, can we afford for leaders here and around the world to take such a public stance against who is arguably one of the most powerful people on the planet, lest we be punished further for it?
MATT CANAVAN
Look, I thank you for the question, but I think we’ve got to call a spade a spade at times like these. That’s a great Australian trait. And, yes, we are great friends with America, but, good friends should be able to tell truths to each other. And, the post from the president overnight went way too far and beyond the realms of acceptability. I haven’t caught up with the news in the last hour or so, but, it has at least been positive to see that it looks like there is now an off-ramp.
And I don’t know if the widespread condemnation of the President’s post played a role in that. Maybe it did. Certainly not mine. But, there were plenty of other world leaders that did that. And, perhaps common sense is prevailing. Let’s hope so. I hate these sort of conflicts. Terrible the loss of human life. They normally lead to worse outcomes, as we’ve seen in, in our lifetimes. So the quicker we can end this conflict, the better. Hopefully now we do have some slim hope that that will happen.
JOURNALIST
Do you believe the alliance with the US has been damaged by Donald Trump?
MATT CANAVAN
Uh, look, I think it’s stronger than any particular post or particular criticism that, we may have about, individual actions. In saying that, Andrew, it’s absolutely clear that this is a different world, and we can’t simply rely on the comfortable truths of the past. It does have that additional consequence that we need to reinvest in our own self-sufficiency, need to look after ourselves. I do grate sometimes at the little bit of small-minded thinking that somehow we can’t defend ourselves.
I mean, as I said, we’ve got a whole continent. We’ve got massive resources. We’ve got the benefit of distance from other countries. We could do a much better job of this and clearly need to, given the uncertainty in the world today.
JOURNALIST
Lucinda Garbet-Young.
JOURNALIST
Thank you, Senator, for your address. Lucinda Garbet-Young from The Canberra Times. You’ve spoken previously, or you’ve spoken today rather, about a need as part of your economic revolution to really build out regional hubs and bolster the economy there. You’ve previously said that you want federal government to make it easier for work from home to happen in places further from Canberra to drive regional employment. The latest APS data shows that in December, just thirty-five percent of federal public servants, that’s about seventy thousand people, are based in the ACT.
Nationally, about thirteen point five percent of APS employees are based outside capital cities. So my question is, what percentage would you like to see that increase to, and how do you think that you can achieve that aside from flexibility that’s already in place? Would it look like targets or having certain positions earmarked for regional hubs?
MATT CANAVAN
Look, very good question, Lucy. I believe those statistics about the proportion of public service outside of Canberra are fairly longstanding because obviously a lot of frontline roles, away from this town. Still, thirty percent of the total numbers of public service is a big, big number, and there’s a potential opportunity to help support regional development if we make it easier to live and work away, from just one place.
I don’t have a target in mind. I would like to see is more encouragement of it, more, more integration or allowing this to happen in a way which continues to grow teams.
I mean, I’m very mindful of the fact that while I support, I think work from home is this wonderful opportunity, we still need human-to-human interaction between people, particularly young people that are coming up and coming in their careers. So it just has to be a much more concerted effort to still achieve that while someone living in an Mildura, or an Albury or Rockhampton, where I’m from. I think we can do that. But at least to date, it seems to me that work from home for the public service has largely been about working from home here in this town, in Canberra, not looking further afield and helping our national interest.
JOURNALIST
Are there particular departments that you think would be best placed to be bolstered regionally with professional skill sets?
MATT CANAVAN
Well, I mean, my understanding, Lucy, is any department that allows work from home in Canberra should be able to do this as well, and I think pretty much all of them do. I mean, there will be some obviously in high-level security, policing, these things where you just need to be physically on the ground. But I think it’s pretty widespread. So anyone that does that should be able to do it for the nation.
JOURNALIST
Next question, Cori MacLeod.
JOURNALIST
Thank you for your address, Senator. Cori MacLeod from innovationaustralia.com. You’ve, you’ve been talking today about building capability, building resilience, sovereignty. You mentioned space and defence. Looking at us, Australia’s ability to build complex things, government as an exemplar is a huge lever in terms of building that capability, but it seems to be a nut we can’t crack. And if you look at government as an exemplar and procurement as a lever to build contracts and not grants, it seems to be a cultural cringe that we cannot fix. And at a time like this, do you have thoughts on how we might address that?
MATT CANAVAN
That’s a great question, and it’s something I didn’t get time to cover. But in that Nationals paper I mentioned on manufacturing, we have a whole bit about the need to lever government procurement, to support manufacturing, initiatives and of course also innovation. Here’s a couple of examples here. You know, when we were in government, we sought to establish a domestic manufacturing industry of hundred-and-fifty millimetre shells. Now, admittedly, this is not the most innovative military hardware, but it is still, as you can see in Ukraine, the workhorse of any defence force.
Through some government support, that factory got established in Maryborough, in Queensland. And, this new government’s come in, and I think because they felt we did it and it wasn’t them, they’ve gone to a French company, Thales, to supply that material, and that’s pretty sad to me.
But I’d like to answer that and ask why are they using federal government contracts to support French industrial military capabilities, not Australian. And then the other example is Gilmour Space, as I mentioned in my speech there.
Look, the, the government eventually helped them get through the red tape hurdles. It’s pretty hard though. Could be a lot easier. That took a long time to get approval for their orbital space launch. I think there could be a much greater effort to focus on some key industries and roll out the red carpet for them, not the red tape.
Thank you.
JOURNALIST
And our final question is from Julia Hack.
JOURNALIST
Thank you for your speech. At the beginning of your speech, you set the scene of a country that is in declining wealth and prosperity, and you said this is why we need an economic revolution, not just an economic reset. I just note that, last year, the Swiss bank, UBS, in its global wealth report, found that Australia was the second wealthiest country in the world after Luxembourg. Australia median wealth stands at four hundred and thirteen thousand dollars. That means that half the population has more than this amount and half the population has less.
I’m just wondering where your statistics and modelling came from to substantiate your claims about declining prosperity.
MATT CANAVAN
Well, I outlined that, and I suppose, I’m going to criticize your statistics like this, the same rule applies to me. There are obviously, three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics. But, without seeing your stats in detail, I think the problem is a whole amount of that wealth is locked up in Australia’s property holdings.
There is two issues with that. One is the obvious one, that there’s a lot of young people that don’t have that level of wealth now in Australia. That’s probably why you’re seeing so much anger out there is because they don’t think they can in the future reach those heights, without a lifetime of slavery and paying mortgage interest to the bank.
So, that’s number one on that. Number two is, look, with it all being locked up in property, it’s to my mind always been a little bit of a false gives you false hope that you’re wealthier than you think because you always need a home to live in. So if you only own one property, and some of us own more, I’m not used to it, but I’ve sold that one.
But if you only own one property, great. Property value’s gone up. Fantastic. And I can borrow a bit more and do other things, a bit more flexibility. But I still need to live in a home. And so if I sell my home, I need to buy another one, then guess what?
That value’s gone up as well. So that real wealth has not gone up in that situation. And that’s why those statistics that Adam Crowe mentioned are so important. That a lot of the stats you see aren’t actually factoring in that extra cost of living, which is a massive handbrake on, I would say, on innovation in this country. I mean, how can anyone young now think, “Look, I’ll take a risk in my life and start up a business.” The costs of you failing are huge. As you get behind, you can’t get back into the, the housing market if you go bankrupt. Well, where does it end?
So we can’t just rely on those wealth statistics. We’ve got to make housing more available. It’s about the things people can live in and do, not a number on a piece on a spreadsheet.
JOURNALIST
Thank you.
Well, thank you, Senator. I’m sure we all understand your thinking a lot more. Join me in thanking Matt Canavan.
