Well, thank you very much, Paul. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. It’s great to be back here in the West. And can I start too by passing on my condolences to you as a party, and to of course Max Trenorton’s family. That was sad news to receive this morning, but I’m sure we will honor his legacy with a great spirited debate today, as we always do at conferences. And it’s great to be here with you. I want to recognise my leader, my boss in the Senate, actually. When I’m on the red carpet now, I’ve got this great honor of being the leader of the parliamentary party, but Bridget is my boss in the Senate. She remains the leader of the Nationals in the Senate, so it’s great to be with you here, Bridget. She spoke very very eloquently this morning about her experience becoming a senator, and I learnt something about the challenges Bridget had to overcome to do that, and you know I can see why she fights so hard for people like the firearm owners who’ve been vilified and demonised for political purposes. And it’s a great honor to fight with you, Bridget, in the Australian Parliament. I’d also like to recognize Paul and Danielle for the great work you’re doing over here in the West, and thanks for having me. And finally, I just thought that was a terrific address from Shane. Yeah, thank you, thank you very much, Shane. I mean, you’ve got longer to go to your election than we do, but I don’t know if it’s a race, but you’ve mapped out almost more policy than we have. Yeah, so we’re going to come to that. We’ve done a little bit too, but you’ve done excellent work there this morning. Thank you very much, Shane. It’s a really inspiring address. I heard I particularly like the idea of supporting families having children. When I came became leader, one of the first things I said was, “We need to have more babies, and I’ve kind of done my bit. My wife and I, we’ve got five kids. I don’t think I’m going to be directly involved anymore. Children being born, I’d like to with my wife, but she’s had enough. And so all I can do now is be indirectly involved and support other families to have children. So definitely supporting rural families, having access to maternity services is very important. We’re fighting very hard too to make sure our tax system recognises families. Doesn’t really do that at the moment, and we’ll have more to say on that. And it is just great to be back here in Western Australia, as I said yesterday, my second favorite state in the country. Feel always feel a little bit at home here. You know, you’re a state that goes ahead, develops its resources. It’s pretty parochial, takes border control very seriously. You went a bit harder than we did, but I thought during COVID, it’s like I think Queenslanders secretly just want the border shut all the time. This just gave us a convenient excuse. But we’re back open, so great to be back here. And as I say, you do you do you are very parochial, and you do take things seriously. The person who controlled those borders over in Queensland, you might remember her, the failed Queensland Premier Annastasia Palaszczuk. You remember her? She’s gone now, and thankfully things go much better in Queensland. But at the moment, but I just looked up before. You know, I I actually came out pretty hard in favour of a better arrangement for WA for the GST back in 2015. I was just a newly elected Queensland senator, and I didn’t really have any purpose. I was I was just a backbench Queensland senator, but I just thought it was an injustice and made some comments about it. And I just looked up. This is what Annastasia Palaszczuk had to say about me back in 2015, she said, “I think it is appalling because this is an opportunity for him to be a Queenslander to actually back Queensland’s position, and this should be beyond politics. Well, actually, Anna, I thought it was beyond politics because I’m an Australian first, actually. Right? I am a very parochial Queenslander, but I want to support our whole country.
I particularly want to support those parts of our country that do things and get things done, and the biggest problem with the pre-2018 GST arrangements was it penalised states like Western Australia that got things done, and that’s why I came out against it. There was a report this week, just this week came out that showed that the average worker in regional Australia is 30% more productive than those in the city. 30% Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. It’s the facts. I’m not calling the people over there lazy. I’m not saying that they work hard too in those office buildings. But the data is clear. Or at home now. They work from home too now, don’t they? The data is clear that on our average per hour, the average worker contributes $129 an hour in the regions, and about $100, just over $103 an hour in the cities. That’s it. And so yes, the GST arrangements were unfair for Western Australia, but more importantly, more importantly, they were just bad business, bad business. Because you should invest back into your business those part, invest in those parts of the business that are making money. You know, so the things that are making money put more resources into there, and so what we should do as a country, as a nation, is put more resources into those parts of our nation which are making money. Clearly, you’re doing that in Western Australia, and we are doing that in the regions as well. And so, I am very proud that it was a Liberal and Nationals government that finally implemented a fair GST deal for Western Australia, and it was the Nationals in that. It was the nationals in that government that that fought very hard to do that. It may not have happened without us. Bridget can maybe tell you the war stories later. We didn’t have a member of the federal parliamentary team from Western Australia at the time, but we could just see it was unfair. We knew it was unfair coming from the regions, and it had to be fixed. And I want to say here, as leader, we will never, we will fight tooth and nail to make sure these fair GST deal and arrangements stay for Western Australia. That will stay under us. Now, I wish I could have the same confidence in the prime minister. He’s actually not telling you that the deal will stay right now. He’s saying that that you’ll keep getting a fair share. It’s a little bit of weasel words right. This from the guy that told us that he wouldn’t. He did lower your power bill by $275. Remember that one. He said 50 times that he wouldn’t change capital gains tax arrangements. He even told us he didn’t fall off a stage when he clearly did. Everyone saw it was on video. And now he wants to be trusted on the GST for Western Australia. Well, apparently he’s here tomorrow. Apparently he’s coming over to the West tomorrow, and he needs to make an absolute firm commitment that these arrangements of the GST will not change. That’s what needs to be done by the government, because we need to keep our country together. We need to invest in those parts of our nation that are making money, and we have to. We have to have a system that incentivises the development of our nation, and more so than that, we need to invest back in those regions. And that’s why I love to hear Shane this morning announce the royalties for regions continuing. So important. We we’ve always taken from the east that you’re a bit of a beacon on this stuff. You know, you actually did this stuff made sure that was a proper return of the wealth from the regions to back to where that wealth is generated? That’s why under a Liberal Nationals government, we will introduce something similar. We’ll have a future generations fund that we’ll take next time we get a resource windfall in Canberra. We’ll make sure that 80% of that windfall is invested back in infrastructure, and that 25% of that is reserved for the regions. We will do the same at the federal level that you’ve done here in Western Australia and invest back in regional areas of our country. We need that now.
We need that more than ever because our economy is in a tough shape. People are doing it very, very tough. Do you remember? It was a year this week. It was a year this week since the Labor Party convened a productivity roundtable in Canberra. Remember that? Made a big deal of it. They had all the nation’s movers and shakers, business leaders, union leaders came to Canberra, and they all talked about productivity for three days. It wasn’t very productive, but for three days they spoke about productivity, and then they sort of forgot about it. And we haven’t heard much about it. And if you go look at the data now, guess what’s happened? Productivity. Has fallen in the past year. It’s gone further backwards. In fact, it’s fallen 5% over 5% since this Labor government got elected. We’ve never seen anything like it. There’s never been a four-year period where productivity in our nation has even gone backwards, gone negative. But under this government, it’s not just gone negative. It’s gone backwards to at a rate of 5% and so what? What do we need to do now? Well, we need to focus need to focus on our economy again, on getting things moving in our country. That hasn’t been the agenda of this government, though, because a few months ago, when they released their budget, there wasn’t much talk about getting the economy going. wasn’t much talk, even of getting the cost of living down. This was the first budget that the government did not even promise to lower your energy prices. They just gave up on it. Just didn’t mention it. Every other budget they’d done to date, they’d say yes, we’re investing in this stuff called renewable energy. It’s the cheapest form of energy. They always just keep saying, doesn’t make it true, but keep saying it, and then nothing happens. Energy prices go up, not down. And this year they just gave up, wave the white flag. We’re not going to worry about it anymore. Well, well, I’m not going to give up. I think our country does and can and does need to restore our position as one of the places in the world with the cheapest energy going around-that should be our goal. We’ve got all these resources. There is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to attain it, because we see, and you see, the consequences of the mistakes we’ve made on energy starker than almost any other part of the country. In here in Western Australia, you’ve lost you’ve lost three industries in the short space of this government. You’ve actually lost four because the Labor Party actually just shut down the live export shade and sheep. They just did that with the stroke of a pen. It was the first time ever that a government had actually just passed a law to ban a whole industry, first time, and like the GST, can I say we’ll be fighting that too, and if the Liberal National Party get back in, we’ll either save the live export trade in sheep or we’ll restart it. It’ll get going again because we’re going to back our nation’s farmers, back our ability to grow food and fire for the rest of the world, and we’re not we’re not going to use people’s livelihoods and jobs as some kind of political trade-off to get preferences from other parties like the Animal Justice Party. That’s what’s been done here. Right, the Labor Party didn’t wake up and have some moral concern for the animal welfare of our sheep flock-that’s not what happened. They did a deal. They did a political deal, which cost 1000s of people their jobs, is costing hundreds of farmers their livelihoods, and they should be condemned for it. Absolutely condemned for it. But on top of that, that was an explicit decision by design. But on top of that, the consequences of this government’s policies has seen another three industries be shut down here in Western Australia. You lost, you lost your nickel industry a few years ago. Nickel refining shut down. You’ve lost the lithium hydroxide opportunities. Remember that they all spoke about critical minerals and this was going to happen. They’ve gone. That’s had to be shut down explicitly because energy prices are too high, and the Kwinana refinery, the Alumina refinery, got shut too.
The prime minister actually brought, he brought the Japanese prime minister here a few years ago to Kwinana. Now I don’t think the then Japanese PM gave him any melons at the time, but we certainly sold him a lemon. That’s for sure, because at that refinery, at that refinery, the prime minister told the Japanese prime minister that we had this wonderful opportunity to provide green metals to the world, and we’re going to do that through things like green nickel. That was the plan. That was the promise. And at the time, at the time, you might recall, there was all these inflated ideas that all the Tesla buying customers of Europe would buy and demand green nickel, because nickel is a very important component of most batteries in electric vehicles, and the idea is, well, they’re climate conscious, so they’re not going to go and buy the dirty nickel from Indonesia, made from coal. They’re going to want the green nickel from BHP, who are now a work company and invest only in green things. And so, BHP destroyed millions of dollars of shareholder value by going down this bankrupt route. Guess what? No one paid a premium for green nickel. Didn’t happen. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s built something like 20 coal-fired power stations in a few years. They actually have lower grade nickel reserves than we do. Their laterite reserves aren’t as high quality. They take more energy to get the nickel out of. But now, now we’ve got this situation, thanks to our insanity, that power prices in Indonesia are a third of what they hear in Australia. A third, our power prices are three times higher. It’s a bit over three times higher than in Indonesia. We’ve got the same resources as them, you know. In fact, and we’ve got better nickel. It’s less energy intensive to exploit, but we’re getting beaten. We’re getting beaten and beaten badly because we have decided we could save the planet and not face the hardcore reality of having to do business across the world. We lost focus, lost, lost, lost drive, lost discipline, and we lost 10,000 jobs here in Western Australia thanks to that insanity. So I’m going to call time on that. What I’m going to do as leaders fight against this insanity, try and restore common sense to our energy policy, and what we are going to do is scrap net zero. It will go under our watch. Because this idea that we can fix the whole planet from here in Australia, and while every other country is not worrying about it, but we can, is bankrupting our country. We were promised that net zero would lower power prices. We were promised that net zero would bring in hundreds of 1000s of new industries and jobs like hydrogen, were promised that net zero would protect our environment. It is not doing any of those things. Power prices are up, industries going offshore, and and the pursuit of net zero and these large scale wind and solar factories is in fact destroying our very natural environment. It’s not protecting it. It’s failing on all levels. And net zero has not been a transition. It’s a transfer. It’s a transfer of jobs to overseas. It’s a transfer of wealth from Australian families and from their power bills through to international investors that are on a grift, and it’s a transfer of authority and power from local communities to international global busybodies who think they can tell us what to do. It has all got to go because by getting energy prices down, we’ll finally give Australian families a break. We’ll lower their cost of living. Will focus again on bringing jobs and industry back to our country, to our nation. That’s what should be the number one priority. And to do all that, to do all that, we’ve got to get rid of this this Labor Party. My number one focus as leader is removing this terrible government and coming up with a better plan for the Australian people-that’s what we will do. And what to do that? To do that, we are focused on making sure that we have that plan that is clear and simple for the Australian people. And while I’ve done a lot of work on this plan, and we focus very hard, I’ve forgotten to bring it to the stage, and thank you, Paul.
He has slowly brought it across for me. And so we’ve got this plan, and I like to quote Ronald Reagan on this: that there’s, as Ronald Reagan said, there are no easy solutions in life, but there are simple ones. Right? There are simple solutions, and we have a set of simple solutions here in this plan. We’re going to scrap net zero and invest in all our energy resources: our coal, our oil, our gas, our uranium. Have nuclear energy here. Yeah, we need that. You got lots of it here. You got lots of it here. No reason why we shouldn’t have that. That’s important for the future. Important for AI and all these opportunities in the future, we need that. We’ll have renewables too. We’re not. I’m not. Never been anti-it. Just needs to be in appropriate places and a balance. We just can’t have our whole power system depending on the weather. That’s ridiculous and insane. We can see that now. We’re going to lower taxes. Lower taxes. That will unleash opportunity. And we’re going to end Labor’s mass migration, which is crowding our streets with way too many people. Every minute, another person arrives in this country, and we are not building a home every minute to housing. That has got to stop. Those three things: lower taxes, cheaper energy, lower migration, will mean higher living standards for the Australian people. It’s very very simple. I just want to spend a bit of it on the lower taxes, a bit of time on that, because we’re going to get rid of all of Labor’s taxes in their budget a few months ago. As I mentioned, no promise to get the economy going, but lots of promises to put taxes. They thought that was a solution. Don’t know what economics classes Jim Chalmers ever went to. I don’t think he did. He did a did a degree in Paul Keating, but when you put tax on something, you get less of it. That’s the general rule. So when you put taxes on property, guess what? We’re getting less home sales. We’re getting less housing lending. We’re getting fewer first home buyers. That’s happening. Data came out last week to show that when you put taxing on taxes on small business, we’re getting record closures of small businesses going to the wall. Families with their dreams crushed. When you get put a tax on investment, we’re getting less innovation. We’re getting people go overseas. For the first time, I hear people saying they’re not going to invest here. They’ve got to go overseas now. So we’re going to get rid of all of those taxes, but we’re going to do more too. We’re going to lower personal income taxes for Australians. We will make sure that no longer will there be a secret inflation tax on your pay rises, because most Australians get a pay rise every year of some note. The government’s been spruiking that oh, your pay packet is going up every year, and then they don’t mention that actually, inflation’s higher than your pay increases on average at the moment. Real wages are going backwards, not up. And if the government can’t admit there’s a problem, they think wage growth is great. They’ve been saying it all week in the Senate. If the government can’t admit there’s a problem with the cost of living and people’s living standards, how the hell are they going to fix it? There is a problem. Our inflation is way too high, and so what we’ll do is make sure that every year income tax thresholds go up with inflation, and that way every year every worker in Australia will get an automatic tax cut for the average Australian. And if there’s an average inflation rate, that’ll mean a $250 a year tax cut every year, and it grows over time. So after four years, it’ll be $1,000 better off a year under our inflation tax removal. And then doing that will also do one other thing, because the other big problem I think has been is Canberra’s to go on a spending spree like you’ve never seen before. We have increased spending these last couple of years under the first couple of years of the Labor Party at a rate we haven’t seen outside of a recession or COVID.
The average household now, or the average spend of Canberra, is $35,000 more than it was per household before COVID, $35,000 more per household, and now you would have seen we’ve got a trillion dollars in debt as a country. Just ticked over there for like 12 hours this week, but don’t worry, it’s going to go over there again soon for a good. We’ve got a big problem with that. Interest rates are up. We’ve got the highest government interest rates in the developed world. We’re going to have to service that much more, much more costs to service interest on a trillion dollars of debt, and so desperately, we desperately need to starve the beast that is government spending in Canberra, right? We need to put the Canberra bureaucracy on a bit of a diet, right? And so by having making sure that tax revenue just doesn’t automatically grow with inflation, that will help put our bureaucrats on a bit of a diet, restrict their access to food, and so I like to I like to call our inflation tax removal policy the ozempic of tax policies. Right, it will force them, force them to think harder about do they need to spend another 150 million dollars on a climate conference in the Pacific? It’s not even the real deal, right? Do we really need to employ 1000s and 1000s of more public servants every year. Can we just get by with a bit more efficiencies? That’s what has got to be the focus. So we’re going to do all those things. There’s a bit more in this plan. This obviously is a plan we developed with the Liberals, and I want to recognize Angus Taylor. I think’s doing a great job and getting along. I’ve always got along with Angus very well, and we’re a great team there, but we have developed a green and yellow version. Got a little bit more in it. Green and gold, actually. Gold, right? Gold, green and gold. And I like to say this is this has got a bit more in it. This is the hardcore version of the plan. We’ve got farming in this. We’ve got coal. We’ve got guns. Thank you, Bridget. In this lot more detail, so grab a copy, spread the word, because we need we need a we need a government with a positive plan, right? Need a need a need a need some leadership that shows that Australia can be the greatest nation on earth again. Because I was reading I was reading Tony Abbott’s History of Australia over Christmas. It’s a great book, if you haven’t got it yet. And I was shocked. I was a bit taken aback, actually, about this statistic that just 100 years after the first fleet, just 100 years after it arrived, we became the richest nation per person in the world. 100 years. That’s pretty amazing, right? Pretty amazing feat, and I think we should be much prouder of what we’ve done here in this this this continent, which was there was none of this, none of this here 230 odd years ago, and what has been built is the greatest nation on earth. But we, we are pushing our luck a little bit, right? We are the lucky country, but we’ve actually made our own luck over the years through a lot of hard work, a lot of determination, a lot of vision, and we just need some leadership to rediscover that and use the natural resources of this great southern land again, if we use our coal, use our oil, use our gas, use our people, use our drive, use our initiative, and get more Australia, more Australian everything. We will become that richest nation in the world again. We’ve got a plan to do that. We’ve got a team to do that, and I’m so proud to lead the nationals, be here over in the West to help you guys too. Thank you very much for having me again, and God bless, and all the best for the conference.
