We have everything we need to unleash our potential | NT CLP Conference Address

Well, look, thank you very much, Nathan, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen. It’s wonderful, wonderful to be back in the Northern Territory. And can I extend to thanks to you, Nathan? Congratulations on your re-election, and to all the members of the CLP who are here today. It’s great to reconnect with many of you. I had some of the best three weeks of my political career up here, helping you in the 2020 election campaign. I just love the place for a start, and it’s been so good to come back and see the likes of Marie-Clare and Matt, who was out. I was at a park run with Matt this morning. Matt does anything for a vote. He had a little hat on this morning. He ran 5Ks with a little pink birthday cap on because it was the 10th birthday of the Palmerston Park Run, and that’s why he got elected. And you got to do silly things. And so great to see you, Matt, Gerard as well. You two were there in 2020, and it was a remarkable job for Lia, really being the only member of the Parliament, going for election at that time. Two in the Parliament, but one member retiring, and to get eight seats in one jump, particularly at a time when other incumbent governments were being re-elected by massive margins at the start of COVID. There was a remarkable job and has laid a platform for a tremendous success of your government. So great to be back with you, to Jacinta too. Great to be with you, fighting with you down there in Canberra, and she’s doing an amazing job with small businesses around the country who are under attack right now from this terrible government, and keep doing that. And it’s just fantastic to be with you, Tony. Kind of lost our way when Tony left, right? It sort of was, I think. And so I think you being back, Tony, then gives us the – back leading the Liberal Party at least – that that gives us that the phoenix rising from the flames here. I think will begin to happen. So great to be with you too. I too wanted to thank Ariana for coming up from Queensland. She did a remarkable job. She may have gone, but that was a sensational address, and got some fantastic young leaders around the country. And also pay tribute to Alicia, the Young CLP president. I mentioned last night how much work you’ve done for us in the Nationals, and congratulations on your term, and also to Zac, who’s just been elected as the new Young CLP president. Look, I also did want to pay tribute to Lia. Lia said earlier that she was the only woman in national cabinet. I didn’t know how she established that because I think most of the other people across the table from her don’t know what a woman is, but at least Lia does, and I can tell you we know what a woman is, and I can inform you that right now in the Senate, the Liberal and Nationals parties have tabled a bill to to reinsert the definition of woman in the Sex Discrimination Act. That’s what we will do. This builds on the wonderful work that Alison Penfold, a colleague of Bridget’s and I’s have in Canberra. She put this in place a few months ago, and we’ve got the bill there. And now we’ve had this shocking decision from the High Court. Although I must say, I don’t blame the justices. The blame has to be fairly and squarely on the former Gillard government that changed the Sex Discrimination Act, and has now led to this interpretation, which the High Court has confirmed effectively means we don’t have a definition of woman, and that means we can’t protect women’s rights if we can’t define it. And so that has to be fixed. And it’s not good enough for the Prime Minister to say this is some culture war when it affects half of our population not being able to combine, to get together, to coordinate. It affects men too, but it particularly does affect women and vulnerable women who want to just share a space to themselves, and we will fight and defend that. I also, of course, want to pay tribute to what Lia is doing up here. She was introduced earlier as a pocket rocket, which is very apt. If only you could just bottle the energy Lia has and turn it into some form of electricity. We’d never have a blackout again in this country. We do have a few energy shortages, but coming back up here, you just feel there’s an energy in this place. I feel like you’re on the cusp of something very big, and I always sort of get that feeling being here, but it’s special I think right now there is a lot of energy going around. I think if your territory was a soft drink, you’d be a Red Bull right now. You’ve just got this shot of energy. You have literal energy, as we’ve heard today, potentially coming from this wonderful resource in the Beetaloo Basin. And doesn’t our country need that? We need both that shot of energy and enthusiasm and optimism that your government is bringing, and we need the actual energy and the gigajoules and the megawatt hours that our country is sorely lacking. We need that energy as a country. Leah mentioned that she doesn’t think the rest of the country is really noticing the Northern Territory. Well, I am noticing. I know many others are noticing what is happening up here, and perhaps we’re noticing more because in the rest of the country it’s pretty grim right now. It’s pretty grim. People are struggling to afford basic essentials of life. Interest rates have gone up 15 times. We have some of the highest energy prices in the world now, and our major cities have been swamped with far too much migration, putting strain on services and denying housing to the poorest and youngest among us. It’s tough. It’s tough right now. So what is going on up here and what I hear up here is a beacon of hope, and it should be something we all look towards and encourage, and try to facilitate further. And I have been extremely passionate about seeing your Beetaloo Basin develop. Don’t underestimate how significant this is. This is the biggest shale gas play outside of the United States to date. It’s huge, and many of you would have seen or know what’s happened in the United States in the past 20 years. It is a revolution, a country that’s gone from the biggest importer, net importer of oil in the world, to being the biggest producer of oil in the world in a generation, all thanks to the shale revolution, and lots of other countries have tried to repeat that success, but there hasn’t been really a big successful one. A little bit in China, a little bit in South America, but this is the biggest here ready to go, and there’s a lot of excitement building about what could be about to happen here, and that will be great for you, as we’ve heard. It’ll be great for you, but it’s also extremely important for our nation, because when you look around a room like this, we import a lot of stuff. Right? That projector will be imported. This microphone definitely imported. This watch imported. The clothes we’re wearing almost definitely imported. It’s Australian wool, but not made here. The tables, furniture, probably imported. The cars we drove in here earlier almost or would be definitely imported. Everything’s imported. Now, of all those things we import, the thing that keeps me up at night the most is that half of our nation’s imports by weight are liquid fuels. So we import a lot of stuff, but half of those imports by weight are liquid fuels, oil, diesel, some other petrochemical products. That’s half, and you know more than most, being on our northernmost frontier, that you know we don’t really have a navy that can defend half the shipping that arrives in this country. So we have a problem. We have a major, major security risk and problem in this country that I think finally people are starting to wake up to in light of the Iran crisis. So we desperately need to fix that security risk because we never know, can never know when conflict might arrive in our region, as it has terribly and horrifically in Eastern Europe and the Middle East in the last few years. We were very lucky for a long time, but you can’t have a plan that that just only considers the best happening. We need a plan that prepares for potentially the worst, and therefore we need to develop much more oil and gas resources in this country and use them here. We’re a very good exporting country, right. We export our resources to the world. We have a lot of them, so we can share them. But we have an absurd situation now, where Japan, has lower electricity prices than we do. Lower electricity prices than we do. We’re the biggest supplier of energy to Japan in terms of coal and oil and gas, and they get cheaper electricity prices than we do, that can’t be sustained. We have to reverse these trends. We’ve got to use these resources. We’ve got to find them. We’ve got to discover them. We’ve developed them, like you hear in the Beetaloo, and then we’ve got to use them, use them for the interests of Australians first and foremost. That should be the plan, and that is why a Liberal and Nationals government will make sure that the primary goal of our energy policy is to deliver the lowest possible electricity and energy prices for Australians. That should be our goal. That should be our objective. And getting distracted from that objective is what is behind the heart of our economic malaise and the cost of everything going through the roof. And so, how do we make sure we can use those resources. Well, using your Beetaloo Basin here, there’s a number of major constraints from that happening right now, coming particularly out of this federal Labor government. Upon coming to government, the Labor Party introduced a Net Zero Act. A Net Zero by 2050 Act that they brought in. We didn’t vote for it even back then when I was in the wilderness and ostracised. We didn’t vote for it. We didn’t think it should be legislated. But in that Act and related Acts, they also introduced a bunch of bans on supporting anything to do with coal, oil, and gas in our country. Those bans remain there today. Earlier this year, weeks after the Iran conflict kicked off, and there was grave concerns that we’d run out of fuel in this country, the government rushed in legislation which would allow them to underwrite and subsidise the importation of oil and fertiliser to Australia. We supported them in that we thought yes we’ve got to keep the pumps full in this country, and so they amended an act called the Export Finance Insurance Corporation Act to give a body called Export Finance Australia the power to do this to underwrite all this stuff and they’ve done that now to the tune of over $3 billion importing fuel and fertiliser help keep things going in this country. In that same Act, in section 23C, Export Finance Australia is prohibited from directly financing the extraction of coal, oil, crude oil, or natural gas, or financing the construction of infrastructure for the purpose of extracting coal, crude oil, or natural gas, or from financing investments for the sole purpose of the use of coal, oil, and gas. So, on the one hand, we now have the absurd situation in our country, where the Prime Minister travels around our region with a cap in hand and a blank cheque signed by you, subsidising the production of oil in other countries, and this same Prime Minister, in an act of Parliament, says that he cannot support the development of oil and gas jobs in Australia. Is there anything that sums up the absurdity of our Net Zero approach more than that? That we would subsidise the creation of jobs of economic opportunity in other countries, but in our own nation, we can’t help you guys. We can’t help the Northern Territory from Canberra. With an organisation called Export Finance Australia. It’s in their name, but they can’t help you build pipelines, build petrochemical industries, create more jobs on the back of this development here in the Northern Territory. At the time the government moved those amendments to the EFIC Act, we moved an amendment to get rid of Section 23C, and made these very points that “hey guys, if you’re going to do it overseas, good enough to do here, hey, let’s get rid of this”. Labor Party refused, so we’re going to have to win the election to scrap it, right? We’re going to have to do that. That’s one thing we’re going to get rid of. Remove all of these restrictions on coal, oil, gas, fossil fuels in our legislation. There’s another one that’s not in that one, but we’ll also remove the ban on nuclear energy too. That’s got to go as well. It’s insane. The basic rule should be: if we’re going to export the resource to another country for them to use and create jobs for them, we should be able to use it too. That’s the principle we’ll maintain and fight for. There’s another barrier. There’s another barrier to the development of your resources, and that’s the broader net zero agenda because any investment here in the Beetaloo Basin or any use as well of that gas here in Darwin or in the Northern Territory under this net zero policy will now have to be netted off. The emissions from it have to be netted off. That’s the net part of it. So you can do it. You can burn the gas here, but you just have to offset those emissions with something else, and that’s how we’ve been basically reducing emissions for 20 or 30 years. Did you realise that if you kick, if anyone here owned cattle or a cattle property, some people, a couple of cattle graziers here. If you kick your cattle off your land and lock it up, do you realise that that lowers the temperature of the globe? That’s what happens. Does because you create a carbon credit from doing it. Create this little bit of paper called a carbon credit, and you can get paid for that. And say you’re going to fly from Brisbane to London. Say it’s a business class flight for you and your spouse. I worked out it’s about 15 tons of carbon you’ve emitted by doing that. And you know when you go by the ticket, there’s a box. There’s a box that you tick if you’re a good person, and say you’re going to offset your carbon emissions. By the way, I’ve never ticked that box. I’m not a very good person, apparently. But there’s no shame if you ticked it. All well and good. But just know what happens. What happens when you tick that box is Qantas goes and buys some carbon credits. And according to ABARES, the agricultural body, every hectare of those cattle properties in Australia, on average, if you kick the cattle off, you save about 10 to 25 tons of carbon. So that flight with you and your spouse from Brisbane to London, where you tick the box, you’ve just locked up a hectare of land from food production. And those people pat themselves on the back and say they’re good people, but we just shut down food production in our country. We’ve done that to date. To date, Australia has locked up 7 million hectares of land to offset our emissions. That’s more than the size of Tasmania. The government estimates we need another 18 million hectares to get to net zero. Locked up, three times the size of Tasmania. And you know, if you take the CSIRO estimates of the Beetaloo development, you need up to about 3 million hectares just for this, right? To be locked up, to be netted off. So this is a massive barrier against the development and use of gas here in this country because you can export that gas to Japan, and they don’t have to buy the cattle properties and offset the emissions. That’s how they get lower power prices than us. They just use it, they just burn it. But if we’re going to use it here to create urea or plastics, we don’t make plastics anymore in this country. Don’t make urea either for now. We’re hopefully going to get a plan up next year in Karratha, but we have to pay for it. We have to go and buy these stupid things called carbon credits. And so, under a Liberal and Nationals government, we’ll be scrapping all this madness. We’ll be scrapping net zero. It’s got to go, because net zero is just a massive big handbrake on the development and use of our resources for the benefits of the Australian people. And it’s about time we take off the brake and put our foot on the gas instead in this country, and that’s what we will do. There’s one final barrier I just want to highlight to the unleashing of Northern Territory’s potential here. The government’s new taxes they’ve introduced in the budget. There’s been lots of talk about that, and there’s a pretty clear and evident impact on the property markets, especially in Sydney and Melbourne and Brisbane at the moment, from those changes. One thing, though, that’s gone a little bit unremarked is the fact that, particularly, the capital gains tax changes are effectively a tax on growth, and businesses that do generate a lot of growth. And there’s a little bit of a hint of that today, where the government’s announced a carve out for startups and tech businesses, because those businesses typically do have high levels of capital growth, the ones who win. But the way the government’s changed the capital gains tax system is totally biased against them. That’s why they’ve been carved out, because the the government released some secret modeling a few months ago, well they released it to select journalists from the Treasury, which showed that if you invest in the ASX and you make a two and a half percent sort of return, the new capital gains tax changes don’t make much difference. You end up with a capital gains tax rate of about 22% similar to what you pay today. But if you make 10% a year capital growth, you pay now under this system a 36% capital gains tax rate, well above what we have now. Now investments in new frontier areas like the Beetaloo are not dissimilar to a tech startup. You know, someone takes a lot of risk. There’s a lot of risk in an early stage oil and gas development, and if you win, if you succeed, you will be getting a lot of return for that risk in terms of your capital price growth. Well, that will now be taxed at a rate almost double what it exists today. So this tax is particularly a tax against the frontier parts of our country that we do hope, I certainly hope, will continue to grow and grow faster than the rest of the country. And so that is one of the big reasons we’ll scrap all these taxes. But we must take a tax on growth off our country. We will scrap all of Labor’s taxes in their budget and bring down tax for the Australian people. We will go further than just cutting Labor’s new taxes. We’ll cut taxes that have existed for too long on the Australian people, and particularly the tax from inflation. Every year, you pay more tax as inflation goes up because you go up into higher tax thresholds, or or even higher into the highest of tax thresholds, you pay more tax. The average Australian ends up paying about $250 a year more tax every year, just thanks to inflation, and that’s just normal inflation levels, not the elevated ones we’ve seen under this government. And so, by getting rid of that and indexing our tax thresholds to inflation. We’ll make sure that the Canberra bureaucracy, the Canberra government, doesn’t just get every year a new form of revenue through inflation. We need to make sure that we start starving the beast that is federal government spending. Need to put the wasteful spending we’ve seen under this government on a bit of a diet needs to go on a diet, right? And that’s why I like to call our tax back guarantee policy here the ozempic of tax policies, right? We’ll give Canberra bureaucracy an ozempic jab, and we’ll start to put them on a diet and bring down that government spending that is way too much now and getting out of control. Now to trillion dollars in debt, we’ll get rid of that. As I said earlier, we have too much migration in this country. Far too many people have come here in far too short a space of time because this government botched the reopening of our borders after COVID. We had to reopen those. I know you here need a good flow of migrants to help your economy grow, but bringing in almost 2 million people now in just over four years is far too much, far too many people in a short space of time. We now have 3 million people on temporary visas in this country. More than 10% of our population are not permanent residents or Australian citizens. That’s up from about 2 million just before COVID. Just in four years, it’s gone up from two to 3 million. Of that extra million people, only 65,000 are working holiday makers. So it’s six and a half percent of the increase, and most of that is backpackers from the UK who have been given more rights under the UK Free Trade Agreement, including to move to capital cities, not the regions, not here like Darwin. And so I can say to you, as I said yesterday here, that we will not be cutting working holiday maker visas or backpacker visas for regional areas like Darwin. That’s not the source of the problem. We’ll be focusing our cuts on migration on the problem, and of that 1 million people, 400,000 of the million is thanks to student visas or temporary graduate visas. Students who have graduated extra than what we had before COVID. We’ve got another 300,000 extra so-called bridging visas, who are people who are applying for another visa. Many of them are students looking to go to visa hop and go elsewhere. That is the problem. And what we have to end is this scam of our universities being sold, not to educate people, but to try and offer them a pathway to Australian citizenship. I think our universities should stay squarely focused on teaching Australian students and doing Australian research. That’s what we will focus them on doing. And that, you know, that is going to be our overall attitude here to everything. What we need is a government and a plan that just backs our country again. It takes a common sense approach. Angus and I, we’ve developed a plan, a plan that will lower taxes, a plan that will deliver cheaper energy and prices for people, a plan that will bring down migration. All of those things. It’s a simple plan. As Ronald Reagan said, there’s not easy solutions in life, but there are simple solutions. We just have to have the courage to do it, and our courage will be to unashamedly lower taxes for the Australian people, to scrap net zero and bring down energy prices, to bring down to have fewer levels of migration in this country, and all of those things. If we lower taxes, lower energy prices, lower migration, they will lead to higher living standards for the Australian people. That will be our focus, and that will make sure that this investment you’re receiving here at the moment in rare earths, in data centres, in the Beetaloo Basin, is not just a Red Bull sugar hit. We need a sustainable economic platform for a new era of Australian prosperity. We can be and should be the richest nation in the world, but we won’t be unless we use our own resources that we have. We’ve got to use it, or we’re going to lose our country. That will be my focus. That will be my fight. We’ll defeat this terrible government. We’ll offer the promise of a better Australia for everybody, including up here in the north. Thanks so much for being here and having me as a guest, and God bless. Thank you.