Follow the money

Chamber Senate on 1/12/2022
Item: BILLS – Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Banning Dirty Donations) Bill 2022 – Second Reading

Senator RENNICK (Queensland) (09:53): I rise to speak to this bill, which is basically laced with hypocrisy. This bill does nothing. It’s got one side of the picture, in terms of private sector, but doesn’t mention anything about money coming from unions or super funds. It doesn’t mention anything about the inherent influence inside bureaucracies. I know that the promoter of this bill worked for the Environmental Defenders Office for about a decade. Of course, she’s one of many left-wing Marxists in the bureaucracy who get paid by the taxpayer to be impartial, but I have no doubt that this is a scheme that’s employed by the left—whenever you talk about any environmental stuff, they always run off to the Environmental Defenders Office and then use the law—’lawfare’—to effectively shut down any sort of new production.

We have this slur going around ‘we can’t have money from fossil fuel donors’. Somehow a diesel fuel rebate is some sort of a rort. If you want to know what a rort is, it’s the people who live in these inner-city houses. The biggest tax expenditure discount in the budget is the CGT grant on wealthy houses in inner-city electorates. Yet these same hypocrites come in here and call the diesel fuel rebate, incurred by producers who don’t go anywhere near a road, a rort. That is not the case at all. When farmers plant their crops, they don’t go anywhere near a road. I myself am from a farm of 150,000 acres. It can take you two hours to get to the boundary just to go and check your water. We would drive thousands of kilometres a year just to check our bores, and we’re meant to pay for roads we don’t use. How is this somehow a rort?

I notice there’s a key word in there—that we’re going exclude people that volunteer their time. The thing is, in the private sector, if you didn’t know, small businesses work seven days a week, 24 hours a day. They don’t always have the time to help the parties. That’s why they decide to give money. ‘We’d love to help you out. We don’t actually have the time, but use it for advertising or whatever.’ There’s an implication that all donations are bad.

I don’t like gambling any more than a lot of people in this chamber, but the fact of the matter is that that was brought in by a crony deal between the Goss Labor government; Kevin Rudd, who was the chief of staff at the time; and the unions, who wanted to bring gambling into Queensland. What have we got for it? I tell you what regional Queensland got for it: nothing. What we got was a lot of heartache. In my home town of Chinchilla, when I was growing up, we didn’t have any poker machines in the pubs, but we had a maternity ward and we had a council. We don’t have a maternity ward or a council anymore, but we’ve got poker machines. So no-one’s going to be influencing me—and no-one does influence me when it comes to donations.

Another thing that this bill completely overlooks is the influence of lobbyists, who don’t have to disclose how much people pay them.

You want to know who the real shadow government in this country is? It’s the bureaucracies who are stacked with left-wing supporters—and they are left-wing supporters—and the lack of accountability in these so-called independent bodies. I did a post this morning, about my tenth one on RBA, about how they refuse to bring our gold home. They refuse to do a proper audit. There’s no accountability there.

I’ll give you another great example. The Bureau of Meteorology used to just have the weather—the vision. These guys would go out, they’d measure the temperature or they’d record the temperature, and that was it. End of story. But now they have this whole new division called the climate division. Their job is to go and create new sets of data that’s been manipulated from the original raw data. They wrap big words around it, like ‘homogenisation’ et cetera, so that most people don’t even understand what they’re talking about, but it’s actually manipulated data. You don’t go back and create a new dataset, and fudge the data. You report the original data with a margin of error; that’s what you should be doing. I’ve spoken to the ABC, another so-called independent body, about why, when they report this data, they don’t distinguish between homogenised data and raw data. Why don’t they report the raw data with a margin of error? That’s how you do it.

In the private sector, if you came up with three, four or five sets of different accounts—Al Capone style—you’d be thrown in jail, but, no, not within the bureaucracy, because it doesn’t suit the narrative of the bureaucracy that maybe the temperature hasn’t risen as much as they claim it has. It hasn’t. The raw data doesn’t show anywhere near the increase in temperature that the homogenised data does.

That’s just another example of the influence coming not from money or from the use of volunteer or paid power but from people who are paid by the taxpayer to deliver goods and services who aren’t actually delivering goods and services at all. What they’re doing is using the bureaucracy to push their own ideology, and that is corruption. That is corruption.

Then we go again to the hypocrisy of this bill with superannuation. The first thing the Labor government did when they got in was to remove the disclosure laws around how much money superannuation funds donate to political parties, via the unions or whatever. Did the Greens vote for greater transparency there? No, I don’t think they did. They didn’t do that.

What about the pharma industry? Big pharma—I’m not talking about pharmacies, by the way, Senator McGrath. I’m talking about big pharma. Did the Greens back our bill to get that contract disclosed? No, they didn’t.

If we go and look at who the Greens’ all-time biggest donor is, it’s none other than Graeme Wood, a guy that made his millions through travelling—from being basically an online booking agent for people to travel the world. How much CO2 does travelling the world actually consume? And they have the hide to come in here and cast slurs on our primary producers, our miners and our farmers, that somehow these guys are bad. But it’s gross hypocrisy.

If we look at the Victorian Greens party, their biggest donor was of course the Electrical Trades Union. They’d be making a lot of money out of wiring all of these solar panels, the wind turbines that we can’t recycle and all the batteries that are going to be installed. Can you see the connection for the Electrical Trades Union, that’s going to get paid a lot of money and a lot of jobs for the sparkies by setting up all this new electrical wiring? Think of all the transmission lines where they’re going to be ripping the guts out and scarring our beautiful landscape. Think of the dead koalas from these transmission lines and the dead wombats from these EVs with greater braking speeds. Think of that! That’s terrible. We have all those inner-city elites driving down from their North Shore suburbs or as they drive up to the snow every year from the inner city of Melbourne in their EV cars with 800-kilogram batteries in the middle of them which increase the braking speed. The hypocrisy of these people is breathtaking!

That was another comment I heard, ‘Accelerated depreciation is somehow a rort’. No! If you’re going to drop a million dollars on a tractor—and it costs a lot of money to buy a tractor to go around and around—you won’t sell that tractor again any time soon for anywhere near a million dollars. It costs a lot of money for big capital-intensive equipment, and to claim that getting a tax deduction for a genuine cost of doing business is somehow a rort is just absurd. It is just absurd! But, yet again, we have the Greens completely divorced from reality. They don’t seem to understand that small businesses in this country don’t necessarily have the time to go out and campaign. We saw that.

The other great big hypocrisy in all this is with the teals, for example. Of course, their biggest funder is Simon Holmes a Court. He got his wealth from his father, Robert Homes a Court, who made lots of money in the eighties from investing in mining companies. We have this classic hypocrisy yet again: ‘Don’t worry about where my wealth came from. Once I’ve got my millions I’m then going to do the backflip and suddenly start being holier-than-thou to alleviate my guilt.’ I know that Senator Pocock often talks about growing up on a farm and that he respects the farmers. I suggest, Senator Pocock, that if you want you could come out to our property one day and look at how far it takes to drive from our house out to our boundaries, and how much petrol we use each year. By the way, my dad never claimed the diesel fuel rebate. I used to tell him to do it, but he just won’t take any sort of handout from the government. He just doesn’t want anything to do with government—he doesn’t want the government in his life. That’s why he lives on a property of 150,000 acres, miles from anywhere. Obviously, I have inherited some of his traits because that’s how I feel when it comes to government as well.

Senator Shoebridge interjecting—

Senator RENNICK: Yes: I came to the Senate to get government out of my life! Thanks, very much, Senator Shoebridge. I enjoy your interjections, and you’ll quickly learn that you won’t get away with them with me because I will eviscerate you! My intelligence will put you back in your spot very, very quickly. Through the chair—

Honourable senators interjecting—

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator McGrath ): Senator Rennick, just pause for a moment. Interjections are always disorderly. Could everybody just enjoy each other’s company and enjoy Senator Rennick’s speech in silence, please. Thank you, Senator Rennick.

Senator RENNICK: I look at these figures and I ask myself, ‘Where will we end up? The other thing we haven’t spoken about—and I must touch on this—is their influence on the childcare industry. I’ve often said that you only have to look at the union movement in this country, which is down to 10 per cent of the workers. The reason why the unions grasp onto our children in child care is that the only growing union in this country is the United Voice, because of the rapid increase in child care. These people say that they want to look after our children; I don’t want the government looking after our children. I want that childcare payment going directly to the parent and letting the parent choose. Just like when it comes to the transgender stuff, let the parent decide. When it comes to our space in this country, the government doesn’t invade our personal space and there’s too much of that happening with big government. I’ve seen that since I’ve come down here, whether it’s in child care or how we look after our health, you name it, or how we save our money; the unions, big government and the bureaucracy are the true shadow government of this country and they have no accountability.

This is the hypocrisy of this bill. When we tried to move amendments to get greater transparency over costings on reaching the 43 per cent target by 2030—don’t have a clue. Senator McAllister doesn’t have a clue how many kilometres of transmission lines we need to reach that target by 2030. They don’t have a clue how many batteries and how much energy needs to be stored, and they certainly have no idea about costings. We’ve done the same for the pharmaceutical contracts. I’m about to bring up another OPD on the Auditor-General. Another ex-Labor staffer didn’t declare he was an ex-Labor staffer when he applied for a job. He seemed to think that was 30 or 40 years ago, so it didn’t matter. Yet again, it matters because a leopard doesn’t change its spots.

If you want to get all this stuff and tamp down on donations, I think every bureaucrat in this country should be made to declare whom they vote for at every election, so we know whether or not they’re impartial. They shouldn’t be allowed to vote. That would be the best way. Once you become a bureaucrat, you’ve got to be completely impartial. Don’t let them vote, or we can make them disclose which way they vote, so we know how they think. For too long these guys have been running a protection racket for the left side of politics. We had one public servant in estimates start saying, ‘We’re the government,’ and Senator Hollie Hughes very quickly picked up on the fact that he should’ve actually been impartial.

As I said, if you want to know who really controls this government, it’s the bureaucrats, the unions, the super funds, the big end of town and the inner-city elites. It is not the battlers. They’re out there. They’re voiceless. Most of them are too busy working. Whether you like it or not in this country, politics is followed by only a very small sliver of people in this country, and most of the reason why is that they’re too busy working. Some people, when they get later in life and they have a bit of money, might want to donate to the party, but this bill will destroy their right to participate in democracy, because they don’t always have the time of young uni students. That’s how Josh got rolled. Basically the teals got a couple of thousand people to go doorknocking and paid them $40. Is it going to apply to the teals, who pay their volunteers to go doorknocking? Is this bill going to apply to that? This says non-volunteer labour; how does it work out when the teals and the Greens pay their volunteers to go doorknocking?

Senator Pratt: They’re not volunteers.

Senator RENNICK: Yes, they’re not volunteers. That’s right. They should be called out as well. Are we going to make every little volunteer disclose how much they’re getting paid? Are we going to do that? No, of course not. If we want to have true democracy in this country—and I’m all for disclosure, but this is one sided—next time I’ll bring that big pharmaceutical bill up, Senator Waters, and see whether or not you want to vote on what we spent the $8 billion on with these vaccines, what we got for that and what was in that deal. You didn’t do that, so I don’t want to hear about how you’re against the big end of town, because every time we try and wedge you guys on making the big end of town more transparent, you always vote with Labor. I’ll be putting the bureaucrats up to ICAC. I’m going to have a lot of fun doing this, because Mr Albanese, the Prime Minister, will shut that down.