Senator ROBERTS (Queensland) (16:35): As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia I wish to make a few remarks about Senator Gallagher's motion—firstly, her opening paragraph. Let's be clear that mining, and particularly China, carried Australia through the global financial crisis, and Labor destroyed our cash balance. We may point to rosy employment numbers, but what about the underemployment that's going on right now? What about cost of living and stagnant wages? These are the result of past neglect by both the Liberal Party and the Labor Party. Growth now is due to past productive capacity, and our low growth now is due to lack of investment and destruction of our productive capacity in the past. Under the Liberal-Labor duopoly, in rural Queensland, for example, where primary agricultural industries are very important—forestry, fishing, farming, grazing—property rights were stolen by the Howard federal government in 1996, working with the Rob Borbidge National Party government, then the Peter Beattie Labor government and then the Palaszczuk and Trad government—and the Newman government did not rescind it. The rural sector lost its property rights—fundamental to productive capacity. We've seen a lack of investment in essential water assets. A friend of mine was talking to a prominent Liberal leader—I won't mention his name—in this country just a couple of weeks ago at a meeting and asked him, 'Why didn't you invest in dams 10 years ago?' He replied, 'Because we didn't need them 10 years ago.' This is the thinking that is stopping our country. Then we look at the self-destruction of our energy sector. We went from the lowest electricity prices in the world to the highest under both the Liberals and Labor. It started with the National Energy Market, which started before John Howard, but John Howard's government put in place the Renewable Energy Target and the stealing of property rights without compensation, and was the first to put in place a policy invoking a carbon tax, a carbon dioxide trading scheme. I'll talk more about those energy prices in a minute. We've also seen in Queensland soil runoff legislation, supposedly to protect the farmers, but it's based on nonsense. It is hurting the farmers and will seriously suffocate the farmers in the near future. Our fishing industry has been decimated by UN guidelines adopted by both Labor and Liberal. Our forestry industry is being decimated now—people with the axe hanging over their head. This is what's happening to the productive capacity in our rural sector. What about our manufacturing sector? Car manufacturing has been shut down. Steel mills are declining. We have two left now. Mining is under the gun. Mining is being choked. Manufacturing was sent overseas under both the Liberal Party and the Labor Party. Our economic productive capacity has been decimated. This is not growth for the future. People are choked by cost-of-living rises and stagnant wages. We see higher house prices. We now live in a country that has just been through the world's greatest-ever resources boom, and our young people can't afford to buy houses. We see shops shut, as I said the other day, from Bamaga south, right through to Burleigh, and west. We see it right across Queensland. We see shops being shut and we see businesses being shut—particularly in the rural areas. So let's have a look at some of the policies put in place by the Liberal-Labor duopoly. Let us look at energy policy—and, by the way, electricity and energy are primary assets; they're primary to everything that happens in our society. The No. 1 factor that has caused our dramatic increase in material wealth in our society in the West over the last 170 years has been the relentless decrease in electricity prices. In the last 10 years, we've seen a doubling of the price of electricity. We've gone from having the lowest electricity prices in the world to now having among the highest—or, in fact, the highest. And that's been driven by Labor-Liberal-Green policies. We currently have a renewable energy target, which requires the subsidy of renewable energy—or so-called renewables, that are really intermittent. We see that decimating the electricity sector. It's currently at 14 per cent. The Liberal-National party want to double it to 28 per cent. That is suicide. The Labor Party wants to increase it to 50 per cent—almost quadrupling it. As I said, energy is the gateway to manufacturing. Energy is the gateway to agriculture. Energy is the gateway to tertiary industry. The primacy of energy must be understood. Yet both parties are destroying it, in a mad rush to appease the Greens on climate. So their policies are similar there. It's just a matter of grade. Then we have immigration. Both parties believe in big numbers of immigrants coming in. We see hospital-bed availability almost halved. We see water supplies now being choked and restrictions being put on, and our sewage water being treated and recycled as drinking water. We see restrictions on showering now being mooted by the authorities in Sydney. How can we keep living like this? We're a first world country, and we're going backwards to being a Third World country. Let's talk about tax. Both the Liberal Party and Labor refuse to tackle the problem of multinational tax. They talk about it, but they don't do it. It's a very simple exercise, as we have pointed out. We've got the solutions. Instead of pretence, we need to tackle multinationals head on. The fourth issue is economic management. We see the Liberal-Labor duopoly doing the same thing again—playing the same games and bribing people at every election. But nowadays it's not just the election cycle that matters; it's the 12-month budgetary cycle—bribing people to get their votes. As to infrastructure, both parties are refusing to build significant, visionary dam projects that could green Queensland. And why? Because the Greens are holding over them that you can't build dams. Both the Liberal Party and the Labor Party follow the Greens' policies on energy, immigration, tax, economic management and infrastructure; they follow the Greens' policies, to get preferences. I don't see a plan. I do not see a plan from either party in the Liberal-Labor duopoly. There is no concrete plan. So, when Senator Gallagher's motion says: … the Morrison Government has no plan to deal with the domestic economic challenges— I agree— leaving us unnecessarily exposed to global shocks— I agree— and to support Australians struggling to meet their weekly costs … I agree. And the Liberal-Labor duopoly has done that. There is no plan other than: 'Follow the Greens. Build facades. Pretend to be doing things: put on a hi-vis vest, put on a hard hat, put on safety glasses and pretend you're doing something.' Of course, the Liberal and Labor parties share preferences. They share preferences with each other because they'd rather put their opponent, or supposed opponent, ahead of the One Nation party. So that tells you that these people are just about ready to merge—and maybe that's what they're thinking of doing! Let's have a look at building productive capacity. An honourable senator interjecting— Senator ROBERTS: Well, the policies are the same, so they might as well merge! Good policies need to be built on solid data. There is nowhere in the world that has justified the economic lunacy and suicide of the Greens on climate. I've challenged Senator Larissa Waters three times and she's run three times. I challenged Senator Di Natale once two days ago and he still hasn't provided a single source. There is no-one who can—not in CSIRO, not in the Bureau of Meteorology, not in the UN, not anywhere. I challenged the head of NASA, Gavin Schmidt, and he had to admit an error to me. There is no evidence anywhere. I challenge people again: you're wrecking our country based upon UN policies that are nonsense. They are crap. You have not presented any evidence to this parliament. Senator Macdonald used to sit over there. In late December 2016 he stood up and he looked across at me and said, 'I don't always agree with Senator Roberts, but I must give him credit for starting the debate on climate science that this parliament has never had.' True words. We've never debated climate science. I invite anyone to have a formal debate on the climate science. We must get back to building policies on solid data—not political opinion, not spin, not headline grabbing, not political partisanship, not corruption but hard, objective data. Secondly, we must restore our Constitution that is being bypassed. We're taking duties and responsibilities off the states and we need, as former Liberal Premier of WA Richard Court said, to get back to rebuilding the Federation. The title of his work is Rebuilding the Federation. It was published in 1994. I recommend it to everyone. It's a very simple, short book but fundamental. Thirdly, we must have comprehensive tax reform to tax multinationals and free up mobility of capital. Let's make sure that it becomes fair. We need to get back to the basics. I agree on this point: we need to bring forward the income tax cuts. If they're so good, as the Liberal Party said just a couple of months ago, let's bring them forward and get the benefit now in the productive capacity of our country. Then we have the last point in Senator Gallagher's position here: implementing increases to Newstart. What about pensions? It's one of One Nation's policies to improve significantly the age pension and other similar pensions. I look at this country and I look at the people resources—resourceful, creative, innovative and entrepreneurial. We have a history of punching above our weight. I look at our people. I've managed them as coalminers. I've worked with them as farmers. They are being choked, they are being suffocated, by the federal government. I look at the resources in this country from soil to water to minerals to energy. We are now the largest energy exporter in the world, with the No. 1 position in gas and the No. 1 position in the export seaborne trade of coal—and yet we have high energy costs. How? How can that happen? We have enormous opportunity. We have enormous potential. The water in the north and the water in the east of the Clarence River up the tributary can be used productively for greening the west. The Greens—the lunatic Greens—call for not building dams. Yet, if we provided water to the west, we would be able to cover the whole of western Queensland and New South Wales in green vegetation. They believe that we need to absorb carbon dioxide; I don't, because we can't control the level. But if they believe that sincerely then they should support the greening of western New South Wales and western Queensland by building dams to send the water to the west. We have great people, the world's best. We have resources amongst the world's best. We have opportunity and potential. But we have wombats running the joint. That's the problem. Labor, the Liberal Party and the Greens are putting people down. It is an insult to look at what we're doing to our energy sector, the most vital sector we have in this country. Then the Liberal Party accelerates it all, seeking preferences. This country has the best people and resources in the world, and we have the lousiest leaders in the world. That is clear. We're killing agriculture, choking mining and killing manufacturing. China is our biggest trading partner. China is taking our iron ore, our coal—and coal is Queensland's No. 1 export—and our gas. After these are gone, what will we have? We have to develop the productive capacity of our country. We have to invest wisely—not to get Liberal and Labor headlines—but to invest in our peoples' future. The core choice of any sane, sensible federal government must be to invest in the productive capacity for the long-term future of our country. I don't see anyone in Labor or Liberal attending to this, because they're held back by the Greens. It's time to stop looking after the Greens and to come back to integrity and start looking after the people of Australia by investing in the productive capacity of our country.