Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, delegates. It’s wonderful to join you again at the New South Wales Nationals Conference. I’ll save some thanks for Rick a bit later on. Just apologize to start off with, I was here a little late because I did the Park Run this morning, and Gurmesh is pretty slow, so he helped me out, but I just saw him, he just walked in himself. He just finished, but smoked me. Actually, he’s a really fit guy, ready to roll for the election next year. It’s great to be back in Albury. Yes, as Rick kind of hinted at, it’s become a bit of my second home down here in Farrer. I’ve loved it, enjoyed it. It’s a wonderful, beautiful part of our country. And I want to start by thanking all of you who helped me and the Federal Nationals team and Brad Robertson in that campaign. I want to pay special thanks to Brad and especially his wife, Kate, as well.
They did a remarkable job over those few weeks. Thrown it into a baptism of fire. It was a very, very tough campaign. We gave it a hell of a fight. We were here every day. I was here every night, almost, some of those in a swag. Glad we auctioned off that swag at the Victoria Nats Conference. Good riddance, it’s gone. But it’s a lot to say to my team, Opposition should not be comfortable. I’m not here for the long-term Opposition. It is a camp. We’ve set down a camp, but we are going to take back government, take back this country, and steer us on a better course. I do also want to thank all of my federal colleagues that helped during that, and the support they have given me this first few months. Michael did great work on water in that campaign. Ross and Kevin came down; Kevin was also working on the Budget during that busy time as well. Leading up to that, we had Victorians from across the border come over in droves, like Bridget, who was here yesterday, and Sam and Darren, all helped out, and I also want to give a special shout out among my federal colleagues, to Alison Penfold, who’s doing a remarkable job in just her first year in Parliament. I don’t think anyone else, the Federal Nationals team, has been retweeted by JK Rowling, but Alison has.
Alison has been doing amazing work in the local community, right, with the floods and disasters, that’s what she is really known for there locally, but she’d also made a commitment to do something during the election campaign, and to do something about a question that had perplexed people in Canberra, all around the world. Actually, there’s people that just couldn’t answer this question. It was a real, a real brain breaker, but Alison’s finally written an answer in federal law, or proposed federal law, in a Bill to the question, ‘What is a woman’? So, congratulations, Alison. May I say, we need to ensure that our laws protect women, protect their spaces, let them conduct activities without the threat of being dragged through the courts for just wanting to share an experience with other women.
It’s outrageous, what’s happened to some very good women in this country. And Alison’s at the forefront; The Nationals are at the forefront of fixing this mess. Can I go back to my state colleagues? I didn’t want to skip over them, because so many of them did help out that Farrer campaign too. Gurmesh going down, of course, so many others. Particular shout out to Steph Cook, all the great work she does there, and to Miranda, shining example of what we are in this Party. Steph works tirelessly for the community, and she delivers results, delivers results, and while we haven’t got a result in that drinking water yet, Steph, I know you’ve made some progress, and we’ll be there all the way with the people of Narrandera too. I also want to thank the young Nats as well; they came down here in droves. Their president lost a car. Someone else from the Territory won a bunch of money on the pokies. I don’t think she shared it with anybody. Didn’t buy Charlie a car, that’s for sure. He’s still without one, but he’s got some old car he’s using someone’s character home.
But it was great to have you, all your great energy, fantastic to have you on the campaign, and really look forward to working with you to take down this terrible Labor government, too. Because I also want to thank the overall Party here, the New South Wales National Party, and actually, I forgot, I can’t forget Tory. Well, Tory, your team. Thank you, Tory, for the work you did. Very amazing job with Molly and Chris, your whole team, and probably missing people. Thank you so much. Thank you to Lincoln as well, the Federal team, and I also recognize Lincoln’s service to our Party as well, but does bring me to Rick, which I saved until last, but I also want to thank Rick as well, because it was Rick a year ago at your last conference in Coffs Harbor who moved the motion against net zero, at your conference in Coffs. I was privileged to be there, and you did create history there, because you were the first state Party unit to make this charge, to put a flag in the ground, saying no, we’re getting out of this brush, we’re getting out of it, it’s destroying our country.
It’s making us poorer, and you guys led the charge on that, and you did so in the way that demonstrates why our Party is so great. It was led by you, motions moved by Rick, but he couldn’t deliver the outcome on his own. There was a spirited debate. There were different views. It was all of you, as Members, who have changed the course of Australian political history by striving against this policy and coming to a decision. And you can’t say that for all political parties.
Our political Party does cherish our grassroots members, and at best when we do listen and follow the good wisdom and common sense of our grassroots members, and I want to say in my first New South Wales Nationals Conference as a Leader that I intend to always back you, to always fight for you, to always be guided by your common sense and boundedness, because you’re in your communities, so I want to thank you for that, because you have, as I said, you’ve changed history, you’ve been part of political history by being involved in that conference last year, I mean, even like a year ago, so much has happened in a year after you made that decision.
I mean, even Barnaby Joyce now is against Net Zero. After you moved it at your conference, he used to be in favour of it, but you convinced him, as well as many other people around the country. And a lot’s happened in that year too. A lot has happened since the Farrer by-election. The week after that by-election, we had the Budget come down, but a Budget come down that was built on lies and broken promises.
People are reeling, and I still am struggling to get overshot of it, honestly, because I had spent the previous five or six weeks, unlike the Prime Minister, didn’t even show up here, didn’t bother to show their face down here, but I had been here on the ground, spoken with Brad and others, with hundreds of small businesses, 1000s of people, and almost universally, the common reception, or the common feedback I got was that we are struggling. We are really struggling, families struggling to pay their bills, small businesses just hanging on after massive increases, their costs, and then the massive impact of the Iran war, and so you have that experience where you know you’re camping out and you’re listening to real people who plant themselves in politics, like we all tend to be sometimes, and then you go to Canberra, and it’s like it’s a different universe, different planet, and they’re not talking about the cost of living, they’re not talking even about their own oil prices, they’re unleashing the biggest tax grab in Australian history that they didn’t even say they were going to do before the election.
And that’s why you’re seeing this reaction from the Australian people, because it’s not just the broken promises and lies that’s enough, but it’s the deep-seated feeling that the government in Canberra is just not listening, they don’t understand, because why, why have we got a government that has spent months, obviously, they spent months preparing to break these promises.
They spent months in arcane sections of the Income Tax Assessment Act on trusts and capital gains tax and negative gearing, and they wasted their time not focusing on, well, how can we lower energy prices?
How can we lower the cost of living? This was the first Budget that this government’s delivered, they have delivered four now, this was the first one that they didn’t even promise to lower energy prices.
Every other Budget they’ve given, they’ve at least paid lip service and said, well, we’re investing in clean energy, it’s going to bring prices down. This Budget that didn’t even bother. Not to mention it, no mention of energy prices. How can you be a government of this country right now and not, in your premier economic statement, mention the escalating cost of energy in this country? It’s the most common thing that comes back to me, but this government has its complete head in the sand, and so, since that Budget, I’ve been back on the road when I’m not in Canberra, been going around talking to small businesses at a round table, and the common feedback I get is people just feel like they’ve done everything that the country asked of them, they invested, they’ve worked hard for their families, and the rules have been changed after the whistle blew.
Someone said that in small business in Kevin’s electorate said that to us, that the whistle’s gone, and they changed the rules, and I initially said, well, I thought that only happened in State of Origin games, but we will get vengeance this week.
But for people that have mortgaged their homes, put their lives on the line. How can you have a government like this, and we’ve got this major issue in this country of how do we lift our living standards, and we’ve now got a Budget, an economic document that has zero plan to lift economic growth, zero growth, where the national accounts come out last week, and it confirms that the first four years of this government have seen, for the first time in economic history, have seen productivity go backwards, go down.
We’ve never, never had a four year period in our nation’s history where our productivity has been negative, never happened. And then this government’s not only broken that record, it has gone down 5 per cent. Like it’s way down, it’s off a cliff. And this comes after just a year ago, you might not remember now, but just a year ago, about nine months ago, the government actually convened a productivity roundtable. Do you remember that? They got everybody to Canberra, it was a big fanfare, the Treasurer said productivity is most important thing in the world. It’s what drives our incomes, is right.
That’s exactly what it does. But they wasted everybody’s time because they barely mentioned it since, and they don’t have a plan for it now. And so I thought I was in Senate Estimates last week, a couple of weeks ago, I can’t remember, I get confused now. A week or two ago, I was in Senate Estimates. I thought, maybe I’ll just put the question to the Finance Minister. What’s your plan for productivity? I was a bit, you know, a little bit concerned. There’s a bit of Dixer, right?
Like, if you’re going to ask Dorothy Dixer an easy question, right? Easy question for a Minister. So, what’s your plan for financial security? What’s your plan for economic growth? Any half-confident government should just have, bang, you know, here’s this page of what they’re doing, here is the chapter, verse, whack, whack, whack, even if it’s all rubbish, they can still shoot that book. But here’s Katy Gallagher’s response, I think we’ve got a queued up, if somebody can chuck it up on the screen now, you’ll see what Katy Gallagher, the nation’s Finance Minister, has to say to you about their plan.
What elements of your budget help increase productivity?
KATY GALLAGHER – GRAB
So, there is a glossy, an A4 four there.
MATT CANAVAN
How does a glossy help productivity?
That’s it. That’s their plan. Do you reckon these guys got to go? They’ve got to go. I think we need someone that has a plan, right? We need someone that has a plan. We need it desperately right now, because we’ve just seen how vulnerable we are as a country. We’ve had the embarrassment, national embarrassment of our Prime Minister having to travel the world, cap and hand to find fuel, find oil for us. How does this happen in the country where we have our own continent.
Surely we don’t need to go to a country like Singapore. Great, Singapore’s fantastic place, it’s lovely. It’s a small little island, and we’re going there to ask them for basic essentials. How have we got to this point?
We have been saying this for a long time now in The Nationals Party, and it just was coincidental that a week or two after this crisis started, the Page Research Centre, The Nationals’ Party think tank, basically the Page Research Centre released a report, and it released a statistic that I think all Australians should become familiar with, half of our nation’s imports, half of our ports by weight are in liquid fuels.
Everything we import, we import a lot of stuff these days, our clothes, our cars, furniture we’re sitting on, lights, all this stuff will be imported, right? Basically, everything is room almost to be imported, but half of them actually are not in this room, half them are in your cars outside and in your fuel tanks, that’s how dependent we are. And so I love our defence forces, but do you reckon we have a navy at the moment that can defend half the shipping lanes to our country? So, what happens? What happens if we face this conflict where shipping lanes are held up. We don’t have this answer right now, and that’s why, in our Budget reply, in Angus’ speech, and mine as well, in the Senate, we made a very key point of saying, look, guys, we’ve got to drop this Net Zero madness in a war, in a foxhole, there are no supporters of net zero, but all that belief goes. I have another belief in a foxhole, but that’s another story, but we have to drop this now before we get into any kind of conflict.
We have to get back to using all of our resources, we have to get back to using our coal fired power stations. We should build coal fired power stations. Again, we should use our coal to convert to liquids, so we’re ready, in case.
We’ve got an amazing resource, we have enough energy. We have enough energy in this country to fuel Australia for 1000 years, 1000 years, and current use, and it may weigh more, but that’s just what we know we have. Our problem is 95 per cent of that energy is in coal or uranium. The two things that this government, the Labor Party, won’t use.
A bit of a problem when you start to realize why energy prices are through the roof. But it’s not just the government that’s the problem here, not just them. So get rid of them and it will be right, but we do have another problem, because not long after I became Leader, myself and Kevin and Susan McDonald was also Shadow Minister. We all wrote to our banks, the nation’s banks, and said, “Hey, we just want to check, would you guys finance an oil refinery? Would you do that? We need an oil refinery, right? Would you do it?” I didn’t expect we got pretty mealy mouth responses. Most of it’s not exactly clear. One man got back to me, they informally called my office, they got back to me and said, look, we’d love to finance an oil refinery, but we just need a law telling us that it’s in our national security interest to do so. What the hell, guys? Why do we need the Parliament to child mind you? You should, I think, you should know that oil security is in our national interest, and maybe you should look at backing it.
So it’s a little complex, I was a little pissed off with that response, but I then thought, well, okay, if you guys want a law, I’ve actually got a law. I got a law, I drafted a law when I was in isolation back then, I drafted laws which said, okay, it should now be illegal for any bank to prevent any farming and mining business, unless it’s a financial reason to do so. Simple as that, right? What do you reckon? Simple as that. Our banks should be there to help our economy, not to be a quasi-Parliament dictating to the rest of us what we should do. I mean, who the hell pointed these guys as moral guardians, anyway?
These are banks. These are the banks. Went through the whole Royal Commission. They were forging signatures, charging fees to dead people. And then they have the temerity to come along and say, “Okay, no, we’ll tell you what to do. We’ll tell you what you can do. This can’t do that. We might be able to let you do some regenerative farming, but you can’t do live export.” That’s bad. Well, guys, if you want to decide what happens in this country or not, you should stand for Parliament and get elected. That’s the job of a representative body in a democracy. It is not the job of an unelected board sometimes sitting in other countries to determine what happens in our country. Should not happen.
So, I’m going to resurrect that law now. Going to give it a go, see where it goes, because if the banks need this sort of instruction, well, let’s give it to it. It’s happened in the US. 14 states in the US have passed laws like this, and it’s effectively killed ESG there. And if you don’t know what ESG stands for, it stands for Extreme Shortages Guarantee. So we’ve got to end that. We’ve got to kill this net zero finance before it destroys us as a country, and we have to recognize the time we’re in right now. It’s a volatile time in politics we can all see. It shouldn’t take us too much to recognize or understand why that’s the case. Why is that the case? Well. Couple people have this deep-seated feeling that things aren’t right, things haven’t gone the way they promised they would, and it’s not just the Labor Party, we’ve broken promises, a kind of a final nail in the coffin, the trust and institutions in our country, but there’s been a lot of promises made to my generation to Australians in the last few decades.
Now we were promised that competition policy and making all the farms competitive in the market would make us all richer. Well, instead we got corporate serve tax advantages now to buy water and land, outbid family farmers who promised that we protect all the frogs and environment, wouldn’t it be lovely? Instead, we just shut down lots of towns and industries, and we haven’t delivered significant environmental benefits, given the cost.
Look at that Narrandera water, we spent $10 billion on a basin plan, we can’t even deliver clean drinking water to a country town. That was wrong, and we promised that China coming to WTO would make us all richer and wealthier, and in a way it kind of has, but what’s the good of having a cheap spanner set at Bunnings if we can’t fill up the car to get there in the first place? What good is that? We were promised that everybody getting the opportunity to work, having equal rights in the workplace, would be great. Instead, now just everyone has to work. Sometimes two jobs, they have no time to spend with their kids and their family. That’s why people are upset, and we need to have a fundamental rethink about what we’re doing, we need to bury the idea that we just continue on this neoliberal experiment, which is now bankrupt.
We’ve got to get back to worrying about our own country, to putting Australia first, interests of families first, and that’s why I am unashamedly a patriot for Australia. That’s true. I want to put this country first, more than I want to maximize GDP or worry about people’s careers. It’s not about just working.
My fundamental political philosophy is that what I really want is like what CS Lewis wrote. I want as many Australian families as possible to be able to just enjoy a Sunday afternoon and can spend time with their kids, watch the footy, go to the pub if they like, do whatever it is, relax, go fishing, whatever, and not have a worry in the world. People don’t have that right now, have a lot of worries in the world right now, so we’ve got to fix that, and the way we fix that is focusing on our country again.
The way we fix that is building things again, getting the inland rail going again, like what the hell is that? Like, why has the government done that, crazy. Get that going, build dams, support rail lines again, scrap this net zero idea, bring down the cost of living, focus on that. We should be building more cities. We’ve got to get out of just Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane. Otherwise we are going to be crammed in, and people are just going to have an apartment to live in, and I think that’ll destroy the Australian way of life, if that’s our future. We’ve got to encourage people to have more babies as well. We need more families. We need to create an environment where people can do that, or the income to do that, the hope and optimism about the future to do that as well. And to do those things, I firmly believe we have to have a strong Nationals Party of achievement.
We are the only Party in the country that is solely and exclusively focused on regional Australia, and our future is going to be written in regional Australia. I don’t want people that live outside the capital cities to become a permanent minority class, if we don’t continue as a Party, if we don’t continue to be strong, well, the volume will be turned down on regional Australia. I can see it in Australian Parliament, capital cities, and two thirds of the votes, guys. So we’ve got to stand up, but the only party that does that, look at Queensland, where I’m from, it’s two Senators from our Party, two Senators from One Nation. Susan and I are in Townsville and Rocky, are on the ground, our offices are on the street, can walk into us. One Nation Party and their Senators are both on the level 36 of the skyscrapers of Brisbane. I love what GK Chesson said, I loved it before as a politician, it’s probably harder to say now, but GK Chesson said that we should keep our politicians close enough that we can give them a kick every now and again. I’m close enough for that to happen in Rocky, and yes, yes, we’ve deserved a bit of a kick. We deserve, we made some mistakes, but I’m committed to charting a different course for our country. I myself fought against this net zero agenda for years.
I did think it went a bit crazy during Covid towards the end. Everyone makes mistakes, but we need this Nationals Party. We need our country to grow and develop in our regions, so that we give the promise for future Australians to have that family, have the space to live up to the potential of our nation as a pioneering country that offers support, opportunity, and wealth for so many people. Thank you for all you do in The Nationals Party. Thank you again for what you did last year to kickstart our revival. Now, revive our country, better reboot Australia, got to go hyper Australia. So, I like to say we just need more Australia, need more of everyone. Very hopeful, optimistic for the future. Thank you very much for having me in conference again. Enjoy the rest of it. God bless. Thank you.
