Gerard Rennick on How Australia’s Economy Is Broken and How We Fix It

Gerard Rennick, founder of the People First Party and former Queensland senator, joined me to discuss his journey from rural Queensland to politics and why he believes Australia needs more leaders with real-world experience. Drawing on his background in finance and a Master’s in Tax Law, Rennick shared his views on the economy, housing, taxation, productivity and capital markets. He has since built his own party from the ground up around five policies he believes could fundamentally reshape how Australia handles money, tax, superannuation and infrastructure. Subscribe to the Mentored newsletter here: https://the-mentored-platform-pty-ltd.myklpages.com/l/WWJGc5 Join my exclusive Mentored+ community: https://mentored.com.au/become-a-member/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Joe Rennick, welcome to Straight Talk.

• 0:01Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  It's awesome to see you here. You're the founder and leader of the People First Party?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  And we'll talk a little bit about that in a moment. Today, and this is where I'm going to get to, we do not have enough in this country, enough real world experience in politics. That's my view, and that's where I want to talk, what I want to talk about today and how and what it's doing to our country.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  If I go, so let's just underline yours first.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks, Mark. And can I just hone in on that a little bit more? We don't have enough real world experience in capital markets.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  No.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  That people don't understand. And I've actually had to unlearn everything I've learned over the last thirty years, just to put that out there at the start. But so born in nineteen seventy in a small town in Chinchilla, about two hundred and eighty kilometres west of Brisbane. So I grew up on a farm, mixed farming. Mum was a nurse, dad was a farmer, used to be a butcher and then, you know, was an aerial surveyor and navigated lots of parts of Australia. So then.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  Your dad did?

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, he worked for a company called Adda Dashrobe, which is Latin for reach for the stars. So he actually was in the Navy and was a navigator in the Gannets. But he failed because he's deaf and he is genuinely deaf. So he ended up surveying Western New South Wales, parts of Western New South Wales. He was a surveyor on the, when the West Gate Bridge was, he surveyed that and parts of the Trough. And actually, one, one weekend, he was out riding bulls in Western New South Wales, got kicked off and sent to hospital. Got kicked in the head and sent to hospital. And that's where I met mum.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, who was a nurse. So yeah, she's a Kemsey girl.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Did you say he was a bull rider?

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Well, he, partly, yeah, on, on weekends. That wasn't his career or anything.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  No, no, it doesn't matter.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but yeah, he was a drover for nine months. He actually drove cattle from Roma down to Dubbo, I think. I'm a bit sketchy on that. But I know he was a drover, you know, as well. So, you know, just that typical knockabout sort of upbringing. He's still alive. He's ninety one. He's out on my brother's property out in Western Queensland.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So anyway, farming background, but long story short, went and completed a Bachelor of Commerce at University of Queensland. Then that was in, and I graduated in pork eatings recession. So I couldn't get work with it. I had interviews with all the big five, big six at the time, didn't get a job there. And actually, so ended up going back to Dolby, which is near my hometown of Chinchilla and working there in public practice for three years. And I have to say, it was, at the time, I thought it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. But looking back, it was actually one of the best things that ever happened to me because I was with a small firm. I had face to face interaction with clients. We did all different sorts of business services, you know, tax, you know, auditing, all those jobs. And I was at the coalface of small business, which of course, as you know, is the engine room of Australia's economy.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  So the second and third year, I started meeting clients and I actually offered me a partnership.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  When I turned twenty five. I left when I was twenty three, but I still think that was really good experience. Because what that gave you is the ability to drill down into detail.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  And, and, you know, I see so many, I used to see it at Westfield, you know, the auditors had come in and they couldn't actually drill down into detail. And.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  It's all high level stuff.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's all high level stuff. And even, you know, and it's right across the, not just the political spectrum, but the court sector as well. And in the professional world today, there's too many professional managers that haven't worked their way up from the shop floor. And I think that's where we're really suffering. J D Vance did a really good speech on it last year, where we spoke about when we outsourced manufacturing. We were naive to think that we weren't going to lose the skills that come with, you know, being on the shop floor, you know, those little ruler thumbs that you only learn when you're actually, you know, on the tools, so to speak. So, yeah, that's, and that's why I said to you earlier on, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Because it knocked, you know, a bit of sense into me. And, you know, it just gave me that grounding of knowing how to drill down into data.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. And what happened after that? Where'd you go after that?

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Well, so then I went overseas for what I thought was going to be two years, but ended up staying for seven years. So I backpacked my, well, so I backpacked my way through Africa for almost six months. Part of that was on an overland truck trip. Exodus, so if anyone, Gen X from the, you know, travels through Africa in the nineties will know what I'm talking about. That was a great experience. Yet again, one part of the trip, we actually, so I climbed Kilimanjaro. And then, because I was really keen to get into mountain climbing at that time, but we also climbed Mount Karasimbi, which was the mountain where, you know, the gorillas in the mist were. And this was in the early nineties, just after the movie came out. But interestingly enough, that night when we came off the mountain, as you do, you know, so this was in Rwanda. You know, as you do when you're backpacking in your early twenties, you go out drinking.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  So anyway, we had Rwandan troops come and say to us, look, there's a curfew on, you're not supposed to be out drinking, but we'll let you drink if you buy us a few beers. So we bought them a few beers and had a bit of a conversation. Anyway, they gave us an escort home with guns over their shoulders. We thought it was all pretty jovial at the time. And that was a Sunday night and a war broke out on a Wednesday. So we left on the Tuesday.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and the, the interesting thing about it at the time, and obviously we're an outsider looking in and we, that was a French speaking country, not an English speaking country. But I had no idea that, you know, that genocide was about to take place. And, you know, that's a real big lesson I got, you know, from travelling is how quickly things can go from peace to wartime. So, yeah.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  And how naive we can be too.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So got to London, worked for, let me just think about this now, British BBC and British Rail. Interestingly enough, and, and with British Rail, this was at the time they were privatising British Rail. So they offered people redundancies. So of course, all the people that were quite the good workers and who backed themselves to get another job went and took the redundancy. And then they realised that they'd lost a lot of their good workers. So that the, the new contracting company had to come back in and offer these people that took a redundancy, actually offer them a new contract to come back on the following Monday and keep working. So that was, it was a really interesting, I mean, I was just a contractor, you know, as a, you know, Aussie expat, just observing all this.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  It wasn't, you know, it was all, but it was yet another one of these sort of chink in the armour about what I'd been taught about, you know, the benefits of privatisation in my university degree. You know, to see that, well, really, you know, this privatisation is everything it was cut up to be. Because there's a lot of tension there between the people that were contractors, who used to be full time employees, because they got a big payout versus those that didn't take the payout and were still getting their wages. So that was an interesting experience as well. But anyway, so I worked for them, worked at BBC. So, you know, I did David Attenborough's timesheets and things like that. I was out at the Atlantic Studios as a management accountant out there.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Oasis filmed Champagne Supernova the day I was out there. I didn't see them, but they were in a, you know, a couple of, you know, rooms next door, sort of filming that. So that was all pretty cool. But then I got a phone call one day saying, how would you like a job travelling the world? You know, and we'll pay for it. And I was like, yeah, I'd love to, you know, at that.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  That's random, like?

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, very random. Yeah, it was very random. But anyway, yeah, I'd love to. So I got flown over to Amsterdam for an interview. And it was probably the shortest accounting interview I ever had. The bloke just said, if you're an accountant, you should know what to do. And then he was more interested in my travels to that day. And it turns out he was from Brisbane as well, Glen Reid, if you're still listening. And anyway, I got a job where basically I was based out of Amsterdam for the next three years. I had, I was in and out of Amsterdam about fifteen, sixteen times, but I had, long story short, about eight months in Amsterdam. Eight months in Brazil, eight months in Norway, eight months in the States and six months between Finland, Chile and Argentina. Where I just basically was, well, as my, my technical role was group financial international controller.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  And as my boss would say, people either do two things when I hear that title, either, you know, fall forward on their knees and start grovelling or fall backwards laughing at such a long winded name. But anyway, look, it was just a general dog's body in the finance world. So I bought companies, installed software, completed financial statements, things like that. But it was a great experience because I was, that, that's turned twenty five by the time I got the job. And I was basically paid to live in five star hotels and, and, and go to work every day in different countries. And on the weekends, the weekends were mine. Like when I was in the States, you know, I was given the use of a Mustang to drive around, well, a hire car. So I got a Mustang as you do. And that was in Sarasota. We did a shared service implementation for all the back offices across the States.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  So that was a good role. You know, in Brazil, I had to train up financial controller. We bought a company there. You know, same again in Norway. Yeah, so.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  So what are you, just on that, Joe, like when you work in those environments for such long periods of time, for such long periods, fairly long periods of time, anyway. What did you learn about places like Norway versus Brazil versus US? Like in terms of how countries are run by the administration, by the governments? Do you see any really stark differences between, say, what's happening here? And was there something you would take from there that you would love to see happen here?

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Well, Brazil was dealing with inflation, the end of it. So I didn't have really bad inflation when I was there, but we had to pay bills before we got the invoice. So that was just because obviously what it was, you know, if you've got really rampant inflation.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  And what is rampant inflation though? What levels?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Well, double digit, right? Because just the time.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  Annually double digit.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So if you're looking at anything over, you know, 12% a year, you're losing 1% over 30 days. Yeah, so, so basically they're very short if or upfront payment terms. Like you basically had to pay on the day because if you've got rampant inflation, which is, you know, you can find it anything over 15%. But Brazil had come off even a higher figure, that money just depreciates away. So even in just the daily, the day to day businesses, you know, of, of dealing with transactions, inflation's a problem. It's not just the cost of living issue, it's actually trying to get paid on time. Um, so there was that issue. I found the Americans extremely optimistic. You know, they were, they were always very optimistic. I remember, um, actually we did, we bought a company in Washington DC before I went down to Sarasota.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  And I was staying in a hotel on opposite the hotel, uh, they were building a new building and I were literally building a level every day.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  And I can remember being shocked at how fast I remember thinking, we don't build that fast here in Australia. So they were very efficient and, and it's not surprising. I mean, houses, house prices in Australia, uh, sorry, in the States are much lower than they are here.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  Because they can build a house there in three months.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  Here's like 18 months.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Um, Nor- Norway, I mean, obviously very dark, cold, you know, they eat lunch at 11:30, lots of fish. Um, you know, but hard not to love the country. I mean, it was just a beautiful country. Um, you know, I had the benefit of sort of being there from arriving in, in the end of the winter, right through the summer period. So I saw the change of seasons as well.

• 10:35Speaker 00

  But what are in terms of administration, like, because we're talking about, we're talking about, um, social leaning or?

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Well, well, look, I, I didn't really, because, I mean, I was young in my twenties and wasn't, uh, necessarily focusing on the political aspects of the country. Um, you know, it's just the people, but look, the people are the same wherever you go, right? We're all the same, it's one race, the human race. This is what we really want to push forward at people first and be, um, you know, look, you know, judge the individual, not the identity. I was just saying before to some others, you know, there's just too much identity politics in this country. And that's the one thing travelling, uh, really, you know, uh, imbued inside me is that we're just one race, the human race. That we all just want a better life for our children, uh, and there's so much gratitude towards our forefathers. Um, and then of course there's the Dutch, I should add, I love the Dutch. Um, the, the Dutch people are just fantastic. I love, I loved the Netherlands.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  I love the straightforwardness.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, very.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  In the early stages, you'd misinterpret it as them being rude a little bit.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  But I, I've worked out for a long time too. And, uh, in the end I, I loved it.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Dutch.

• 11:37Speaker 00

  Because you know where you stand.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah, just, and just straight up like, you know, like, you know, if you could ever do, get, do a deal or do some sort of backpacker deal with. Every Aussie should go and spend six months living in the Netherlands as far as I'm concerned. You know, how we've got the similar deal with the UK, I'd love to do the same with the Netherlands. It's just such a great country, um, and great people as well.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  Do you, do you think all these things, all these experiences you've had in terms of travelling and, and work or travel, um, do you think they have somewhat influenced you when it comes to people first?

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I mean, well, well, it, it, it's the common denominator of that we're just the one race, the human race. I mean, I spent, I, I ended up going backpacking after that role for another two years where I basically travelled the globe. And I spent a lot of time throughout the years, sitting in bus stations and meeting different people, working with different people. And, you know, e- everyone hates their government, doesn't matter what nationality you are, they hate their government, uh, hate paying taxes, all of that stuff. But they have a common, they love their sport, everyone loves their sport. That's why it's such a great, you know, way to unify people, uh, you know, they love their children, um, you know, and, and it's just, I mean, and here's the thing. The poorer the country I went to, the more generous the people were.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  And what did you say, happier?

• 12:50Speaker 01

  I don't know if they were happy though, certainly much more hospitable to myself.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, welcoming.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, welcoming, um, you know, I remember one night when I was in Africa, I, I went down to Maspingo ruins in Zimbabwe there. And I ended up sort of sleeping on this mud hut and just thinking how friendly these people were. Um, you know, yet again in Iran, you know, I travelled through Iran on the way home. I went from Moscow down through all the stars into Iran, Pakistan, India and then in Nepal, uh, how friendly the Iranians were. Because even back in the nineties, you know, big bad Iran, but of course the people themselves were incredibly friendly and hospitable. And yet again, so, you know, I was probably a little imperialist, imperialist growing up, you know, in the back of World War Two there. But, um, uh, you know, I just hate conflicts. I'll talk about it in my maiden speech, you know, strength of diplomacy is what, you know, strength of position and sound diplomacy is what we really need. And, and there's a lack of sound diplomacy.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  What does that mean, sound diplomacy?

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Well, you know, understanding now the point of view, you know, it, it, we use.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  You mean as a nation?

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, we use a lot of belligerent rhetoric now, governments and politicians, yeah. So, so in the same way, we use belligerent rhetoric against each other on a domestic level, right? You know, Labour bashes Liberal, Liberal bashes Labour, you know, Punch and Judy show. We've made the trap of doing that on international affairs as well, uh, and we shouldn't be doing that, right? Because if things get out of hand there, like.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  Or misinterpreted.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Misinterpreted, things can go wrong. I mean, what we did in Iraq, Iraq was another real come to Jesus moment for me because.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  In the nineties, you're talking about the early nineties.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Early 2000, not the 91, 89, like, because that was in and out relatively quickly. But what we did in 2002, three, was it where we started bombing Iraq? Because they had chemical weapons of mass destruction.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  So called.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so called. Um, yeah, I don't know how many people got killed in that, certainly millions were displaced, injured, you know, had their lives turned upside down for what was ultimately a lie. Uh, and, you know, and then we've now done the same with Syria, you know, we've got the head of Al Qaeda, you know, or ex head of Al Qaeda bloke who had a $10 million bounty on his head, running Syria. You know, I, I went through Syria, this was another beautiful country. There's people living there that don't have any political inclinations, they're not out to, you know, all they want to do is a roof over their head, food on the table and a better life for their children. And we go in and we destroy their lives because of some ideology or some, you know, preconceived good guy, bad guy thing. And it's like, you know, we, we've got to think about these decisions.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  So this is one of the things that really concerns me a lot as we head further into the 21st century is this lack of, uh, sound diplomacy, I guess. Uh, and, and, you know, there's too much belligerent rhetoric. Um, so yeah, it, it definitely has impacted me a lot.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  Well, what I wanted to establish is that you had real life experience. We've established, and I think where I'd like to talk to you about is that point of ideology. Ideology seems to be splitting us up.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Division seems to me to be a part of politi- political play.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  Uh, is that, is that correct?

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. And, and what's making it worse.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  It's the, it's the, it's part of the, part of the game.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  That's right. Now, it's always been there, but because social media has got the news at our fingertips 24 hours a day. And, you know, we all, uh, uh, are guilty of doom scrolling and on the, on, you know, go, you know, you have five minute break, you're on the phone. I mean, when we grew up, you would have got the news, maybe, you know, either the.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  Six PM at night?

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Six PM at night.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  First thing in the morning.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, or, or at the quarter to eight ABC bulletin in the morning. I mean, you didn't even used to have the Today Show, right? I mean, I always talk about the cartoons, I can remember watching cartoons on school holidays, thinking that was a treat. Now there's an entire channel devoted to cartoons and even now the kids don't even go and watch ABC 24 cartoon channel. They just go.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  YouTube?

• 16:21Speaker 01

  YouTube, yeah.

• 16:22Speaker 00

  And they find them when they want.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they have the devices, right? So, um, I think the fact that news is in our face all the time is actually polarising us even more. Uh, and people just tend to get caught up in that ideology. And that was one of my problems with, with the, I had with the Liberal Party. It was always that we had to, Labour's bad, we have to bash them over the head, even when we did things wrong or they did the right thing. It was always, you know, if, if I, I didn't toe the line because I thought, you know, Labour's doing the right thing or we were doing the wrong thing. You know, I'd be told, put that, you know, shut up and get back in the box. Oh, yeah, absolutely, yeah.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  So it's.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Gotta toe the party line.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  Well, you got party line, one and all in or step back?

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and don't get me wrong, I get that, you know, uh, yeah, in a party you do have to toe the line to a point. Um, but when we stopped upholding our own values, so, you know, Angus, um, Taylor, I mean, I'd left the Liberals by this stage, voted against the tax cut. When I, one of my last bills, when Jim Chalmers lowered the tax rate from 16 cents to 14 cents for low income earners, Angus voted against it. You know, well, Peter was the leader, but Angus was the shadow treasurer. Um, and I just, I mean, I said to my Liberal, yeah, ex Liberal colleagues at the time, I said, what are you doing, guys? Like Liberal Party believes in lower taxes and you're voting against lower taxes. You know, like, like, when are you gonna, this is your problem. Um, but back to your question about the idealism, yeah, it's, it's just the constant news feed now and it's much more political.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Uh, and, and I think, and that's, and, and with that, having entertainment, so it's also, um, in-house, what I call in-house entertainment, right? So you don't have to leave home anymore. Back in the old days when we grew up, you know, as you said, we had one or two channels and the radio. So you'd get bored, you'd have to go out and actually join groups of people. You know, it didn't necessarily have to be political groups, it could be, um, sporting organisations, volunteer groups, you know, community groups, whatever. People don't need to do that anymore because they're at home, you don't have to need to leave home, you can order Uber, you can order ice cream to your house. Uh, you can order coles to your house, so you can technically stay there forever. So, but people then become more and more narrow focused, right?

• 18:25Speaker 01

  And of course, when you're on social media, and I'm guilty of this as well, you know, you're not as polite to people, you know, to an avatar or someone hiding between, behind an avatar. Then what you are to, you know, if you're speaking face to face, you know, your mannerisms drop. Um, so, uh, yeah, it, it's definitely polarised the world.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  And also the algorithm is feeding you your, your, what you, what you like.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  So you're never actually getting another point of view.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  And because, because I've often wondered about this when it comes to politics, particularly politicians of today. And then let's look at the Labour Party for a moment, like Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister. Do you think that politicians are driving the division? Or is social media driving the division, but the politicians are using social media to their advantage? And therefore playing into it like it's social media has become part of the politicians playbook in terms of getting reelected. It's always about, seems to me, it's always about getting reelected today, over and above everything else.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  That's correct. Absolutely. I mean, when I took a stand on the vaccines, for example, that was what I was told, Jared. You know, don't worry about the injured. We've got to get, win the next election. And I was like, I've got people, yeah, I've got people here that are, you know, having heart attacks, you know, coughing up blood, you know, having myocarditis, et cetera. We need to give these people.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  I know someone got paralyzed from the waist down.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I had three years of this, like just unstoppable injuries, you know, and I mean, I never signed up for this, right? Um, but at the same time, that's something I couldn't walk past. I mean, it's one thing, sometimes you let it go through to keep it, you know, you might vote at the party, even though you don't agree with it. Because you realise, you know, you can't, you know, rock the boat all the time, right? Um, but this was something I couldn't walk past. But no, you're right. But, but look, in answer to the initial question, I think they feed each other. You know, so social media reinforces politicians' views, politicians then reinforce the views that they think are going to get them elected. I mean, I'm in this quandary now that, you know, if I criticised Pauline Hanson, I'd just get smashed, right? And even I have things like not turning up to estimates, which to me is a valid criticism, but her followers will just smash me. A lot of them follow myself as well.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  But this is where I step off the train again, like I did with the Liberal Party. I'm going to put what's right in front of what's in the best interest of the party. That's why I actually called the party people first as opposed to party. Instead of party first, that's where I got the name from. Cause I used to say to my, my staff, you know, can we just put the people first and do the right thing by the people? And they'll look after us rather than try and lie to them all the time.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  Do you find that, is that, is that a little, um, not naive, but, um, in terms of being voted in, that is? Cause you've got to get voted in in order to do the things that you want to do for the people that you think the people want you to do for them.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  But in order to get voted in, um, what comes first, um, does the people always come first or does sometimes you know better? I mean, you know, cause like the current federal government, they think they know better on everything.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  Do they just say, hand us everything and we'll sort it out for you?

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Well, so yet again, this comes down to the ability of it being able to explain your position. So if you can explain your position and, and, and, uh, you know, try and demonstrate why your position is going to help the people, then I think they will come with you. But you're right, like it is a bit of, yet again, I mean, you know, if you go too puranical, you'll never get elected at all, I guess.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Um, even though yet again, I mean, you know, one of our policies is lift the tax rate threshold of $45,000 so that all workers can pay $4,000 less tax. There's 14 million workers in this country, three million retirees and three million small business, right? And that's a good policy. And, and the reason why we're backing it is Treasury don't model secondary impacts.

• 21:57Speaker 00

  What's that mean?

• 21:58Speaker 01

  So, so you, you understand the velocity of money, right? They, they assume if you give someone a thousand dollar tax cut, that that money's not coming back to Treasury in the next 12 months. So, so that to me is erroneous. I, I would argue that if you give a tax cut to someone of low income, that most of that money is going to go back to Treasury in the first month and it's going to have a higher velocity at the lower income levels than at the higher income level. So yeah, if you're on a million bucks and you get a $5,000 tax cut, you might just go on a longer overseas holiday. But if you're on 40 grand and you get a $2,000 tax cut, you're going to spend that economy, especially when cost of living is running at 5%, you know, inflation's running at 5%. Um, so yet again, I, I think if you can demonstrate why your policies are in the best interest of the people, you will get elected.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Obviously you need the media exposure. Um, I, I would say initially, uh, in Howard's early years, he wasn't necessarily trying to. He was initially, uh, you know, a politician of conviction. Um, and, you know, it, it took him a long time to get there. He had the eighties and the battles with Peacock in the eighties, but when he came back in 95, 96, he was seen as sort of a stabilising influence after Keating's last few years. So I, I think you can get there, but yet again, it is hard in this day and age to put out a rational set of policies. When there's all of the, you know, the, the red meat out there on social media and the short, the short, um, you know, what you call the 24 hour news cycle and just that, you know, Barnaby and his dog barking, for example.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Okay. It's a news story, but really, you know, it's, can we move on to something more important?

• 23:26Speaker 00

  Well, what was important about that was Sarah, Sarah, the way she dealt with him.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:31Speaker 00

  But the ABC dealt with him. I mean, I mean, I thought to myself, that was the most important thing of the whole, the whole episode of the dog barking, et cetera. I can't remember what he yelled out, shut up or sit down or something like that. Um, but the way Sarah said to him, well, don't worry about it. Just answer the question.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  And, and I thought his response, for me, I keep thinking about what would Trump have said if someone said that to him?

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, he'd been, he would have given it back.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. And but I thought actually Barnaby, Barnaby didn't give it back. I thought Barney was actually very polite to her.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  He gave her an opportunity and he had it seen to make front, front page of everything. Um. What do you think about those, you know, the ABC? Because I mean, I, well.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, they've got a left wing bias. There's no doubt about it.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it's, but it's more than a bias though, I think, Jared. Like it's, uh, it's like they go after them.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. But yet again, we had an opportunity, uh, when I was in the Morrison government, uh, just after January the 26th, first week back. It was 21 or 22. I can't remember what year. It must have been 20 or 21 actually. Uh, and, you know, the ABC was pushing, calling it Invasion Day, like blatantly calling Australia Day Invasion Day. I went back, um, said, right, here's our opportunity. We can remove the independence of the ABC. So, so the issue with the ABC is, is that it's completely independent. Like too many bureaucracies now, they've become independent under the guise that, oh, well, you can't have politicians interfering with them, et cetera, et cetera. The, the problem with that is of course, once they've become independent, there's no accountability and transparency. They've become a force unto themselves.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Uh, I, I tried to get that moved, um, in the party room. I said, let's say, look, we're not going to have our national broadcaster calling Australia Day Invasion Day. Right? And we could have wedged the, the crossbench, uh, team in the Senate. Uh, there were five at the time, the two one nation senators, Jackie Lambie, Rex Patrick and, um, Sterling Griffith. We would have only had to get one of the three, um, non one nation senators up, uh, and we didn't do anything about it. So yet again, the ABC run ramp has run rampant because when we were in power, we didn't do anything about stopping them. And, and this is the problem with the, the coalition is that they have empowered the left over the last 30 or 40 years. They've supported superannuation. They've supported, yeah, all, all, all the, um, institutionalized childcare facilities rather than paying,

• 25:51Speaker 01

  you know, parents, giving parents greater choice over the top childcare they want. Uh, yeah, it was John Howard who signed the renewable energy target initially at 5%. He brought in a national curriculum. He got rid of nuclear power. Um, so, so yeah, everyone's frustrated with the ABC. I get it. But at the end of the day, you, you've got to work within the machinery of government if you want to change it. And yeah, going back to John Howard, if you read his biography, he learnt when he, I think it was the 73 Balmain campaign when he first ran. Um, he said his Labour opponent killed him with kindness. And if there's something I think that we need to do if the, if the Conservatives wanna, or the coalition wanna become a better form of opposition and, and better politicians is actually learn how to bring people along through the art of persuasion,

• 26:35Speaker 01

  rather than constantly harping on about problems. They are just so painful to listen to these days. I was just saying, you know, saying it to your staff outside before, you know, I'm sick of myself whinging on social media. You know, and, and that's the thing, you know, we wanna, we wanna actually, certainly, you know, people first know we're just a little party. But we want to actually present a vision and start to give people some hope again, because there is way too much pessimism in this country. And we are such a great country and we have so much opportunity. I mean, we've got seven million square kilometres of land, uh, in a perfect part of paradise in the South Pacific, where 28 million people, biggest city in the world, Jakarta's got 42 million people in it. And we're complaining about overpopulation here. Granted, you know, that is true to a degree,

• 27:17Speaker 01

  but there's also other places of Australia where there's a lot of opportunity, you know, and so, uh, yeah. Back to your initial question, yes, the ABC is wrong. Yeah, it will certainly, uh, has a bias to it, but let's fix it. So yet again, I don't want to do what we did to manufacturing where we walk away from the problem. Let's go back and fix it because I grew up watching Four Corners. I grew up watching Foreign Correspondent.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  Same.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  My father, you know, he's described as further right than Tilla the Hun. He listens to Country Hour every day religiously.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  I love it still.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So there's still some magnificent programs on the ABC. It is a part of our culture. Rather than just bash it over the head and complain, you know, let, let's try and get in there and try and actually, you know, improve it. So it represents all of Australians. I mean, Australia all over, Ian Macmara, another legend.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  Unbelievable.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, one of the great.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Every Sunday morning?

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  6am?

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, my dad, when he, when I lived in Sydney, he was down here one time. Macca had him on here and he's had him on a couple of other times, you know? So yet again, this is something that we should cherish. And instead of just wanting to, you know, um, pour fuel on and blow it up. Let's try and actually make it the great institution that we know it can be.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  I, I, I guess I, you made some interesting point because I, I remember we're sitting down with, um, Marka Bim once. And asking Senator Marka Bim, former seven up Marka Bim, you know, um, and asking him, you know, if you're going to form a, a new political party, not if he was, if just anybody, it was just a conversation, um, what do you need to do? And he said to me, he probably needed to sit down and work out five or six policies. You know, it could be about tax, could be about immigration, whatever.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  But five or six, and you need how, you need to know how to um express it, et cetera, et cetera. But you must need those five or six. Let's have a look at people first, your party.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  You're not expecting to win an election, you're expecting to be part of an opposition perhaps, or ultimately part of a coalition, let's call it.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Well, hopefully you can get some senators up and, and, and, and influence decision making in that way.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and, and that's because of our system, the senate actually has the ultimate say at the end of the day.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's based on proportional voting, and that was deliberately set up by our founding fathers to give minor parties and get the minor parties to hold the majors to account.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  So what, what, what, am I correct in what, boy, am I correct in what a mark, uh retelling the story about what Mark a Bib Tommy? And what, and if so, what are, what are people first five, six things?

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm glad you asked that because we have got, we've got a slogan, the vision, uh solutions for today and the vision for tomorrow. And that is based on five key policies.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  It's five, is it?

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so first one is lift the tax rate threshold to forty five thousand dollars, so everyone pays four thousand dollars less in tax.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Uh, the second, and we'll pay for that by means testing the defined benefits scheme for retired bureaucrats in Canberra, getting rid of subsidies for renewables, uh and a couple of other sections of the tax act.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Okay, so it's funded.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fully funded.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  But you said, the, the way you funded, funded it is by taking money spent in other places.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  And so these words, these two things neutralize themselves, but why, why if someone's earning forty four thousand nine hundred nine hundred dollars? Why do you think they should have not pay any tax? What's the, what's the thinking around?

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Because we don't think people should pay tax below the cost of living. Listen, if you're getting out of bed and putting your nose to the grindstone, and you know, the words of our anthem is wealth for, wealth for toil.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  What, why would someone earns forty five thousand dollars today, four grand tax, almost six in super, their take home pays back to thirty five thousand dollars? We don't want these people falling beneath the cracks, and you know, we, we both grew up, you know, back in the time when we had more tradies than, than professional workers. Let me tell you, you could probably sack seventy five percent of professional workers in this country and you wouldn't miss them, but if you got rid of our guys on those low incomes. You know, the, the wheels of this country, it stopped turning over very fast, and I'm very determined, so. I, I, my grandparents are all blue collar labour, like we sort of came over the DLP in the late fifties, but um, you know, I grew up with tradies, mechanics, you know, my best mates, they're still my best mates. And I know the important work they do, and I want to make sure that everyone that gets out of bed, puts their nose to grindstone is properly rewarded.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  And I think it's completely immoral, and businesses get a tax deduction for the cost of business, right?

• 31:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  I think workers should get a tax deduction for the cost of living, you know, it, it's, if, if you've got a job, it does cost you more, you've got to, you know, fill your car up every week or buy a ticket on the train. You might have to get work clothes, you might have to get a suit, you know, the girls, you know, my wife, when she has, you get a haircut, you know, for a female to get a haircut today, it's a couple hundred bucks, you know? It's outrageous, um.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  So what, so what you're saying, Jared, though, is for the um, uh, if you're under forty five thousand, um, because it, that's like less than a thousand bucks a week. It's going to cost you at least that in the cost of living, just to live, just to exist. It's not a holiday, it's often in private schools.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  No, that's the bare basics.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Or to kids off to ballet, whatever, that's just living, maybe, and just a very basic, you know, food and stuff like that.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  You're saying effectively they shouldn't have to pay tax because they should, otherwise they're going to be, they're going to be negative.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  That's right, exactly, but don't forget, they pay tax through GST, fuel excise, buy beer, you know, beer excise.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  They're paying consumption tax.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, they do pay consumption tax.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  See, right, they do, they are paying tax, they're just paying tax on their income.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  Because if they did, they wouldn't have enough money to live.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then the next step, and I mean this, and you know, I, I won't make any guarantees about this because I think you need to get into the budget to find where you can make savings. But we would then like to lower the thirty cents on incomes above forty five thousand to a hundred, lower it by two cents every year for the next fifteen years to get the tax rate threshold up to a hundred grand.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you're going to, over time?

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:40Speaker 00

  Bring the tax free threshold up to a hundred grand?

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Over time?

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Okay, that makes sense, and, and what about super? You mentioned super before.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Okay, so that's one of our key policies as well, we want to make super voluntary, so you get to keep your superannuation as part of your wage if you want to do that.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  So you can make twelve percent more.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Exactly, you'll get twelve percent more in the hand.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  For everybody or people under a certain?

• 33:00Speaker 01

  No, for everyone, no rules as to how much you can put in, take out, the first twenty five thousand dollars in your superannuation will be tax free.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  And then after that, it goes back to your normal marginal tax rates. I don't think superannuation is doing what that, it, it was intended to do, so in nineteen ninety two, approximately fifty percent of retirees are on a full pension, about twenty six retire, twenty five percent of retirees are on a part pension. If you Google ASFA superannuation statistics, Australian Superannuation Financial Association statistics, you will see the median balance for women aged sixty to sixty four is a hundred and sixty two thousand dollars. So that means half the women, um, you know, aged sixty to sixty four have less than a hundred and sixty two thousand dollars in the bank, for men, it's two hundred and twenty thousand dollars. To go off the full pension, you need three hun, sorry, off the, yeah, off the full pension on a part pension, you need about three hundred and twenty thousand in assets.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  And to go off the full pension entirely, you need about eight to nine hundred thousand dollars in assets, right? So admittedly, super is not fully matured yet, it's only thirty four years old, but it's statistically impossible for low income earners. If you're going to take twelve percent of their salary, for them to put enough in a super to actually be able to retire on that amount. Now, bear in mind that since nineteen ninety two, ten percent of people retired with a mortgage, today it's forty percent, right? And bear in mind the median salary in this country, it's eighty two thousand, I'm just going to use eighty thousand, if you're on eighty thousand, you need fifty grand to live on, twenty grand tax. You're left with ten thousand dollars to save, twelve percent of eighty thousand dollars is nine thousand six hundred.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  So for anyone on a median salary, you're literally taking their last ten thou, a hundred percent of their savings. And you're going to put it and give it to some bloke in an ivory palace somewhere in a capital city, and there's no guarantee you're going to get that money back when you're sixty seven. Now, if you're starting off working, first five years of your life, say you're on a median salary, you could earn fifty thousand dollars, right? Yep, the people that support super will go, oh yeah, Jared, you know, but you're going to earn six or seven percent in super, that's great. But if you can't use that as a deposit for your house, and the median house price is a million bucks, and it's rising by five percent a year. Your opportunity cost is fifty thousand bucks, because house prices are rising faster than you can save. So it's a false economy that way, and don't forget, if your mortgage is six percent, that's after tax income that you've got to pay with that.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  So let's say you earn a hundred grand and earn ten grand in your own name in investment income, then, you know, you've got to get a ten percent return, pay thirty cents on that to get a seven percent return. Plus one percent management fee, just to actually make your mortgage make. So yet again, you need to generate ten percent on your investment income outside of super to, to make up for the lost, you know, like to, to get that six percent after tax return that you do in super. So yet again, your mortgage, you know, it's harder to pay your mortgage off because of superannuation as well. And, and not only that, we've now got four trillion dollars in superannuation, yeah, so these people have industry and retail funds, they don't get to vote for the boards.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  So there's no corporate accountability there, so you've now got three trillion outside of self managed super funds that are controlled by unelected board members, right? And if you control three trillion dollars worth of capital, what do you control? The economy.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally, which by the way was the original design.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  That was Keating's design.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so now, and so now you've got a, a corporate sector driven by ideology and not productivity, right? And they're pushing all these agendas that had nothing to do with productivity, I actually, I can't believe I'm saying this because I got burnt on the stock market in the late eighties. My mum first bought shares in September eighty seven, can you believe it?

• 36:30Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, and of course next month they've, they crashed, so mum had to work another ten years, so she ended up retiring as a nurse when she was seventy, but, um, but she got me into share trading and I didn't know. Uh, I only found this out after she passed away, she used to be a share trader, you know, trade shares, before she got married to dad, way back in the sixties, she had BHP shares. But um, uh, you know, we need a bit of that entrepreneurial spirit back, and the problem is today.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  No one's got any money.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Well, it's the corporate fund, fund managers.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  And, yeah, yet again, one of these things.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  But there, but as again, what I was saying before, Joe, the government's saying, we'll do it for you.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  We'll take your money now.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  And we're going to invest it for you.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  Because you, you're dumb, you don't know how to do it, which sort of, some cases probably is true, people would, you know, people will gamble it.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:13Speaker 00

  But this is another example, ideology telling you what I, what you can do with your money.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Exactly, that's exactly right, yeah.

• 37:20Speaker 00

  We're better at it than you.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  Exactly, and, and what you get now, these corporate fund managers, they all basically just follow the indexes.

• 37:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  There's very little entrepreneurial ship going on, and I think the, I'll stand to be corrected on this, this might have been about a year old when I read this article. The number of listings on the AXS is declining, they're really struggling to get new listings.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, no, that, that is a hundred percent correct.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Because, because it's a punish.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  It's hard work.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the other thing, as someone who's a small investor, I hate the fifteen percent accelerated retail listing offer, offerings, you'll see that all the time. Just as the company's about to kick off, they'll raise more, oh, yeah, take off, when I say kickoff, I mean take off in terms of making money. They'll issue fifteen percent of new shares every year to their mates, uh, at a diluted price, and you're like, oh, here we go again. You know, like they should go back to the old pro rata way of like, if you own five percent of the company.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  You get five percent.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  You get five percent of the new issues, you know, so your equity is not diluted, but yet again, that's just a big boys' club between the, you know, the, the corporate fund managers. As you know, the industry funds use one proxy advisor, combined um voting powers around twenty percent. Um, so yet again, you control twenty percent of the shares on the AXS, you know, an AXS listed company, you get to push the left wing ideology.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  No, you push, you change, you change the board, or, or, or the board is so scared of being um demoted or taken off the board, that they'll do everything you want.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  Even if it means, you know, not doing something on Australia Day, or uh, if, or, or flying three flags.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  Or whatever the case may be.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  It, it, it sounds crazy.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  And so, so people, people first said, we're talking about lower tax rate. But you want to bring, you want to bring the tax free threshold of forty five and over time to a hundred.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:04Speaker 00

  Uh, you mentioned super, superannuation, you're saying, is it voluntary for everybody or?

• 39:09Speaker 01

  You get to keep it. If you, yeah, you get to keep and people will say not everyone can save their own retirement. You're right. You know what? That's what the pension's for. But yet again, you know, the tax breaks for superannuation, the last budget was sixty billion dollars. The productivity commission back in two thousand nineteen, twenty estimated the cost of running super was one percent of funds under management. So one percent of four trillion is about forty billion again. Massive cost in financial engineering and paper shuffling doesn't produce a cent. We need more real engineers in this country, not paper financial engineers. So that's our second policy. Our third policy is to pay childcare directly to the parents, subject to welfare testing.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  So what does that mean? So yeah, let's say in relation to my kids, they send the kids to childcare before preschool.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  You pay them or what?

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, you pay them. Yep. And if they want to pay childcare, they can use childcare. But you've got millions of shift workers in this country that can't access childcare at all. So you've got nurses who work shift work, police who work shift work.

• 40:07Speaker 00

  Fireys.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Fireys, hospitality workers. I've got a mate who plays in a band with his wife on weekends. He can't get his parents on week, parents, their parents on a weekend to look after the kids. The cost of the childcare wipes out, wipes out the money they make from the gig. You know, we've got fly in, fly out workers that might pay for, you know, be home for seven days, ten days on, seven days off. Why pay for childcare then? You know, if you wanted to get an any for half the time, do that. You've got people in regional Australia that can't even access childcare centres. So they all miss out. Right. So my view is, and then you've got, so if we do that, we give shift workers greater choice over the hours they can work. So there's greater work choices, there's greater flexibility. But it's also giving people greater choice in how they parent their children. So I stayed home before I became a senator for a couple of years.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  And I'd go to a mothers group on a Tuesday morning and a number of mothers would go, had to go back to work because of financial constraints. But they weren't ready to go back. You know, they'll have to go back when they're a bit older, but while the kids were still two or three, you know, they'd prefer to stay at home for a few more years. So if that bit of money and we'll top up, what we'll do is we'll top up family part eight benefits. Can help parents stay at home. If you want to be a parent and stay home a little bit longer, that also gives you the option of doing that, you know, help you get over the line, at least your kids get to school or something like that. And that can help pay off the mortgage or make ends meet. So you can spend more time with your family because spending time with your children at that age is so important. You know, you, and when you look back, you're not going to go, oh jeez, I'm so glad I left my kids,

• 41:36Speaker 01

  you know, childcare centre when I was two years old and went back to work an extra three years earlier. So, you know, and.

• 41:41Speaker 00

  Well, they should have a choice.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  They should have a choice, just like super.

• 41:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. In other words, it shouldn't be again, the government saying, look, hand it over to us, we'll take control of all this for you.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  And, and, and, and the other thing is to, I think, to be honest, like every time childcare centres get more money, all they do is put the price up.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  It doesn't go back to money, but there's no real beneficiary other than the people running the joints.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That's right. And the unions. So the fastest growing union in Australia is United Voice. When Albanese, so Albanese in the, in the twenty two election had to pay childcare workers three and a half billion dollars directly of taxpayers' money. Because the childcare centres couldn't afford to pay the childcare workers, he's now had to renew that again. But a part of that deal was the childcare workers had to be unionised. So fourteen dollars a week by fifty bucks a week, so seven hundred bucks a year. Times, I'm not sure if it's two hundred thousand childcare workers, but even a hundred thousand, that's seventy million going into union coffers. Two hundred thousand, it's a hundred and forty thousand million. So, you know, when, when Labour tells you that, you know, they really want early childhood education, no, no. It's all about getting more money into the union, union coffers.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  And then the, then the unions that support the government in terms of the next election.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, and, you know, let's keep the childcare industry going, you know.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  Would you call it a rort?

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Well, well, look, there's definite childcare needs. We need to get on to why two parents need to work and hopefully they've got time today to do that. So, uh, it's not a rort in the sense two parents have to work and I can understand why. So maybe I'll jump on to that.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, do it.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  So they're, so they're, they're our three solutions for today.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Now, our vision for tomorrow, the next two policies. And the first one is monetary policy and I'm really glad, I'm, I'm really excited that you.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  As in the R B A.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that you invited me down today because being an ex bank, a banker yourself, you'll appreciate this. Our monetary policy is the most misunderstood and least discussed policy of all. And it is the most important policy that we have to fix in this country before anything else.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  It drives everything.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it drives everything. Capital management, you know this yourself, Mark, capital management is king. If there's something we've learnt in our years in finance, you've got to know how to manage capital. And we've been brainwashed on the difference between debt and equity. And I'll touch on that in a minute. But if we go back to why two parents are having to work today, it goes back to nineteen eighty five and Paul Keating lifted capital controls. The private banks in nineteen eighty five had eight billion dollars in foreign debt. By two thousand eight, they had eight hundred billion dollars in foreign debt.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  That money was lent against housing. It wasn't, so as you know, in finance, the net present, the value of an asset's the net present value of future income streams, right? We went from valuing assets based on the earnings of an asset to how much money we could borrow from offshore. Right. So we were brainwashed at university, you can't print money out of thin air, right? Okay. Well, what we did, we'd done something even worse. We started borrowing money that was printed out of thin air by foreign countries. In particular in the late eighties, it was Japan. So what's happened is house prices with that extra credit in the system have gone from four to five times earnings to ten to twelve times earnings. So of course you've had to send two parents back to work to pay for the mortgage. Hence the creation of the childcare industry in the late nineties. Remember Eddie Groves and Co? And then what we saw.

• 44:43Speaker 00

  ABC Learning?

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, ABC Learning and that ended up being a stock market collapse.

• 44:47Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Bubble and then a, and a crash. And then in two thousand eight, we had the real G F C crash based on, you know, irresponsible credit practices in the, in the northern hemisphere. We nearly had the same thing happen here, but the mining boom kept us going. But, you know, you remember Storm Financial?

• 45:04Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  But one of the ways that we kept house prices strong here throughout that was Kevin Rudd allowed temporary visa holders, i.e. foreign students, to start buying houses in Australia. So that meant that basically then it created the, the foreign student sector as well. Right. Another sector that, you know, pumps some money into the economy, but distracts us from other parts of the economy we need to focus on. So that irresponsible credit practice has basically from what Keating did in nineteen eighty five of letting unrestricted capital inflows into this country for consumption. I mean, housing's important, don't get me wrong. But it's ultimately a consumption tool, has saw house prices rise to the roof. And then the money that we pay on that eight hundred billion, the interest, that's not even taxed.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Right. So, you know, your parent, you know, we, we put interest in the bank, we pay tax on it. The foreign banks don't have to pay tax on that. I'm not sure if you're familiar with one twenty eight F for the thirty six act, public offer test.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So.

• 45:57Speaker 00

  As long as this has proper spread, by the course of.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's got to be, yeah, it's got to be initial offering in the public market. Yeah, that's right. And a proper spread. That's correct. Yeah. So there's a few factors there, but. Long story short, it cost the budget about three billion.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  Withholding taxes, there's no withholding tax basically.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  On the interest paid to the foreign entities.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 46:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. As long as the initial offering, as long as the offering, initial offering, I should say, as opposed to the

• 46:23Speaker 00

  secondary market.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  Has enough spread, in other words, enough participants. If you just have one, one person, like it's just PIMCO.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  Being putting, you know, the eight hundred million or billion or ten billion, that's not enough spread. But what's interesting about that though, it's interesting, Jerry should talk about this because it was Keating who sort of deregulated this process. And it, it's, it's an interesting thesis because I've never thought about it like this, but in terms of a couple of mics, but I've never thought about this. But the extra money coming into Australia, because banks probably raise, probably fund housing, maybe fifty percent is funded through deposits, taken here in Australia, like money you might put in a deposit or I'd put in a deposit, whatever. Which is the way they are, the only way they used to do it before.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  Now.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  The other fifty percent is coming from somewhere overseas, US, Europe, Japan, UK, wherever.

• 47:16Speaker 00

  South East Asia these days. And, and, but that, that's here to stay. I mean, and because there was so much money available, the banks accessed it and it was cheap. And they could sort of, what they could do is build around it so they could hedge their currency risk, their prepayment risk, they could hedge all these risks associated with it. And they could still get it cheaper than they would have had to pay if they took it from a deposit here in Australia. So the banks are making really good margins and they therefore will take and were desperate, they were desperate to lend it.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  So.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  It's not here to stay if I can help it.

• 47:48Speaker 00

  And the money's, you get the, but all of a sudden if the money's available to you as a borrower, you, cause you know, this has been my thesis all along. If, if I can save, just let, let's use a million dollar purchase price. If I can save two hundred thousand dollar deposit and the bank says to me, I'll lend you eight hundred thousand, just forget about stamp duty. Um, and if for some reason the property goes up to one point one million and the bank says, don't worry, Mark, I'll lend you nine hundred thousand dollars. The borrower will say, okay, I'll take it. The borrowers don't look at it as, uh, I owe nine hundred thousand dollars. They don't look at it that way. I know this from my own research. They're just thinking, what's that extra hundred thousand going to cost me per month?

• 48:27Speaker 00

  And it might be two, three hundred bucks, but all that does is push that pri- house price up because everybody who's buying that house, when the vendor wants one point one, everybody is all borrowing nine hundred thousand. It's like the bank will lend it to every bidder.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  Every single person in the room. They don't say, oh, wow, we're borrowing nine hundred thousand dollars for thirty years or in those days of twenty years, twenty five years, but thirty years these days. They're not going to say that. They're going to say, it's just going to cost us an extra couple of hundred bucks a month to live in this beautiful house.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  So we'll pay, we'll pay one point one and that's how house prices get out of control.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That's right. And, and the problem is if that extra funding, but here's the thing. We need, so prior to Keating, so let's use the million dollars example. So interesting enough, CPA is about eighty seven percent funded actually internally.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, but they've got the biggest deposit base.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's right.

• 49:14Speaker 00

  We don't have enough depositors, by the way.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  So can I come back to this? This is what I exactly want to touch on. So when I was at the Bank of Queensland for every million we lent, you're right, like forty percent was deposits, uh, domestic deposits, sixty percent was international wholesale funding. Now, before Keating had, had lifted capital controls, the most the Bank of Queensland could have lent was four hundred thousand dollars, not a million dollars. Right? So that automatically means now, as you say, if you're going to borrow more, sixty percent of that money is now going to be paid offshore as interest. Right? In the old days, when all they could lend was four hundred thousand dollars, that was actually a virtuous cycle because what that money was coming from was the term deposits of the older generation. They'd lend through the bank to the younger generation and the younger generation back through the bank would pay back to the older generation.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  And that would keep, and that would keep house prices linked to the savings and the earnings of the prior generation. When Keating lifted those capital controls and, and debt went from eight billion to eight hundred billion foreign debt, we basically decoupled the price of houses from earnings. And so first, the first generation loved it, right? For the first twenty years, because they were all living off the boom of the house prices and we saw that here in Sydney. Um, but now the next generation's coming through and they're paying the price for it because they're struggling even to get into the housing market.

• 50:26Speaker 00

  The earnings have never kept up.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And so complementing Keating lifting capital controls with John Button getting rid of the, um, you know, tariffs on manufacturing, whereby we let manufacturing go offshore. Now, there's no doubt that we did struggle to compete with Asian labour at the time. But the problem was we did lose earnings capacity when we did that by letting our, our manufacturing go offshore. And there's a fantastic opportunity right now that no politician other than, you know, an ex politician sitting here. Like most factories today are automated. You know, the argument that we can no longer compete with offshore labour.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Because of the costs, yeah.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, because of costs, right? So, you know, when we export iron ore and, um, coke and coal, we should be parking that at Darwin in a steel factory there, turning it into brisket steel and instead of exporting coal at a hundred dollars a ton, export it at five hundred dollars a ton for brisket steel. Now, we mightn't bring a lot of jobs back onshore, but we can capture more upside and tax that to start paying for all those extra services we're going to need as the population ages.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  Because everything is robotically controlled these days.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, not just in steel factories, a lot of stuff. And, you know, if we can get nuclear here and get more baseload energy and drive down the cost of energy, bring back, uh, stamp duty on share trading to abolish payroll tax, another big mistake when the GST was brought in. We got rid of, um, uh, stamp duty on share trading. So fifty six percent of, fifty to sixty percent of the stock market now is traded by foreign bots. Right? Who just scalped the market. So we should be starting hitting them, hitting them with stamp duty.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Um, and then getting rid of payroll tax. So have a tax, you know, get rid of the tax on productivity and replace it with a tax.

• 52:00Speaker 00

  Did you see payroll taxes as a tax on productivity?

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's a shocking tax.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, man, John Howard, if you remember when John, um, introduced it in, um, the, uh, GST, he said we got, the design here is to give it a stamp duty and payroll tax.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  That's correct. Yeah.

• 52:14Speaker 00

  But I don't think they ever raised enough. They just didn't raise enough. So do you think there's an argument then, for example, in relation to your party, to increase CG, uh, the capital, uh, the, um, GST?

• 52:25Speaker 01

  No, no interest in raising GST. If anything, I'd abolish it and just bring in one percent transaction tax on financial transactions.

• 52:32Speaker 00

  Because it used to be six cents every hundred dollars or something?

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was something like that, but.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  Stamp duty, I'm talking about share trading.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Because when I started buying shares in the late eighties, we used to pay stamp duty.

• 52:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I remember doing, uh, do the same. Uh, in everywhere except Northern Territory.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Okay.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  Northern Territory. Yeah, because I remember, um, a lot of share transfers used to get executed in the Northern Territory.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 52:52Speaker 00

  The firm I was at anyway.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, cool. Yeah, yeah.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  Because Northern Territory didn't have it. But yeah, but so, but that's interesting. So you, you would, um, abolish payroll tax at the states and give the states the power to.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  No, we'd tax it nationally and give it back to them.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  Give it back to them.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Just, and, and likewise, we want to bring back a national government insurance office, like the old insurance offices. If you run a national corporation today, you have to take out, um, workers' compensation in six different states.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  That's crazy.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  Well, I do that in my business now.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Like, so let's just have a one stop shop for national government insurance.

• 53:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Uh, fifty percent of insurance now is reinsurance paid offshore.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  We should just re-insure ourselves and federal government can do it for QBA and Suncorp and all that as well.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Uh, and we can lower the cost of insurance as well. So let's get rid of payroll tax. Let's standardize workers' compensation. Let's lower the cost of insurance as well. So that's one of our policies, not quite, it comes under monetary policy banner, but going back to.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, let's go back to the monetary policy as a vision, one of the vision policies.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  So, um, what would you do with the RBA?

• 53:54Speaker 01

  So, so we want it to be accountable to parliament, even though it does play an important role. Uh, and we also want to use its payment system to underwrite a new CBA as well. Um, now, uh, what we want to, it's our big kicker with the monetary policy is we want an infrastructure bank. So we want to fund our own infrastructure through quantitative easing in a productive manner. We were told at university that it's irresponsible for governments to print money out of thin air. Now, that is fifty percent correct. If you print and spend, that is bad. Inflation is a relative number between demand and supply.

• 54:24Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  If you print and spend and increase demand, that's absolutely, that's wrong.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Here's the thing, if you print and build and increase the supply of power stations, increase the supply of dams, you're actually going to deal with the structural imbalances of, of this country. Because one of the problems we've got ever since the Tasmanian Dam decisions in, in eighty three is that state governments can't build regional infrastructure because the inner city greenies stop it from being built and they come in over the top through the federal government to stop it. But what we want to do, in the same way, if I said to you that I was going to bring in a private bill, I'm a sen- I was still a senator, I'm going to bring in a private bill to stop BHP from issuing new shares on the stock market to build a coal mine that was going to generate a fifteen percent return on equity. You'd think I was stupid, wouldn't you? You'd go, there's nothing wrong with BHP issuing new shares out of thin air, provided they're building an asset that's going to generate a return.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Governments can do the same thing, provided they match it with, you understand, you know, secured, secured loans versus unsecured loans. They build infrastructure, profit centre infrastructure, dams, power stations, toll roads, ports, airports, telecommunications. Okay, all of those, uh, assets make money. And what you do is, toll roads is a classic example. Sydney today, what, you're five million people paying ten bucks a toll? In a hundred years' time, it'll be ten million people paying a hundred bucks a toll, right? It's just a money-making machine. Why on earth would you privatize your toll, toll roads, right? They're natural monopolies anyway. So what we want to do is, we will issue one new share and call it untapped wealth, set up an infrastructure bank in Canberra.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  That money will then lend bonds or issue infrastructure bonds to state governments to build those profit centre infrastructure assets. Okay. And they have fifty years to repay the debt. Now, in the, in the case of, say, you build a dam for a billion dollars, you might just issue the state government a billion dollars. It might take four years to build. So you'll issue the state government five million dollars for two hundred weeks to build the dam. But here's the thing, thirty percent of that's going to come straight back to Canberra in taxes in the first week. And the other seventy percent of the, the money is going to spin through the economy, paying people to build things, right? And we can do that because where does the wealth, where, where does the ingredients that, for the dam come from? It comes from the water out of the sky. We don't pay the clouds for it to rain. We don't pay the sun to give us that sunshine.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  If I drop a bull in the paddock with twenty, uh, twenty cows and come back a year later, I've got twenty calves.

• 56:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? That's coming from mother nature. Mother nature gives us this recurring wealth and that's why we can justify it. But the key thing is you've got to match your credit as you expand your, because what we do today is we expand our credit on this side of the balance sheet, you know, the standard of balance sheet. We do it through foreign debt. We should do it for, through domestic equity. And then the reason being that when you make profits here from these assets, it comes back as dividends to our children, not as interest offshore. And that's the fundamental brainwashing exercise that happened to us in our generation is that we weren't taught the difference between debt and equity. And we've grown up relying on foreign debt instead of generating our domestic equity. All equity is is title. Our forefathers built this country. They gave us this title. They fought for it. They built it.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  Right. We have title over all the rain that comes out of the sky free, all the sunlight, the minerals in the soil. We have that title. Why do we give it away? So if we build a dam for a billion dollars, for example, and most governments will go out and borrow a billion dollars offshore. That means the first billion dollars in wealth we make, we just let it go offshore. And another twenty five.

• 57:46Speaker 00

  To buy them back.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And another twenty five years interest at four percent, that's another billion dollars in interest paid offshore. So we've just given up two billion dollars of our untapped wealth to foreign banks instead of here. You know, keeping it here for our children to inherit. And we have to do that. Because another stupid thing of what happened when Keating lifted capital controls, he allowed savings banks to go out and do whatever they liked. So of course Victorian savings bank, state bank, went out and bought Tri Continental. You'd remember this.

• 58:12Speaker 00

  I do remember it.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  Sent the bank broke, nearly sent Victorian state government broke, Joan Kerner. So then Jeff Kennett came in, started privatizing all our assets, state assets. And of course, this is, you know, we talk about the federal government trillion dollar debt. State governments are even in a bigger.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  There's another trillion we'd add them all up.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  There's another trillion. We are, in Australia, national and state government debt added together is two trillion dollars.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  That's correct. Yeah. And don't forget the four hundred and sixty billion dollars sitting in franking credits that haven't been paid out yet either.

• 58:42Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So no one ever talks about that either. So that's another policy I'd like to talk about later, but. So this is the thing, we've got to secure title over our untapped wealth. Cause that's the only way out of this mess is to go back to building infrastructure that's going to generate recurring wealth. Because when we privatized all that infrastructure, we started letting even more assets go offshore. But even more importantly, we started to let go of the skills that our children need. It's not enough to just build them infrastructure and leave them infrastructure. We've got to teach them the right skills. So complementing our infrastructure bank is.

• 59:17Speaker 00

  Is this coming under the R B A head?

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Well, well, under monetary policy.

• 59:20Speaker 00

  Under monetary policy.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Monetary policy. Monetary, so monetary policy, you manage monetary policy through three levers. Qualitative easing, which is what we do now, which yet again, changing, if you got washed up in a desert island, would you go and pull some leaves off a tree and start bartering leaves and changing the price of the leaves? No, you'd actually start building, you know, a fire, you'd build a house, you'd look for a water supply. You'd actually start building real assets. Yeah. Not, not manipulating the price of paper assets, but building real infrastructure. So we rely too heavily on qualitative easing. I used to go, you know, ask the R B A this in estimates, right? And of course their hands are tied because they can only deal with qualitative easing. What we need to do is deal with quantitative easing, i.e. build real assets and expand the volume of credit.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Which by the way, in the nineteen thirty seven banking Royal Commission, the recommendation of that Royal Commission was the central bank should always control the volume of credit in the system, not foreign banks, our central bank. So we've got to use quantitative easing. And then the other way, of course, is through macro potential controls, you know? You can't have a five percent deposit, you've got to have a twenty percent deposit for a house. You know, savings banks can't, you know, go buying investment banks, things like that. So this, so this all comes under monetary policy, under the lever of quantitative easing. So, but in a, in a productive manner. So we're going to bring back our bank over here to keep branches open in the regions. Cause as you know, a lot of bank branches are closing in regional Australia. That's no good for businesses in small towns that, you know, can't access a bank and get banking services.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Plus our, plus our state government insurance office. Quantitative, our infrastructure bank over here that will also make money. We're going to put the profits from those two banks into a middle bank called the infrastructure bank, sorry, a development bank. And that development bank will also lend back to state governments for schools, cost center, infrastructure, schools, hospitals. Yeah, for councils, for things like sewage works, so that.

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  The source of the council building houses.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. But what we want to do is by having that three bank policy, we want to remove the cost of finance on our own currency for governments. Cause we're really at the moment paying tax twice, once through the, using the utility, the infrastructure. And again, on the interest that we have to borrow to build that infrastructure.

• 1:01:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, most of we don't realise we're borrowing the interest to, to pay, to pay the principal.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And we don't need to do that. We should issue it as equity, not as debt. But on, on the condition that it's secured against an asset that makes money, just like you do in a bank.

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Right? Like if someone came to you, you know, wizard and said, oh, I want to borrow a million bucks and didn't have any collateral, you wouldn't lend it to them.

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  I'm not going to lend it to them.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  So they've got to have, you know, it's got to be a hardcore asset. And we've got seven million square kilometres, twenty eight million people. We have so much potential in this country. We need to invest in our own future for our own children. And, and, and complementing this is bringing back a military apprenticeship scheme that will actually start to train our younger people and get a lot more people back on the tools. So I'm, I was born nineteen seventy. My sister was born sixty four. So when she went to high school in seventy seven, there were four classes in grade eight. By the time she left in year twelve, there was half a class left. It's been forty years since the button plan. That generation is now retiring.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  That was the last generation whereby more people were on the tools than in, you know, paper shuffling in offices. Right? So we're going to have this, this is why we have to have such a high immigration rate for skilled labour. Because so many people that were trained on the tools and doing apprenticeships, they're all retiring. And our younger generation ended up going off to university, thanks to the Dawkins Plan, nineteen, late eighties, nineteen ninety. We all sent them off to university, get broken, brainwashed. Right? So we've got to get them back on the tools. And that's what this military apprenticeship will do. And we want to expand.

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  You mean join the military?

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. The reason why is that it's very, you know, you don't get paid a lot as an apprentice. So if we can give them free accommodation.

• 1:03:14Speaker 00

  Food.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  And, and food, it'll help them, you know, save money, you know, what they earn, they get to keep.

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  And then we want to use that as a pathway into a military engineering corps, civil engineering corps, and a mechanical electrical engineering corps to actually start building roads and power stations. Because we, yeah, snowy hydro too, two billion budget, blowing out the forty billion.

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  It's unbelievable. Not even, but not finished.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, not even finished.

• 1:03:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, we, you can't pick up a phone, not don't want to, you know, get involved with the war. But you can't pick up a phone to a foreign building contractor in the middle of a war and ask them to rebuild the road if it gets bombed.

• 1:03:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  You know, we've got to have the ability here to build ourselves, you know, build for ourselves. And we don't really have much manufacturing left. So if we can do it, and it's not, you know, it's not compulsory, it's not anything like that. It's just an alternative that if you want to leave school at sixteen, we'll pay for you. And we're going to fund that by increasing student visa fees from, well, it's just gone to five thousand, it was two thousand, to twenty thousand dollars. So if you're a foreign student, you know, they come here, they can pay up to a hundred thousand dollars for a university degree. Like only, the government's only been clipping two thousand dollars for a student visa. Why are we doing that? If you're here for four years, two hundred weeks, that's ten dollars a week rent for our infrastructure. We should charge a hundred dollars a week for our infrastructure, get twenty grand.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  And then for three hundred thousand foreign students, we want to bring it down from a million, get six billion in foreign student fees, you know, visa fees. That can help fund our military apprentices.

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  Who you sit down with and working all this stuff out?

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Oh, I just do it myself. I don't know. I just sort of tend, I've been thinking about this stuff for twenty years. So this is the only reason. I mean, I've lost my position as a senator, as you know, but it's just this drive to get these ideas out there. Because it just kills me. Like, I'm so grateful to the sacrifices of my own parents, my, my forefathers. That I want to make sure our children get the same opportunities our forefathers gave to us.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  What was your fifth, fifth, your second vision?

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  So the second, I just want to have a little story there before I get to the fifth one. So as you know, the first guy to issue in currency in Australia was Lachlan Macquarie. First seventeen years of the colony, they relied on foreign currency. There was a drought in eighteen hundred and five. That foreign currency got repatriated, so they started bartering in rum. That literally went tits up, thanks to the rum rebellion. So Lachlan Macquarie was the first governor to come to Australia and says, sit, look at us as a country, not a colony. So you need, to run a country, you need obviously a military to provide law and order, a taxation system and a monetary system. He issued the holy dollar, as you know, which is used to build the city hospitals, city barracks, which is still standing on Macquarie Street today. But what was interesting was he used that Spanish peso, which was the reserve currency of its day as our currency.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  But what he did, he punched a hole in it. And he punched a hole in it to make sure it didn't get exported offshore again. So this is our last policy. We want to increase the rate of tax on profits sent offshore to be higher than the rate of tax here in this country.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  So, because ultimately you take Pfizer in twenty twenty two, they made one point four billion dollars in sales here. They shifted a billion dollars offshore in royalties to Ireland. Ireland's got a company tax rate of twelve and a half cents.

• 1:06:13Speaker 00

  As long as you're in the middle of Dublin.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the middle of Dublin.

• 1:06:16Speaker 00

  In the, in the tax free area.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, tax free area. And there's withholding tax here of ten cents. So ten plus twelve. So one of the things, yet again, we were taught, you can't have double taxation. That's not right. I learnt this at Westfield. It's the cumulative rate of tax that you have that matters, right? So ten plus twelve and a half is twenty two and a half. That's still seven and a half cents, less than thirty cents. So we lost, when we let that billion dollars go offshore, we lost three hundred million dollars in company tax, of which we did recoup a hundred in withholding taxes, but we were two hundred million dollars worse off. Ireland's hundred and twenty five million dollars better off for just having head office over there.

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's all they have, by the way.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I do this.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  There's a four, four kilometer circle.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:56Speaker 00

  And if you've got an office there, you pay the, the low tax rate.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  And, and. To do nothing.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  Absolutely. But we let all this wealth, you go and get a plumber here in Sydney tonight, you Google it. And the plumber's based in Sydney, the customer's based in Sydney, that money goes to Ireland. Did Ireland build or did, you know, Meta or Google or Pfizer build the cables? You know, that, that, that connected us to Ireland? No, of course not, right? So we've got to start taxing profits that go offshore. This was the whole reason why, so I went, so back to my story. When I came home, I worked at the Bank of Queensland Management Account and Treasury Account, Securitisation Banking Ops. Then worked at Westfield for six years in predominantly treasury, but I did a.

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  With W B Liddy.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  I did know David Lyd, that's right.

• 1:07:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  Yep, yep, he was big hairy awesome gold guy.

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, yeah, so I, I used to catch the ferry from Kangaroo Point across the river with David a few times as well. Um, so he, he brought in a whole new mainframe. So he outsourced the mainframe services. So I worked on that and, and coding all the overnight into nights into the bank settlements and everything like that. Now I moved on to managing a team of around fifteen in, in banking ops, including treasury securitisation. Um, good experience, yet again, small bank, but really worthwhile. Anyway, I did a master's of finance when I was there in the treasury stream. Uh, and then when I came to Sydney, I worked at Westfield. Westfield, unlike the Bank of Queensland, which had about five subsidiaries, Westfield had about six hundred. Uh, and I was like, why, what's all this all about? And I realised it was all to do with tax,

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  moving tax around the world and things like that. So obviously they had shopping centres in, in the US and the UK. But I did a master's of tax law up in Sydney University and I was shocked at the number of sections in that tax act that gave tax breaks to foreigners over domestic, uh, to foreign investment in front of domestic investment. And this is killing us. So we can't have an onshore tax rate of thirty cents and an offshore tax rate, depending on tax treaty, of between zero and fifteen, because everyone is bending, bending over backwards to shift profits offshore. We have to stop the leakage of profits offshore. So between building more infrastructure to generate more income, increasing taxes on foreigners and cutting some government waste, that's easier said than done.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  That's how we want to bring the, the budget back into balance, as well as cut taxes for hardworking Australians. Yeah.

• 1:09:12Speaker 00

  They're your policies or not, not called policies. I don't know what you call them. They're, they're headliners that they're.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, five key policies. Yeah.

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  Well, let's say, uh, people first go to the next election, twenty eight, twenty eight, we're talking about twenty eight.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:25Speaker 00

  Uh, can you get, um, other people to represent your seats, various seats?

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  We, we, we won't have any problem filling, uh, getting Senate candidates.

• 1:09:32Speaker 00

  Yep, yep.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  Uh, we will.

• 1:09:33Speaker 00

  Outside of that?

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  We will struggle to fill a hundred and fifty seats. This is our first time around. Well, there was myself last year where we only had a standing start of about four months. So what we're working on is building our membership. So we're merging with the Citizens Party. We're going to get close to seven thousand members.

• 1:09:47Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  I'm talking to a couple of other minor parties. Um, hopefully if we can bring them on board, we'll get to ten thousand members. The Labour Party as a benchmark has about fifty thousand members nationally. Uh, and our, and all we can do is, is through opportunities like you've gratefully, um, given me today and I appreciate it, is get our word out there, talk about our policies through grassroots involvement. So social media, going to the markets and talking to people in the community about our policies. And we just want to really focus on the vision for tomorrow as well as, you know, obviously we want the solution today, but we want to just really want to stress the importance that we do live in a great country. Uh, we owe it to our children to give them the opportunities our forefathers gave to us, uh, and to be more optimistic. So we do want to have a point of difference there

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  in the sense that, yep, we, we, yeah, well, I mean, inevitably I sometimes get dragged into the, the toxic toxicity, you know, um, sewer pit of uh, social media, but, um, yeah, we, we do have solutions and there is a way out of the mess that we're in. Uh, we've just got to go back to basics and that is, you know, hard work, you know, believing in family, you know, and, and believing in, in your community in this great country called Australia.

• 1:10:50Speaker 00

  You know, it's funny, I, I was only thinking the other day, when I was a kid growing up, it's, it's interesting you should say that because when I was a kid growing up, it sort of went like this. It was, uh, in different order for different people, but these three elements are always included in everyone's conversation. God, family, country or family, country, God, or whatever, whatever the, the, the, it didn't matter what the priority list was, but it was sort of those three things. You, you wanted everybody. That's all our values. We all stood for our country.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:18Speaker 00

  We all stood for our God, whichever God that was.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:21Speaker 00

  And for our family.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:22Speaker 00

  They're our three main values.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:25Speaker 00

  We sort of lost sight of that a little bit, haven't we?

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. You know, I, I still think the high point of our, um, national identity was Bob Hawke in nineteen ninety eight, uh, nineteen uh, eighty eight, sorry.

• 1:11:35Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  Um, at the Opera House, you know, and that bicentennial celebrations on the Sydney Harbour, they were just magnificent.

• 1:11:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, straight after America's Cup Challenge.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  Eighty seven.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  That's right. And Bob Hawke, and I don't normally agree with Bob Hawke on a lot of things, but he said something that I think we should reflect on a lot. He said there should be no hierarchy of origin in this country. And he's bang on about that. It doesn't matter when you got here. If you put Australia first and love your country and want a better life for your children.

• 1:12:03Speaker 00

  That's it.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  That's it. You know, that, and, and our founding fathers, you know, section one sixteen eight, they said there is freedom of religion. They did that because they did not want religion in politics. And that's really, really important. You know, our founding fathers, you know, the constitution could do with a few tweaks, but, um, uh, they did a very good job in, in doing that. And I don't think people realise that the reason why they put that in there is that they, they believe that religion and politics needed to be separate.

• 1:12:27Speaker 00

  So is people first party, are you sort of saying to us, let's get back to basics?

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:12:34Speaker 00

  But I don't mean like be simple, but, um, just what is fundamentally important.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:12:40Speaker 00

  For us to exist.

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, which, which is your family.

• 1:12:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  You know, it, it's like it's just.

• 1:12:44Speaker 00

  But also our country, look at our country, look what we've got.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And, and your country. Yeah. And, and we, and look, having, you know, spent all that time travelling, we are so lucky as a country.

• 1:12:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  Uh, and, and I just sometimes think we forget about it and we should not be so pessimistic about what we have here and, and the opportunities we have. Sure, we've had a probably rough decade where we've been going in, in the wrong direction. No one denies that. And both major parties, you know, are to blame for that. Um, but, you know, it doesn't mean to say we can't turn it around. I mean, two hundred years ago, pioneering forefathers were coming out here, you know, you know, beating a path through the scrub, you know, uh, putting up with snakes. And if you got bitten by a snake, you couldn't just go to the hospital. I mean, my mum was, uh, one of five children, her three brothers all died within one year. So my grandparents, my grandmother lost three babies, you know, within one year.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  Oh, not, not sorry, within the first year of birth. So, um, you know, I mean, it wasn't that long ago that, you know, women would lose many children in childbirth. Uh, so we, we've come a long way and our forefathers have made so many sacrifices to make this country the great country it is. Yeah, we, we've just got to constantly remind ourselves that, you know, we are so lucky. Uh, and then use that to empower us and motivate us to, to get up and do the right things. And not waste time on social media. If you, if you waste time on social media, not, not this social media course, but if you're spending ten, ten hours a week on social media, cut it back to eight hours and put that two hours into doing something constructive. You know, get involved with the political party, uh, and, and because yet again, the combined membership of political parties in this country is around two hundred thousand people.

• 1:14:17Speaker 00

  Not many.

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  Not many. It's less than one percent of the population. You know, you can't complain if you, you know, the world's run by those who turn up. And if you're not going to turn up and get involved, you, you know, well, of course the world's going to go in a direction that you don't want it to go because you're not, you're not doing anything about it to control your own destiny.

• 1:14:32Speaker 00

  Do you think that's an Australian thing though? Do you think we've been so spoilt? Not ma, not at the moment, but we have been so spoiled over such a long period of time.

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:14:40Speaker 00

  And that, and we don't feel the need to do these things?

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  I think that that has been the case. I think that is changing.

• 1:14:46Speaker 00

  No, I think, I definitely think it's changing now.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. But it has been, oh, for sure. Yeah. And, and especially with that asset boom in the eighties and the nineties, because we were losing product. We, we were hurled up by the mining boom for sure, but the mining boom has masked a lack of productivity through our manufacturing sector. It's allowed the public bureaucracy to blow out, uh, and, and bureaucracy, not, not public servants. So our teachers and our nurses and our policemen, there's not enough of them. There's too many bureaucrats. So we need to reach, you know, reorganise that. So there's less.

• 1:15:15Speaker 00

  Maybe you could just explain that because I think you, that's a really important point. And I think we, we might finish off this, but this is a really important point, if you don't mind, Joe. Um, people take the view that we have, a lot of people talk about too many public servants, you know, like, but they don't talk about bureaucracy. Bureaucracy, um, and I'm someone who lived in India for a long time and I know how bureaucracy works because, um, uh, Gandhi made sure he created this bureaucracy because every, he needed to give everybody a job.

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Yeah.

• 1:15:41Speaker 00

  Didn't matter how much you got paid, but everyone had a job.

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:43Speaker 00

  And it was sort of bordering on communism, which is sort of where Gandhi was at, like.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:47Speaker 00

  And, and a country like India was poor, you had to, you know, people had to have a job.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:15:52Speaker 00

  So, yeah, maybe you just can explain to people the difference between public service being in the service of the public and being in the bureaucracy.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:16:00Speaker 00

  Between the two.

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  Two different things. The public service, so our, our nurses, our teachers, I mean, my mum was a nurse, you know, my grandmother was a teacher. You know, our military, they serve the people. And, and that word public service is thrown around too much. And you're often like, you know, um, there's a Sky News does this. Oh, we've got too many public servants, there's too many. It's like, no, no, no, hang on a minute. Don't go around bashing the front end workers. They work really hard, right? But do we have too many bureaucrats? Absolutely. And it's the bureaucrats in the back office that create the regulation.

• 1:16:26Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  Right? Which not only is a tax, it's, it strangles productivity, right? And, and one of our policies, I call this my main speech, we've got to have a federation convention that looks at removing the duplications of roles and responsibilities between federal and state governments and the vertical fiscal ambiguities between state and federal governments. And like, and, and the next level down, thirty three councils in Sydney. Do we need that many?

• 1:16:47Speaker 00

  Ridiculous.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  It's ridiculous, right? Brisbane City's got, uh, four councils. The biggest one, Brisbane City itself's got one point four million people.

• 1:16:54Speaker 00

  Works amazingly.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:16:56Speaker 00

  Same as Gold Coast. Amazing.

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. Because, I mean, I'm sure there's still inefficiencies in their bureaucracies, but, you know, at least there's only, because we've often had this thing on our side of politics where if you have the, the states competing, you'll get greater competition. But I've realised when it comes to bureaucrats, you're actually fighting an eight-headed Hydra, not one. Like, you're better off having like one, you, one, one level of bureaucracy.

• 1:17:17Speaker 00

  Seable.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, very simple. Uh, and of course, ironically enough, the Tasmanian Dam's decision has led to this. Uh, because it basically allowed Bob Hawke to go to the High Court and say, we want to stop the Tasmanian government from building a dam. I'm not talking Franklin Dam's a beautiful dam, maybe it shouldn't have been dam, no argument there. But what that means now is every time the state government tries to do something, the federal government steps in according to some foreign treaty, uh, and over, and stops the state government from doing anything. So we've got this real dysfunctional federation at the moment and we've got to sort that out.

• 1:17:49Speaker 00

  The bureaucrats create a thing called, what I call the bureaucracy, which is by definition designed to be inefficient. And as a result of that, um, the inefficiencies, inefficiencies create jobs within the bureaucracy for bureaucrats.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  And it just keeps feeding on itself.

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:06Speaker 00

  And it becomes, it's no one individual's fault. It's, it's not the fault of the individual bureaucrat that's in the bureaucracy. I mean, sometimes it is, but generally speaking, it's not. It's the fault of the politicians who create the bureaucracy.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:19Speaker 00

  And to some extent, currently in our current, uh, regime, the bureaucracy protects.

• 1:18:26Speaker 00

  Certain politicians.

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  And it'll protect itself. You're right. It's it's a hammer looking for nail.

• 1:18:30Speaker 00

  They they they talk about um AI one day taking over the world. Well, for me, we've already have it. It's called a bureaucracy and uh and it's it's been it's it's happening in a lot of countries like UK is a good, a great example. France is another great example. Um but Australia, the bureaucracy is a major problem for a country who's so small.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:18:47Speaker 00

  In terms of people. We we're way, way too big.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:50Speaker 00

  And I agree. Public servants, people in the service of public, they should get a medal.

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:18:56Speaker 00

  And please don't confuse a public servant.

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:59Speaker 00

  With a bureaucrat.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right.

• 1:19:01Speaker 00

  And a public servant gets paid. No, we knew what a bureaucrat gets paid either. There's a major disparity between the uh you know, the return, the reward for effort.

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:10Speaker 00

  And uh and that's what we've got to look at is the bureaucrats.

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:19:13Speaker 00

  I've had some exposure to it because I've chaired quite a few um um task force for various governments.

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:20Speaker 00

  And uh I have to tell you, the bureaucracy at the end of the day kills off pretty much every innovative idea that I've ever come up with.

• 1:19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, they're risk they're risk adverse. Yeah, I I caught up with um some guys in the defence industry who are private contractors and they just said, you know, they're so frustrated with Australian military because they're so risk adverse. And by the time they've actually, you know, it, you know, they want the proof of um, you know, uh.

• 1:19:45Speaker 00

  Concept.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  Concept before before they adopt it.

• 1:19:48Speaker 00

  Like prototyping.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, prototyping all this stuff. And as they were saying, by that stage.

• 1:19:52Speaker 00

  He's got no money left.

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  We've got no money left or or or and other countries come up with even more.

• 1:19:57Speaker 00

  Which is why I'm I'm I don't think about it. I I've got a, I want to really approve this. And I think about that. Bureaucracy thinks about what are the reasons why I should not approve it? And that it doesn't matter whether it's defence or.

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:08Speaker 00

  Uh dams or whatever the infrastructure is.

• 1:20:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:11Speaker 00

  It's about why, what are the reasons that there's a problem?

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  Well, because if they did it too efficiently, they'd do themselves out of a job.

• 1:20:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, correct.

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:18Speaker 00

  So feeds on itself.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:20:20Speaker 00

  Well, um uh Jared, I really want to thank you very much for um, you know, your introduction to me at least um of the um People First Party. I think it's amazing.

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  Well, I have a name change soon too, by the way. It's going to be People's Party. I I Heritage Bank, you know Heritage, you know, they changed their their bank name to People First. So they've sued me. Ha. Copyright. Yeah. And as I said to the judge, I said, I don't have a licence from APRA for showing Prudential Regulation Authority. This is a question of fact.

• 1:20:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  But she let it go to trial and it was going to go for three days. And I was like, well, I don't like the look of this.

• 1:20:51Speaker 00

  I was just calling it so People's Party.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:53Speaker 00

  Actually, I don't mind that. People's Party.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, Australian People's Party.

• 1:20:56Speaker 00

  It's probably slightly easier.

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll just call ourselves People's Party. You know, it'll be abbreviated to that. But um but yeah, but thanks for having me on, Mark.

• 1:21:05Speaker 00

  I I look forward to that. I look forward to it um uh making some inroads into the 20th election, mate.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  Cheers. Thanks, Mark. Appreciate it.