The Hon Sussan Ley MP
Leader of The Opposition
Federal Member for Farrer
THE HON SUSSAN LEY MP, LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION: Hello, Liberals and friends, it is such an honour to stand before you as your Federal Leader. I still remember the very first State Council I attended 25 years ago with my wonderful friend and mentor, Ian Blackham, in our Jerilderie gash on the front stage and the power of regional Liberals coming to the fore. As I said, it is such an incredible honour to be here today and to see so many of you who are here for the reasons that I am here, because we believe in the values of the Liberal Party, the dignity of work, the meaning of aspiration, the conviction that government should reward not punish.
I still remember, as a candidate with no possible chance of winning, such is the beauty of Liberal Party democracy, you put your hand up and you fight for what you believe in, getting the caravan that I had lived in as a shearer’s cook out of the shed at the bottom of the hay paddock, putting Liberal Party logos all over it, hooking it up to my old Holden, and driving up and down the Murray River and listening to the amazing people of this country. What an honour.
So today, we are at the end of the parliamentary sitting year, and it has been a massive disappointment. What has this Albanese Government delivered to the people of Australia? Three things stand out. Higher cost of living, higher power prices and sadly, higher inflation, which means that families next year do not have an interest rate cut coming their way and they quite possibly have an increase. And families, in the lead up to Christmas, are struggling. Can I tell you, when I leave here, when I limp off the stage and head to Tasmania to talk about forestry jobs, I have one thing in mind. There are a lot of people who are not getting a break this Christmas under the Albanese Government. Shame on them.
And what did we see on that last sitting day? We saw something called environmental laws, it is all very complicated to a lot of people, and it should be, because all it is is greening and red tape. But what it saw the rebirth of is the Labor Greens alliance. It is back. It is back in force, and it is going to hold back the projects that we know this country needs. And you know what else it is going to do? It is not going to protect the environment. I want to make that very clear. It is going to hold back the one thing that will deliver our affordable, responsible energy plan, gas.
And the reason why this is so important members, is because many of you in this room are engineers. You understand the energy system. You know that Australians deserve affordable energy and responsible emissions reduction. We can have both, but right now, affordable energy must be a priority. But what have we got under Labor? A trifecta of failures. Prices going up, reliability going down and emissions flatlining. How does that make any sense?
So we know too that this Government has set targets it cannot meet at a cost that Australians cannot afford, all for nothing. $75 billion spent so far on the renewable energy transition. And the Business Council estimates that just to get to the 2035 targets, an eye watering $530 billion. But within that, $150 billion of industries and businesses and manufacturers going offshore.
There has to be a better way. And I am. This plan is coming to a train station, town hall forum and market square near you over the summer months, because the fight that we are having for Australians is about energy affordability and responsible emissions reduction, but it is about something that I know everyone in this room understands in their DNA. And that is, we have to be a country where you make things. Remember the Prime Minister and all that Made in Australia? Remember all that? He does not say it quite so much now.
Maybe some of you remember 18 months ago, there was this big future made in Australia push. $22 billion, with a Government that is spending more and more of your money there is always a big price tag. Anyway, I thought, I wonder how this is all going. I will go on the Future Made in Australia website. I will see who is getting this $22 billion. Well, the good news is, in one sense, no one is. But the bad news is that the number of projects funded under the Future Made in Australia, zero. Not a single one.
Now, they set up a big bureaucratic thing called the Front Door. It is the front door. You go through there, you get your energy and emissions and projects and manufacturing and renewables etc. You get it funded there. Not one single thing has been done. And the other thing is the Future Made in Australia is still in the consultation phase, 18 months afterwards. Shame on them. Shame on them.
Now, not far from here, I stood at Tomago Aluminium a few weeks ago. I made sure that I stood in the same spot that the Prime Minister had stood in in January this year. He said, pointing to Tomago Aluminium this is what a future made in Australia looks like. There will be green jobs and industry here for 40 more years. Now, you are New South Wales people, and you love your state and you love the industries that it produces, so you will feel the sadness that I felt when I talked to the workforce whose manufacturing process is better than any other aluminium smelter in the world, because we do things really well in Australia. And the Tomago Aluminium Smelter was turned on in 1983 and it has run 24/7 since 1983. It has never turned off. You cannot turn off a smelter. Imagine how we are all going to feel in 2028 when someone turns off the switch. Shame on them.
Because what we see there is a warning sign, not just for metals, manufacturing and smelters. I mean, this is the sixth one that is running up the white flag, heading for a bailout. There is no made in Australia. There is a big bailout in Australia. But this sends a massive warning sign on energy and how this Government has got it all wrong. Because if we do not make things in Australia, it is very simple, ladies and gentlemen. We make them somewhere else and they come to Australia as imports. Does the globe know any different? We know the emissions produced offshore are probably more than the emissions that would be produced in Australia. But I am not going to stand here as the leader of this fine party and accept a future where we import plastics, aluminium, steel, cement, bitumen, nitrogen fertiliser. This is what is happening. We are losing our strong manufacturing capability under this Government’s energy policy, and it is frightening, and we have to fight it.
And there is work to do, which is why this plan is coming to every single town hall, marketplace and train station near you. Because when I talk to Australians about this, they do not always realise. And then I talk about the next generation, because I have six grandchildren and I want them to inherit a better planet, and I want them to inherit a better standard of living. How dare this Government talk about its so-called environmental credentials, as it did this week. You heard them. And say to the next generation of Australians, you will be poorer and worse off than your parents or grandparents. We will not stand by and let that happen, because that is where these policies, including energy, are heading.
Back to the things we do not make in Australia anymore. It is absolutely shameful and shocking. And you can see what is happening to the price of houses. It is going up. In fact, it is going up by close to 30 per cent, which means no one is building a new house. But I mean, the price of new houses is going up by that much. They are simply looking at the existing stock of houses, because while they are going up, they are not going up that much. But is it any surprise that the cost of houses is going up, when the structural shell of the house is more and more in an imported supply chain? That makes no sense.
The bitumen that paves the roads of the new estate. The plastic, because we do not make HDPE and LDPE. These are the plastics you find in packaging, in bottles, in agriculture and construction. We do not make them in Australia at all. They are all coming in on the boat and you know where they are coming from.
So if we look at that house again, glass. Well, we make windows in Australia, but we do not make glass. We do not make glass in this country. No architectural glass. So all of the windows that go into these new houses come on a boat. And of course that adds to cost. And sometimes we are not the first person in the supply chain. And as we saw during COVID, when the supply chain is disrupted, it gets pretty awful.
And you all know I’m a pilot so I am interested in services and bitumen. We do not have runway grade bitumen in this country anymore. We import it all. If we had to build airports in a hurry, I do not know what we would do. We do not even have the IP and the operation to do that. And increasingly, more and more bitumen is coming on a supply chain imported in a warm sort of boat, because you cannot let it get cold.
I despair. Cement, the building blocks, members, the building blocks of a modern civilised society, are not made in Australia anymore. I looked at the Port of Kwinana recently. They were making a big song and dance. They are opening some new terminal. Oh I thought, what is going on here? They are importing clinker.
You know, we make clinker, we used to make clinker here. What is in clinker? It is the ingredient of cement. Limestone and clay, and of course energy, gas or thermal coal. But no, no, no. Under this Government’s energy policy, the manufacturers are being punished for their emissions, so we are now building the import terminals to import clinker to make cement. The building blocks of the modern civilised society are not here anymore. They are on a supply chain from somewhere else.
And ladies and gentlemen, if you just think of the precariousness of our economy on this alone, you know there is really something to fight for. This. I said to the Prime Minister this week, what happened to your made in Australia? And I got no answer.
I am saving maybe the best till last, because I am a farmer. And hands up any farmers in this room, I can see Noel Wilson sitting over there and the great crew from Farrer. Well, imagine what the architects of the Green Revolution in the middle of last century would say if they knew the facts about nitrogen fertiliser, which contains urea, which of course uses a lot of energy. 80 to 90 per cent of our nitrogen fertiliser is imported from the Middle East and other locations. Imagine the carbon miles on that trip.
So we have food production put at stake. We are risking the real things that we do well in this country. And all for what? An ideological target. A target that they cannot meet at a cost Australians cannot afford. And yes, we want responsible emissions reduction. And I have talked to young people, including my children’s generation. I said, yes, I care about the next generation. I care about the planet. That is why I want emissions reduction to actually work, which is why our plan talks about that too. It is affordable energy and responsible emissions reduction. It is exactly what this Government is not doing.
There is so much going wrong with the Albanese Government right now, and it is not just energy policy. At the heart of the agenda that you see in front of you is something that is, of course, the biggest spending since Whitlam, and by comparison, maybe even bigger than that.
And again, I have talked, some of the statements I have made so far, the very first one I made as leader was about how we manage the budget responsibly, how we live within our means. And I know a lot of younger Australians have got used to debt as just a big number that does not really mean very much. But when you consider that we are spending $50,000 a minute in interest on the debt on the national credit card, then you know they have got it all wrong. A $1.2 trillion debt in the 28 to 29 year.
And I talked about empowerment versus dependency, because the country that I want to see, Australia, the country I know Australia really is, is not one where the citizens look to government and say, what can you do for us? It is one where the government says to the citizens, how can we empower you? How can we support you to be the generators of industry and growth and small business and the private sector and build a future for your families? How can we do that? But that is not what this Government is doing. It is simply sitting there passively borrowing more and more money, being very generous with borrowed money.
Now, I also made a statement about personal income taxes going down, and that is a solid commitment that I have made, because it comes from my own experience. And many of you know that when I was learning to fly I did several jobs, I was pretty interested by the time I got to the second and third job, the tax rate was sort of through the roof. I thought, I am not keeping more of what I earn. What is going on here?
And then I went to work in the shearing sheds in western Queensland and saved all my money. My husband and I saved all our money for a start on the family farm. We loved to see that little nest egg grow. But then we saw it attacked by a very high tax rate. But it is about reward for effort. It is about a government that rewards its citizens, does not punish them.
So every time you see the Government talk about a generous piece of new spending, borrowing more of your money, you can know that we will allocate it to either budget repair or lower personal income taxes. That is my commitment. Every dollar that Labor spends is a dollar that you have to pay, and I want to put that dollar back in your pocket. You decide what you spend it on, because you know what? When you decide what you spend it on, you do a whole lot better than the Government does.
And so many of you, and I am so grateful, because I know your experience in small business, and that has taught me a lot. My small business is a farm but there are many small businesses. They work incredibly long hours. They stand there with a smile on their face as a business proprietor from dawn to dusk. There are not that many people walking through the door with money to spend, we understand that. It is tough. But as one business owner said to me, when I get home, I have to do all this paperwork, and I do not understand because if I could see the link between the paperwork and something, but I do not. And the feeling is that this Government wants to punish me. This is what our wonderful small businesses say, and that is not good enough.
So we are going to do better for small business. We are going to get rid of their red tape. We are going to deregulate. We are going to support them. We are going to listen to them. And we are going to understand that it all comes down to people walking in the door of that small business with money to spend. And right now they do not. This is a Government that thinks that Canberra has to be all things to all people. But we know that government should set the rules but never run the race.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, sometimes it is hard to stand up against public sentiment. We did it with the Voice in the last term of Parliament. We are doing it this term with my affordable energy, responsible emissions reduction plan. We know it is the right thing to do, because when energy is unaffordable, everything is unaffordable.
And as I met mums and families this week, and I have heard from them about what it is going to be like in the lead up to Christmas, because every single thing you pull off the supermarket shelves, think of the energy that is embedded into its supply chain. Think of the cost that is added every step of the way. Think of the real importance of understanding that as a government and backing in the people who elected you. There is so much disappointment in this Albanese Government. We know that for families looking at the future and the turn into next year, the cost for the kids going back to school, I want them to know that the reasons we want to manage the budget responsibly and run an economy, these are not economic talking points. These are because we have to be there for the most vulnerable. That is why you run a responsible budget. You must have a safety net, not a hammock, a safety net.
And you have to recognise that for the people who have worked hard, pensioners, veterans, those who are struggling, as a political party and as an alternative government, we will always be there for them. And people talk about the next generations as if somehow the Liberal Party is not there for them. 100 percent we are there for the next generation. And I am calling them the disenfranchised generation. Because how can it be that Gen Z and Millennials are set to inherit a lower standard of living than we have? It cannot be. But every young person I speak to and their biggest concern, unsurprisingly, sometimes bigger than all the other concerns combined, is how do I get a house of my own? How do I find a pathway into a home? How do I get a start? And everything we do will be aimed at making sure that the next generation can see that the Liberal Party of Australia is there for them.
Now, I want to reassure you that I am not taking a backwards step. I am not going to step away for one second from the things that matter. And this week in Parliament, we saw Government ministers who were quite happy to step away. Chris Bowen, the Energy Minister. I do not think anyone in Sydney will see him. So we had a little bit of a discussion with the Speaker about how it is important to be able to call him a part time minister, because he is a part time minister. And he is very focused on his new job. In case anyone had not heard, he is the President of COP negotiations. And that is really a very busy job indeed. So I watched the Energy Minister in Question Time looking at his phone. I thought the calendar invites are coming in. What would the first one be? Maybe Azerbaijan, because that was the last COP President. And hey, there are 180 countries, so you might as well start with A. Let us lock that in, team. And then maybe the Energy Minister could swing over to the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal, because remember that renewables only grid that crashed pretty badly. But I am sure it is still a shining light for Chris Bowen. And perhaps squeeze in a visit to Davos. A fireside chat about hydrogen. Over to Houston, let’s give those big oil people a lecture, shall we? But then it might be time to go back to Brazil, get the band back together in Belém. Remember that he has just signed that amazing sort of negotiation document where he, our Energy Minister, has said, we are going to phase out fossil fuel exports. He stood in Parliament and said, this is all fine. This is a good thing to do. The Liberal Party should be supporting us. And he seems to be completely unaware that while we stand with an abundance of natural resources under our feet, as I explained in the plan, an abundance of natural resources, with the second or perhaps third largest resource deposit of LNG in the world and the second or third largest exporter of LNG, it comes back to us soon, you know this, ladies and gentlemen, through an import terminal that is being built at Port Kembla.
So when you say that to Australians, you say, you know that might be why your energy costs are too high, they think that is pretty crazy. We have to have gas to power the grid going forward. Absolutely we must. Gas is the transition fuel. Because we are not anti renewables, but pretty soon they are going to be stranded assets, sitting out there with no baseload or dispatchable power or the prospect of nuclear, which we still believe in, in this plan. Because every technology is in this plan. Because we need to be technology agnostic about the types of power so that we get affordable baseload dispatchable power. But we still [INAUDIBLE] importing LNG so somebody is going to make a lot of money out of that, but it will not be the Australian people.
Meanwhile, you have got a Government that is signing away our future by saying we have to stop exporting LNG, and we certainly cannot be using it in our grid in Australia. This is madness. And when I think about the ports that I visit or wish I could visit more of, I see a lot of things coming in. I see a lot of imports. I do not want to be a country where everything is coming into this country. I want to be a country where we are exporting. Because we pay the bills. We lift our standard of living. We underwrite the productivity that the next generation depends on. This productivity thing that the Government has no idea about. Declining really bad, well, flatlining. Remember, it is over 100 days since the Productivity Summit and nothing has happened because they misunderstand that it is the private sector that will drive this every single day of the week.
So, ladies and gentlemen, before I wrap up, I want you to know that most importantly, I thank all of you for keeping the faith, for flying the flag and for understanding the importance of the things we do as Liberals. And I said before the end of the year we will release our principles on migration policy.
Because, you know that the pressures on our cities and the pressures on our schools and our hospitals and our public transport commute is because the population balance is all wrong. And this is the Government that does not have that balance right. Now I want to make it very clear this is not about any migrant or migrant community. This is about a failure of infrastructure. Failures of infrastructure at every single level.
So we have got a Government that has no population plan, gets the numbers wrong every time they give you any numbers and then just walks a million miles away from any confidence that they can give to you. So we will have migration principles out by the end of the year. Soon after that, as I talk to more Australians about the affordable energy plan and the things that matter to them, most importantly I listen to them, we will be talking about the things that matter to mums, to kids, to families. So there is a lot happening. I want to say thank you for today, for the last six months, and for all of the passion, the determination and the power that you bring to our national debate and our national story.
Thank you.