Moreton Bay Today - Gerard Rennick talks One Nation, Immigration, Cost of Living, and Multinational Tax Evasion

Former Senator and People First Party founder Gerard Rennick joins Travis Groves on Moreton Bay Today for a straight-talking conversation about the rise of smaller parties, One Nation’s shock WA win, immigration, the cost-of-living crisis, housing, energy and fuel prices, plus his push to crack down on multinational companies shifting profits offshore to avoid paying their fair share of tax in Australia.

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Introduction & Why Smaller Parties are Important in Australian Politics

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Well, what's the point? They won't win. Well, my next guest has been for one of the more intelligent people he's ever known. Speaking up against COVID-19, vaccine mandates, vaccine injuries, and government overreach. He's a former Queensland Senator who walked away from the major parties and started his own. Gerard Rennick, founder of the People's First Party, joins us. Good morning. Morning, Travis. How are you? Yeah, good, mate. Yourself, you've been busy.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Yeah, I've been in uh Western Australia last week where we had a number of branch meetings and went to the field day uh that was held just outside of Perth. So we uh you know, as a small party, we won't get much support from the mainstream media, so we're just out there, you know, talking to the community on the ground.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

That's why I wanted to put this as the first question to you, Gerard. Why are smaller parties important in Australian politics?

SPEAKER_01 1:00

Well, you need small parties to hold the major parties to account, and having come from a major party, you know, the Liberal Party become controlled by what you call the vested interest. So they're lobby groups, you know, and and particular organizations that have an interest in pushing their agenda. Uh and we saw the, in my view, the collapse of the Liberal Party start to occur in October 2021 when Scott Morrison signed up to Net Zero. Now, many people in the Liberal Party in New South Wales are incredibly upset about that, and they actually wanted to remove their sitting members that supported the net zero position. And the Federal Liberal Party came in and got the New South Wales executive to stop having pre-selections, uh, and they just basically allowed the sitting members to uh contest their seats uncontested uh from the internal side of politics. And if you don't have democratic pre-selections inside your own party whereby the members aren't given a say, they quickly get very disillusioned and they leave the party. We actually saw that uh play out earlier this year in Farrah, whereby uh you know, the the Liberal Party vote collapsed. You know, that that seat had been held by the coalition since its inception around 1948, I think, and uh they lost their seat for the first time. And that was because the membership basically packed up

One Nation Secret Habour Win

SPEAKER_01 2:16

and moved to One Nation.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

Speaking of One Nation, in Western Australia, obviously, over the weekend you saw at the state level picking up the secret harbour seat held by Labour since 1989, over three decades, a blue-collar region, working class families fed up with the cost of living, mass migration, net zero policies, strangling farmers and other industry. Do you think it's a good indicator of what's to come in Australia as the next federal election uh is just what under two years away now? Uh then talk us through what people's first party policy is on immigration, uh Jura.

SPEAKER_01 2:49

Yeah, okay. Well, look, what's significant about the weekend result was that it was in a Labour seat whereby one nation uh got up rather than Farrah, which was a traditional coalition seat. So that now has put the Labour Party on notice. Obviously, it's been well documented that One Nation has been adding into the coalition's vote, but that's what's significant about this weekend, because the coalition actually ate into the Labour Party's vote. And you can see uh that the Labour Party had become very worried by that, by the use of the f inflammatory rhetoric uh by the Prime Minister yesterday uh at the Queensland Labor Conference. So that's what's really significant about that. Will that still play out in 18 months' time? I think to a large degree it will. Um whether or not it plays out to the same extent, only time will tell. And you know, a lot can happen in politics in 18 months. But there's a definite shift away from supporting the two major parties. Uh I think it's a good thing. My fear is with One Nation is that they won't hold it together and they lack the uh policy depth and uh capability of implementing their own policies. And we

Immigration

SPEAKER_01 3:53

actually saw that last week where there was a lot of confusion, not just with David Farley breaking ranks, but that uh up until recently the One Nation policy has been 130,000 uh migrants grosser that so their policy was that they'd only issue 130,000 new permanent visas. Now that has changed to being 130,000 net permanent visas. So in other words, they'll issue 130,000 visas plus uh how plus how the number of people that actually leave Australia. So for example, if 170,000 people leave Australia, permanent citizens, they will issue 300,000 new visas, subtract 170,000 that left so that there's 130,000 new visas issued net. Um and there's confusion around that. So this is what concerns me with One Nation. Um in particular, I mean, that's their signature policy, so there shouldn't be any confusion around that. Um but the other thing with immigration, we've got a policy of 130,000 uh uh 100,000, sorry, uh which is gross. So in other words, we'll only issue 100,000 new permanent visas. But what surprises me with immigration are the poor quality controls around uh tracking of immigrants when they come to this country. And one of the things we want to do is actually link the tax file number and the sponsor and the expiry date to the visa. So and we want the tax office to actually track all this data. I mean, the tax office is very good at you know spending resources on going after small Australian businesses, but they should really focus on people who overstay their visas and particularly the sponsors who bring uh immigrants into this country and then don't take responsibility for uh when they overstay. So if the tax office, we want to make the tax office responsible and they can simply track uh PAYG payments by tax file number and they will know the market and because it's also a tax attached to the expiry date, they will know someone who is overstaying their visa is still being paid by that sponsor. And if they are being paid by that sponsor, then they'll be penalized um directly. So that's how we want to actually decrease bridging visas as well.

Cost of Living

SPEAKER_00 6:02

And it should be easier than ever with AI now. Now, groceries, housing, energy, and fuel are all putting enormous pressure on families, as we know, some admitting to stealing food for the first time in their lives. Homelessness continues to rise across our parks and public spaces. The Albanese Labour government uh loved to blame the Strator Moose in the Middle East, among with other global factors. What's the real story here for the cost of living? Why is it so out of control?

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Well, there's a number of factors there, Travis. I mean, they're not Albanese is not entirely wrong. I mean, obviously the cost of hormones to moose did make an impact there earlier this year. But it's a combination of factors. And in particular, we've had excess government spending. That's well documented. But what's not well documented is the failure to continue to build more infrastructure as our population has grown. So our population has doubled since around the mid-80s. So in the last 40 years, we've gone from around 14 to 15 million people to 28 million people today. But what hasn't doubled is the amount of infrastructure in the economy. So we've barely built a new dam in the last 40 years in regional Australia. We haven't built many baseload power stations. Yes, we've added renewable power, but that hasn't uh increased what you call the base load capacity. And as a result of that, we've actually seen power prices increase. Further to that, we haven't had an increase in things like you know, very few new ports. Uh the quality of our roads hasn't got much better outside the cities. Uh and that's significant because it's the infrastructure built in the regions that generates wealth. So, for example, if you build a power station, you can access the coal. So take, you know, Cogan Creek Power Station near my hometown of Chinchilla. Uh, you know, it's got four hundred million tons of coal sitting there uh just under the surface. I mean, if you can access that coal for nine, ten dollars uh a ton and turn that into what's virtually it's not free energy, but it's only the cost of digging it up and you know putting it in the power station and burning it, that energy can then be used to actually, you know, add value add to uh you know an enormous range of goods and services, as well as actually keep the cost of power down for consumers as well. Likewise for water, the more dams we build, the more irrigation we have, we can actually drive down the price of food. Uh, you know, more dams can provide more hydropower, which is one good form of renewable energy I will support. Um and it's home grown, which is really important. You know, one of the problems with renewable energy is we're shutting down our base load power stations which use domestically supplied power such as coal and gas, and we're importing foreign-made renewables, which are, excuse me, 70 percent owned by foreigners. So a lot of the wealth that's even being built or the profit made by our power generators today is going offshore.

Multinational Tax Evasion

SPEAKER_01 8:46

So uh the other big issue we've got is the as we've allowed more and more foreign investment in this country, it's actually resulted in not only the loss of income from state governments as they privatized infrastructure, which is used to pay for recurring costs to schools and hospitals, it's led to a massive amount of capital flight in this country, whereby the profits we're making in Australia is actually going offshore. And as a result, and one of the things, and this is actually the main reason why I got into politics initially, I've got a background in tax, um, is that we were allowing billions of dollars every year, tens of billions of dollars every year to go offshore, and it's not taxed here in Australia. So we're not just losing profits, we're losing the tax base that comes with those profits. And if we want to get Australia back on track, we need to start increasing the profits on uh that's sent offshore and use the money raised from those profits, you know, the tax on those profits uh to be lower income tax here in Australia.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

You talked about the fact that the ATO will chase down small businesses or individuals if they miss their tax, but not chasing down this tax being missed by multinationals.

SPEAKER_01 9:52

That's right. I mean look, to be fair to the ATO, they can only do, you know, follow the rules that's been set down by the laws of Parliament, but it beggars beliefs that who uh the Treasury who you know look at what's going on with the tax office. So the tax office is more of a you know follow the law, you know, processing organization. It's Treasury who should be looking at what's coming out of the tax office, looking at the the total income that's going offshore, comparing that to tax collections. And I'll give you an example, like even though I'm no longer in Parliament, I've got a former senator or got an existing senator to ask some questions uh on my behalf at the last set of estimates. And I asked the ATO, are they tracking payments or profits sent offshore and how if so, how much in withholding tax is being withheld? And they're not tracking that. Um to me that's a real concern because you know, as I said in it um before we got cut off, capital flight is a real issue in this uh um country, uh, and we can see that every day as the people are finding it harder and harder to make ends meet, uh, despite the fact that we're an extremely wealthy country. So one of the things that people first uh that we offer is the fact that we know uh how to track um offshore tax payments uh and that we intend to do something about it because one of the easiest ways to turn this country around, apart from building infrastructure, is to actually stop the the capital flight or the the offshoring of our profits. Morton Bay Today with Travis Groves, Mondays from nine till midday on ninety nine seven Bridge FM.