Mr BROADBENT (Monash) (17:05): I don't think that the former member for Bennelong ever gave a speech like that one, where he never followed the dictates of the party or the talking points.

Mr Perrett: John Howard?

Mr BROADBENT: Yes. Good man! One thing we know is that Australian families are enduring very difficult times, whether from high rents or mortgages, skyrocketing energy bills or insurance premiums going through the roof. Many families doing a tough right now with rising inflation. I heard a call before, saying that inflation is going down. Go and get a trolley full of groceries and find out if inflation is going down! If you can find inflation is going down—

Mr Perrett interjecting—

Mr BROADBENT: then you're not doing the shopping!

Mr Perrett: I do the shopping!

Mr BROADBENT: That's what's happening. You're not seeing the price that families are paying—

Mr Perrett interjecting—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Wilkie): The member for Moreton should restrain himself.

Mr BROADBENT: The member for Moreton should never restrain himself! I really appreciate him. I don't want to go across you, Deputy Speaker Wilkie, but I enjoy the member for Moreton; he has been a great contributor to the parliament. He's prepared to stand up and talk about the real issues that are affecting families every day in Moreton, as I do in Monash!

A tub of yoghurt, for instance, used to be about five bucks; last week it was 10! What's going on? I don't think that's supermarket gouging—I don't know what it is—but you can't have a 100 per cent increase in something. Everything I touch is either getting smaller in the packet—smaller jam!—and still larger in price. I'm embarrassed to come home to my wife and say, 'Here's your marmalade.' The tub used to be about this big and now it's only about that big at the same price, if not dearer.

Last week a constituent told me her story. Alison and Dean are in their late 20s, with two young kids aged three and eight months. Up until late last year, Dean had run his own business for five years as a gas plumber. No longer in Victoria: when the Victorian government brought in new legislative changes which meant that gas could not be installed in new homes as of 24 January, Dean was out of a job—along with thousands of other people. Just like that he had to close his business. That's five years of hard work down the drain. Alison planned to have eight full months of maternity leave after giving birth to her second child in July last year. However, due to their financial situation, including the uncertainty of Dean having to find a new job, Alison had to return to work months earlier than expected. The couple now pay $260 week for their two children to attend child care three days a week. Alison told me that there have been weeks when their bank account has been in minus and they've had to wait until payday to be able to pay council rates and insurances. And she's not on her own there, I can tell you. This is because they prioritise their mortgage, childcare fees and ensuring their children are fed before anything else. To add to this, every time their account is in minus, their bank charges them a fee of between $5 and $10. At the moment they're living from pay cheque to pay cheque. At the end of the week, after taking into account the bills and the mortgage, there's not much left to spend, let alone save for a rainy day.

A recent report from the Brotherhood of St Laurence found, quite rightly, that people experiencing poverty and job insecurity are increasingly unable to budget their way out of financial crisis. I know a family that's reticent to go to the doctor because they can't afford the out-of-pocket costs. This is disgraceful in a country like ours; taking a child to the doctor is not discretionary! Apparently, more than 1.2 million Australians—and they would have been in Tasmania too, Deputy Speaker Wilkie—did not go and see a GP during 2022-23 because of the cost. That's twice as many as compared to 2021-22. It's affecting all of us. And then there are people who are rationing their medication in order to make it through to their next payday. This is not good enough in a nation as wealthy and with as strong an economy as we have.

Governments need to redirect their priorities towards those doing it toughest in Australia, towards those who are living independently or who are lonely. We have a responsibility to those who are least able to look after themselves in this country. I haven't stopped addressing those who need the most help since I first came into this place. Right now, this country is facing a crisis of people who need direct help. We have to find ways to give it to them.

I'll follow on from the member for Hunter and say that there have been two scams on my phone today. You had 'Michael Jackson'; I had the 'port authority' or whatever it was telling me I hadn't paid my bill! The point is that the member for Hunter was very right and very clear when he said that the government has spent $86 million, planned over a number of years, to organise this operation. It's beginning to work, but it's not just government's responsibility. It's the responsibility of the individual, the telcos, the banks and anybody else who can do anything we possibly can as a nation, a people and a tribe—tribe Australia. It's your money, your money and your money. One fellow I read about here, after my staff did the research, was about to transfer $25 million. He is an executive—a CEO of an organisation. He was about to transfer, but he made a phone call to his own bank just before he transferred. They said, 'It's a scam.'

My own family member was building a house, and there was a due payment to be made. It a considerable amount of money for the new house they were building, and it was to go to the builder. My brother-in-law was lucky. He knew the builder, who was a friend of his. He knew the daughter was away at the time. When he received the email, which was correct—the money and bank account were correct—it just had a different bank account to be paid into. He said: 'I'll pay it. No, no; I'll give George a ring.' So he gave George a ring. Sure enough, George said: 'No, I haven't changed my bank accounts. They're exactly the same as they were before.' My brother-in-law said, 'This is a definite change to another account.' He would have transferred a substantial amount of money to an organisation; it would have been gone, out of that account, in minutes.

Another lady was insistent after a phone call. She was an older lady. She went through every one of her bank accounts and got all the money out, because that's what she'd been instructed to do. She took it to the Commonwealth Bank to bank it into this particular account. The Commonwealth Bank saved her. They said, 'This is a scam account you're paying into.' Embarrassed, she went back and put all her money back into the other accounts, even though the staff at the other banks had said: 'Are you being scammed? Are you being scammed? Are you being scammed?'

Too many people are being scammed. These people are smart. And they find ways—whatever way they can. They know you well. When I say, 'They know you well,' I mean this. As somebody said, they had the last three digits of their bank card, their name, their wife's name, their children's names and associations they had, and they sounded just like the bank. They will send you documentation that mimics the bank's documentation. You would swear you're actually talking to the organisation that they say they are. I had a Telstra scam, and they had me on the line for 10 minutes before I thought, 'Hang on, why are you asking me these questions about accounts that I don't have?' Then I realised it was a scam. I just thought it was Telstra ringing me, being courteous and looking after me. I was being honoured and favoured. It's great to have them look after you.

I do have proper phone calls from people that say: 'I'm your account manager from such-and-such a bank. You've got some money there; do you want to do something with it?' And it turns out they're legitimate. What we have to do, as a government, is ask, 'Righto, how can we best protect our people?' and actually put the work in. But it's not just about what the government can do, and it can't just be about the banks repaying everything that's lost, because then Australia would just become honeypot for them. They'd know that the banks would repay it, so they'd say, 'Let's get into Australia!' No, we have to be better than; we are better than that. We cannot afford to have $3,000 million taken out of our economy each year. It's money owned by decent individuals—smart, bright people. We can't do that! It has to change and it has to be a whole-of-government, whole-of-banks, whole-of-telcos and whole-of-everybody-else-involved-in-it thing to make the difference. This is our chance now to get onto these people, to make the difference and to make Australia a no-go zone for scammers.

I'm going to ignore the spurious attacks on previous governments by other speakers on this motion, and I'm going to do that for a very good reason. On this day I've got to say that all the governments I have served with or under in this parliament have reflected one of the lines of this motion: 'supporting a cohesive and inclusive multicultural society'. It doesn't matter whether you come from Tasmania—like you, Deputy Speaker Archer—or from New South Wales, Queensland or Victoria. A number of members have claimed that they have the most multicultural community in the whole of Australia. The member for Bruce claims—with some veracity, I think—that he has the most multicultural electorate in Victoria. There are those on each side who, as we heard from the member for Fowler, would say: 'No. I have the most multicultural community; here are the figures and here are the numbers.'

What is beautiful, broad and brazen about this whole Australian community is that we are changing, as we always knew we would, as time goes on. I can remember in this place when the word 'multiculturalism' was an absolute no-no. It started with the New South Wales state government removing the word 'multiculturalism' from any ministry, and then the same thing happened in the federal parliament. I grew up in a multicultural community called Koo Wee Rup. We could say then we had the most diverse European community of all towns, but it wasn't really, because there was also Werribee and all around Melbourne. The Italians dominated our communities; they came in poor and they worked hard, and their children worked hard. Their children were well educated, and they went on to do really good things. The people who came here from Sicily were tiny little people, because they'd been starved for generations. If you could see their sons and daughters now, three generations down the line—talk about two axe handles wide and six axe handles high! These are big people, and they have prospered. It's not only the Italians but also the Germans and the Yugoslavs, as we called them then. That name has changed a few times over the years. We had them all, and they came here to build a community.

In my electorate of Monash, we have people who had worked on the Snowy Mountains Scheme and then came to work for the state electricity commission or in the open-cut mines in the Latrobe Valley, which have been an absolute blessing for Victoria. Just as Tasmania has the gift of hydroelectric power, where fourth-fifths of all of Tasmania's power comes from hydroelectricity, Victoria had this golden opportunity out of the Latrobe Valley. It was built by Monash and his team—my electorate is named after him—and it supplied Victoria's manufacturing community with cheap electricity, allowing them to be one of the most powerful manufacturing states in the world from the early 1930s through to the 1960s. That changed when all of a sudden we decided to say: 'We want renewable energy. We're not going to look at that brown coal as gold anymore; we're going to look at it as a pollutant.' Power stations that were to be built in the Latrobe Valley were abandoned, and now we're about to lose two more. I fear for our nation not because of its multicultural status but because this government is leading us on the way to a very poor future.

I read today, that finally NSW Health looks set to scrap its useless, redundant and discriminatory Covid mandates.

But we’re still waiting for Victoria to drop its three jab or no work policy.

I still receive heartbreaking calls from doctors, nurses, firies, police officers and paramedics who were terminated from their jobs – many of them charged with ‘serious misconduct’ - for not submitting to the experimental covid jab.

Mind you, even in the midst of their distress and suffering at the injustices perpetrated against them, not one of them regrets not getting it.

And why would they?

With unprecedented rates of excess deaths, heart attacks, strokes, turbo cancer and auto-immune disease, thousands of esteemed doctors and academics across the world continue to plead for the mRNA jabs to be banned.

Let me be clear, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear there’s no shortage of peer-reviewed, scientific evidence.  It’s just not being reported on mainstream news.

I know doctors are hearing reports of adverse injuries in their patients but are too afraid to speak up for fear of retribution from AHPRA.

What happened to the doctor’s oath of first do no harm?

I say to doctors across Australia, it’s not too late to stand up and share your concerns.

Russell Broadbent here, your independent member for Monash.

Last weekend I was interested to read an article in The Weekend Australian in which my friend, Jennie George, shared her disillusionment and despair about Labor’s trajectory on energy policy.

What makes this a story is that Jennie is a former Labor MP and former President of the ACTU.

As she says after closely examining Labor’s energy policy and drilling down on job creation promises and what they meant for workers, Jennie had to decide: “Do I keep my mouth shut …or…do I speak out." She said she felt a responsibility to question.

Energy targets are being spruiked like shiny trophies to legitimise a policy idea that quite frankly is nothing short of absurd. And one that has the potential to threaten the wellbeing of our nation.

This government was elected by the Australian people and its time they began to act in the interests of all Australian people.

The Labor government’s target of 82% Australia's energy being sourced from renewables by 2030 is a reckless goal and it seems they don’t care who gets in the way.

For these renewable projects to go ahead, around 10,000 kilometres of new transmission infrastructure will need to be established. Not only is it eye-wateringly expensive, it’s going to have to occupy fruitful agricultural land and will certainly create disputes and issues for communities all around Australia don't want wind and solar farms in their backyards.

Energy is so vital to this country's productivity, economic prosperity, and most importantly - our independence and freedom. We have the resources, we have the people, and we have choices.

At the end of the day, Australian people will be paying the price - either as taxpayers or consumers - for the efforts of this government desperately reaching for reckless targets putting their own interests above those of the people they supposedly represent.

That's just as I see it.

Unsurprisingly, my conversation with the brilliant Professor Gigi Foster has sparked a great deal of interest. For those that wish to watch the full interview, you can access it above.

I don't mind if the government have programs and they say things before an election campaign about what they're going to do in regard to housing. But don't then tell me 100 times that you're going to reduce the cost of power—as the previous member just said, they have a power reduction program—by $275. You said that time after time after time, and people in my electorate listened to you, understood what you were saying and supported you. A whole four per cent of them decided to move towards the Labor Party and away from my position. People thought, 'I'm going to be $275 better off if I vote Labor.' What has happened? They haven't had a $275 reduction.

But then Labor said, 'Oh, no, we've got five years to do that.' The trouble is that the Prime Minister didn't say that during the election campaign. He didn't say, 'In five years time I'll give you a $275 cut.' He just said, 'I'll give you a $275 cut.' It's sort of a reversal of the 'Mediscare' campaign from the previous election. It's a promise to say, 'I'm going to give you this,' but then they don't give it to you. You can understand that people are under pressure, and all the previous speakers have recognised that people are under pressure from power prices and a lot of state government costs, like your water and your electricity. When has the federal government come along and said, 'Here's what we can do for you'? It hasn't happened.

What happens in your new housing program, whatever it's called, which we just debated in the House and went through—it's another first home buyer type scheme; oh, it's the Help to Buy program—when the market intervenes, people can't pay for some reason, their interest rates go too high and they're under pressure?

I went to get a punctured tyre repaired, and the guy repairing the tyre said, 'You're the politician, aren't you?' And I said yes, but I was trying to hide it, with the way I was dressed. He said, 'Do you know my mortgage has gone up 1,500 bucks?' This guy is running and is part owner of a very good tyre business. They've always looked after me very well in Pakenham and always been great. He said: 'It's 1,500 bucks, mate. That's what it's costing me over and above what I was paying.' He said, 'I have to find that money.'

I recently had a very well-paid person come to me and say, 'Russell, you don't understand how high the mortgage is that we've got to pay.' Well, no, I don't understand how high his mortgage is, because when I took out the mortgage on the small farm that I'm on it was $30,000. Then, in the next episode, from others that I've heard about, their mortgages went to $60,000, then $80,000, then $150,000 and then $200,000. When I asked a young girl who worked with me for a while, Priscilla, what she'd borrowed to get into her unit in Parkdale, or wherever it was, she said $400,000. I was in shock. Now people are borrowing $1 million. For some of the people these days who have borrowed that sort of money, a tiny change in interest rates is catastrophic. And they all believed that interest rates wouldn't change for a long time. As we heard from the member who spoke before, people come up to you and say, 'I've just moved from a fixed loan to a variable loan, and the price has gone through the roof for me.' And this has happened to thousands of people across Australia. I learned very quickly that people are now relying not only on their income but also on their savings. They're using up their savings just to survive at the moment.

Governments should be very aware of the electorate when people are under pressure, because they will have regard for everything you say, all the time, about what you're going to do. And if you don't do it beware, because the people will be coming for you.

I seconded this motion for a reason: I seconded this motion so that this parliament would discuss the issue around the size of the market held by supermarkets. Philosophically, I probably don't sit well with the motion that Mr Katter has put forward but I'm happy to second it so that the parliament can have the discussion.

Access to healthy, fresh food should not be a luxury in this country. We all realise the prices people are paying at the moment seem to be inflated beyond their control and beyond the household budget. What we're facing here is that the market dominance of the supermarkets is probably unprecedented in nations around the world. If we compare ourselves with the UK, the biggest player in their market is around 28 per cent. In the US the biggest player in the market is around 25 per cent. In Australia the biggest player in the market is 37 per cent. With our second biggest player having a larger nominal share than the share that the largest supermarket in the US has, just two supermarkets account for 60 per cent of the market share and prove how lacking competition is in the sector. You already know which two supermarkets I'm talking about.

Of course, there's a choice. In Melbourne you can seek out a retailer that may be a long way away from you but will give you a better price. I asked a customer the other day—I'm not sure whether I'm allowed to name names here—in the ALDI store, 'Do you believe you get a better price shopping at ALDI than you do at the major supermarkets?' She said: 'Absolutely. This is my major shop for the week.' It was about $275 for her major shop. She lives with her daughter. In that process, she said, 'Yes, I think I'm this many dollars better off by shopping at that particular store.' So in Australia you can still seek out, if you're prepared to look and travel, opportunities for independent supermarkets.

Where I have a problem with the bill put forward is that, even though the member for Hasluck a few minutes ago outlined all the programs that the government has in place to fight against the monopoly, the market happens very quickly. I'm a former retailer. The market happens on that day in that week in that time. By the time all the inquiries that you might have with the ACCC or any other body over price gouging are held and done, the damage is done. It's all over—it's finished—for the retailer. In my own area, when a major player in the market in my industry came in to my community, I knew that our retail model was over, finished, gone. It took a long time for me to explain that to my family—that we were now finished—because we couldn't compete in the marketplace with such an enormous organisation. Therefore, businesses like mine disappeared not just in my area but right across Australia because the big organisation came in and took over from the very small.

In the inquiry that's currently going on in Australia with regard to food prices—or whatever the inquiry is called—it was really interesting to hear the apple growers and what they're going through at the moment and the fact that many of them are ripping their plants out of the ground because they can't put apples on the shelf—you'd know this in South Australia—because of what it costs them to produce it. In fact, the gap is enormous. Some of their produce is perfect to eat, but, because it's slightly the wrong colour, it gets rejected, for heaven's sake. So 30 per cent of this beautiful product here in Australia is thrown out or sent back to the grower just to be ploughed in or thrown down the tip.

What I'm putting to the House is that it's good to have this discussion around how we deliver food into households in Australia but remember that we're dealing with a marketplace which is moving quickly every day and you've got to be a very big supplier to supply a very big supermarket. So the smaller man is left out. If you want that change, you have to change how you are supporting the smaller operators and the smaller growers.

Grant Piper reiterates the reason for the Reckless Renewables Rally held in Canberra on 6 February 2024: that the government’s push for 80% renewables is fundamentally flawed and in need of an urgent review to test assumptions.

Following a terrible reaction to his first Covid vaccine, highly skilled and experienced nurse Geofrey was terrified to get a second shot.

After he was unable to obtain an exemption, Geofrey had two choices: either resign or be terminated due to “Serious Misconduct” for willfully and deliberately failing to comply with his employer’s Covid-19 vaccine requirements.

Geofrey chose to resign as he didn’t want that charge to be on his file.

Geofrey now works putting up signs along the roadside. This is inhumane, unjust and a national disgrace.

When sharing our perspectives about the pandemic, especially when they differ from the official government narrative, Professor Gigi Foster says we need to act with love and compassion and openness and provide a slow dripping of the truth.

I recently had the pleasure of asking Professor Gigi Foster why Australia went so hard with lockdowns and mandates instead of following the dedicated pandemic plan that had been developed over many years.

Gigi’s observations and thought-provoking perspectives offer valuable insights about why certain decisions were made, and explains the effect they had on our national psyche.