Check against delivery / E&OE
Good morning CPAC. It's great to be with you.
When the Liberal Party was last in government, we got some big things right, but we got some important things wrong too.
We stopped the boats.
But we made the mistake of allowing immigration numbers to creep up, especially student and bridging visas, which have subsequently exploded under the Albanese Labor government.
We brought the budget back into balance by 2018-19.
But we made the mistake of spending too much during the pandemic – more than was needed to save jobs and the economy.
We got power prices down by 10 per cent on my watch as Energy Minister.
But we made the mistake as a government of signing up to net zero – which I detested from the get-go.
Your frustrations about where we let you down in the recent past are understandable and reasonable.
Believe me, I share them.
I've been upfront about our mistakes, especially in my first press conference as Leader, and in my budget reply.
And I'm being upfront with you now when I say we've learned from them.
Under my leadership, we're a different and better Liberal Party.
Some of you may have doubts.
But if you believe our country can change for the better, then believe the Liberal Party can too.
Together with Matt Canavan's leadership of the Nationals, the Coalition is once again conviction-led and unashamedly on the right.
And we've got a bold agenda to save our country – no more small target – which I will talk about today, because our country needs saving.
I know you're deeply concerned about Australia's economic, social, and cultural decline.
I know you're here because you love Australia and want to repair our country.
And I believe many of you know – in your hearts and heads – that a changed and better Liberal Party – together with the Nationals – remains the most credible alternative government to deliver the change our country desperately needs.
Friends:
Since becoming Leader of the Liberal Party, I've spoken about protecting our way of life.
Today, I want to speak about a major threat to our way of life – one that's not new.
Sir Robert Menzies understood the menace of socialism.
He said, "Socialism means high costs, inefficiency, the constant intrusion of political considerations, the damping down of enterprise, the overlordship of routine. None of these elements can produce progress."
For Menzies, the battle against it wasn't only economic and social.
It was a moral and spiritual fight too.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, socialism went into retreat.
But it wasn't defeated.
It found safe houses on Western university campuses.
It fused with postmodernist thought and identity politics.
And soon, that thinking spread into big corporations, bureaucracies, the media, and parliaments.
The first Cold War wasn't only a contest between great powers – it was a battle of ideas.
We are in a battle of ideas again.
Today, we see some Western governments and political parties toying with the same rotten ideas that have devastated countries wherever they've been tried.
For the past four years in Australia, we've had a federal government which is socialist in all but name.
The Albanese government lacks the economic pragmatism of the Hawke and Keating governments.
It's more incompetent than the Rudd and Gillard governments.
It's more ideological than the Whitlam government.
There's something deeply illiberal, radical, and power-hungry about the Albanese government.
Labor's agenda is leaving us poorer, weaker, and demoralised.
The sooner Australians awaken to Labor's regressive agenda that masquerades as progressive, the sooner this terrible government can be defeated, and the sooner we can begin to repair our country.
Almost everything Labor does is about power:
Getting power. Expanding power. Holding power.
In a recent speech, Treasurer Jim Chalmers brazenly spoke about his desire to "win and wield power."
And here I was thinking government was about service!
From the get-go, Labor has bloated the size of government.
Labor sees government as the solution to every problem, and every problem as an opportunity to expand government power.
That's why, under Labor, there's more bureaucracy, more government-run programs, and more centralised decision-making and control.
Yet bigger government hasn't made life better for Australians.
There's been so much waste.
Billions wasted on ideological climate bureaucracy. On ineffectual housing bureaucracy. On corporate welfare.
For all the money pumped into government bureaucracy and programs, Australians are worse off.
Under Labor, power prices have skyrocketed by a staggering 40 per cent.
Some 30,000 fewer homes are being built each year.
Childcare costs have gone up nearly 30 per cent.
The so-called "care-economy" has expanded to unsustainable levels with the NDIS plagued by fraud.
And there are many examples of Labor's economy-wide interference:
A minefield of new regulations and laws.
Crippling carbon taxes.
Subsidies and special treatment for green energy rent seekers that shield competitiveness.
Picking losers like squandering $9 billion on pie-in-the-sky green hydrogen.
Ideological favouritism for expensive industrial-scale renewables while demonising cheap fossil fuels.
And heavy-handed union intervention across workplaces.
While Labor is responsible for an explosion of unproductive government, its interference across the economy has undermined the productive private sector.
Under Labor, a record 50,000 businesses have gone bust.
This Prime Minister isn't listening to small business because he doesn't want to hear what they have to say.
He wants small business to cough up, shut up, and close up.
On his watch, we've also seen the bailout or closure of some of the most important industrial facilities in this country.
Labor's government-directed economy is hurting businesses, hollowing-out industries, hampering enterprise, and hindering investment.
This anti-free enterprise government is committing economic vandalism.
We're in a cost-of-living crisis and an economic crisis because we have a crisis of big government.
The more Labor spends, the more prices inflate, the more Australians pay.
Under Labor, Australians have suffered the worst collapse in living standards in the developed world.
And we're beset by a trifecta of Labor failure:
Stubborn inflation.
Sixteen interest rate hikes – the highest rates in 15 years – with more to come.
And a collapse in productivity.
Indeed, economic growth is an illusion.
Every dollar of growth under this government has been due to population growth – mostly from mass migration which Labor won't scale back.
Project Albanese is a disaster.
This government has no idea how to grow the economic pie.
It only knows how to carve up a shrinking pie.
And that explains its wealth redistribution agenda.
The Albanese government is the highest taxing government in our history.
And in Labor's last budget, Anthony Albanese broke the mother of all pre-election promises.
On 50 occasions, the Prime Minister promised there would be no changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax.
Yet he and Jim Chalmers have imposed new taxes on housing, on every asset class, on trusts, and on savings.
These taxes will hit almost every Australian.
But why is Labor attacking aspiration?
Because it doesn't believe in empowered citizens.
It wants citizens to be dependent on the government because there are votes in dependency.
Consider what we've seen under Labor:
Expanding the welfare state.
Never-ending handouts.
Subsidising student debt.
Government owning a stake in people's homes.
Forcing families into a one-size-fits-all childcare system.
Cutting the private health insurance rebate so more Australians move into the public health system.
And taxpayer funded welfare and home deposits for non-Australians.
Behind all these things is a brazen political agenda:
To make more people dependent on government, to buy votes, and to hold onto power at any cost.
How else can we explain Labor's resolve to pass legislation to control what Australians see and hear – a blank cheque for political censorship.
Labor's thirst for power is also evident in its divide-and-conquer strategy.
It stokes divisions to keep attention away from its own failures.
The Voice referendum was about dividing Australians by race.
Even its recent budget was about fuelling intergenerational resentment.
Friends:
The Australian way has never been one of resentment, redistribution, dependency, and division.
Rather, the Australian way is one of aspiration, enterprise, striving, and succeeding.
My message to Australians is this:
We must never surrender to socialism.
The promise of big government is a false promise.
Faith in big government is misplaced.
Instead, we need to rediscover faith in ourselves.
It's people – not government – who generate prosperity.
It's free enterprise and enterprising free Australians who create opportunity, jobs, productivity, investment, and the wealth that benefits us all.
I'm committed to reversing our country's economic, social, and spiritual decline.
Unlike Labor, I don't believe government is about wielding power.
It's about empowering its citizens.
Indeed, life is about service and responsibility – about doing something for the greater good.
My grandfather taught me that.
He was the chief engineer of the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme at a time when every dam and tunnel came in ahead of time and below budget.
More than anything, I believe in hard work.
That's what growing up on a farm within a multi-generational farming family teaches you.
And I tell you what else it teaches you:
You've got to know the value of every single dollar.
Every dollar matters.
No dollar can be wasted.
You've got to budget for every drum of drench. Every fence post. Every trip to the market.
On the farm, you must account for every single dollar.
And that's the mentality you need whether you're managing a farming budget or a federal budget.
Friends:
I'm no career politician.
I started and ran my own successful business.
I've worked across the agriculture, energy, resource, and infrastructure sectors.
I've advised small and large businesses on how to grow.
I've helped industries to deregulate and become more productive.
I know how to get Australia out of the hole Labor has put us in.
I know how to reboot our economy.
But I can't do it alone.
Good government isn't built around one figure.
You need a strong team.
Matt Canavan is no career politician either.
Matt and people right across the Liberal and National parties have worked and succeeded in business and industry.
And on top of a strong team, we have a strong plan.
A plan to fix our economy and to protect our way of life.
Friends:
We will bring big government to an end.
We will deliver better government that gets the big things right, gets off Australians' backs, and is for human endeavour – not human control.
The reckless government spending will stop so the pressure comes off homegrown inflation and interest rates.
After all, for Australians to have the means to live, government must live within its means.
And we will pay down Labor's trillion-dollars-of-debt by banking resource revenue windfalls into a Future Generations Fund.
We're also going to restore aspiration.
Every toxic tax Labor announced in its budget will be axed.
But we will go further and do long-overdue, generational tax reform.
Australians are paying more in income tax every year through bracket creep.
Over four years of Labor's inflation, Australians have paid an additional $65 billion in income tax.
So we will index tax thresholds to protect Australians' incomes from inflation.
Under a government led by me and Matt, Australians will get a bigger tax cut each year than under Labor without the tax increases.
A typical worker will be better off by $250 in year one, $500 in year two, $750 in year three, $1,000 in year four – and so on.
We're also going to restore the conditions that revive business, enterprise, and investment.
By establishing a permanent $50,000 instant asset write-off for businesses with a turnover of under $10 million.
By rewriting laws and simplifying approvals to get projects off the ground faster.
By slashing red tape.
And by requiring government regulators to stop regulating for regulation's sake and to start making life easier for Australians.
All these things will help to get more businesses started, more factories operating, and more infrastructure built.
As you know, energy is the economy.
So we will bring back cheap and abundant energy to bring down the cost of everything.
We will scrap net zero.
And we will scrap every one of Labor's crippling carbon taxes.
We will back any technology that delivers cheap and abundant energy.
We need to dig and drill for more coal, gas, oil and uranium.
And we will lift the moratorium on nuclear power.
And soon, as Matt and I announced, we're going to introduce a Bill which will override activist-driven legislation and lawfare that's stopping projects like the Mount Pleasant coal mine from proceeding.
On migration, I've said repeatedly that the numbers are too high and the standards are too low.
This will change under us.
We will cap migration numbers based on the number of new homes built each year to free up housing supply.
At present, around 170,000 homes are being built each year.
But given the magnitude of migration under Labor, actual numbers will need to be significantly below the cap.
This week, we announced new policies.
We will cut Net Overseas Migration to 100,000 for the first two years of a Liberal-Nationals' government.
In years three and four, the NOM will be 130,000 and 160,000 respectively – still significantly below our housing migration cap.
We will deliver the largest cut to immigration in Australian history.
We will end Labor's mass migration and take pressure off housing, roads, schools, and hospitals.
We will reorient Australia's migration program to one that brings in the skills we need and is values focused.
The Australian Values Statement will be an enforceable visa condition.
And we will establish a taskforce to boot out 77,000 unlawful overstayers.
We're also going to get new homes built.
By investing $5 billion in supporting infrastructure.
By slashing the National Construction Code.
And unlike Labor, we're going to put Australia and Australians first.
That means many things.
It means crushing the criminal tobacco trade by cutting the tobacco excise by 80 per cent.
It means reserving access to housing programs, the NDIS, and 17 different welfare programs for Australian citizens only – because only when you commit to Australia should Australia commit to you.
It means spending at least 3 per cent of GDP on defence to equip our warfighters in a more dangerous age.
It means putting in place laws to protect our national flag, our national day, and our memorials from activists.
And it means standing with courageous women like Sall Grover and countless others by correcting the law to reflect the biological reality that a man is a man, and a woman is a woman.
Friends:
Right now, the country we love needs a strong team and a strong plan.
The Liberal and National parties have that credible team and that comprehensive plan.
And we will deliver the better change Australia needs.
And let there be no doubt:
The next election isn't only about fixing our economy.
It's a spiritual fight to protect our way of life – a fight for the soul of our nation.
We've done it before.
We'll do it again.
Socialism will not win.
Because Australia is worth fighting for, now more than ever.
I'm going to fight like hell to win the election.
And I want your support to get rid of the worst government in our history.
Thank you.