Russell Broadbent here, your Federal Member for Monash.
We’ve got serious trouble coming our way. It feels like a recession, even though GDP figures don’t officially declare it. But I’m in favour of looking to more than one indicator, so shall we?
Right now, The Australian Securities and Investments Commission is recording the highest rate of external administration and controller appointments ever.
Business failures have surged to a record high in the past financial year. There were more than 11 thousand insolvency appointments in the 2024 financial year. That is 39% higher than the year previous and 124% higher than the year before that.
And at the same time, the Prime Minister is flaunting a so-called ‘Future Made in Australia’?
In what world can solar manufacturing or green hydrogen or critical mineral sourcing be feasible, when the local café is struggling to keep its doors open and the lights on.
You’d have to be throwing a lot of taxpayer money around to make that work.
At its essence, the Future Made in Australia program is an unproductive waste of the people’s hard-earned money. 23 billion dollars of taxpayers money into industries that Australia can’t be competitive in? It’s just ridiculous!
Leave the investment decisions to investment professionals, and they’ll tell you they’d rather build a gas plant than a wind farm. I asked an energy executive how many wind farms would exist in Australia if they weren’t subsidised, he told me there would be none, zero.
So even while brave Australians with small businesses are facing an extremely uncertain future, the Government is fuelling inflation by ruining our energy grid, and leaving everyday Australian consumers to pay for the knock on effects as a result.
Energy affects the cost of production, the cost of transport and the cost of storing goods on the shelf. Therefore, business viability depends on energy. For our country to retain the title of being ‘the land of opportunity’, we need to go back to cheap baseload power - in coal and gas.
That’s Justice as I see it.
