There's nothing like it.
Thank you for that wonderful welcome, Michaelia.
It's great to be back in the West - a second weekend in a row.
If you'll forgive me, I won't make it a third weekend. I will be sleeping in the doghouse back at home. But it is wonderful to be here for two weekends in a row.
Simon - thanks for the work you're doing as State Director.
Caro - a huge thank you for the work you've done in rebuilding the Party over recent years. We've got a lot more for you to do as a Federal Vice President.
Aiden - congratulations on your impending appointment as State President.
Basil - from one opposition leader to another, keep up the good fight, mate. You are doing amazing, two incredible weeks in the Parliament, and there's going to be a lot more as we hold another bad Labor government to account.
And to my many federal colleagues here today: Michaelia Cash, Andrew Hastie, Ben Small, Matt O'Sullivan, Dean Smith, Melissa Price, Rick Wilson, Slade Brockman.
What an incredible team we have here in the West.
And as Michaelia said, they're going to be fighting every day from now to the to the next election.
Now friends, after the week that we've just seen, it's appropriate to start with a sombre note.
We're all shocked by the absolutely horrific attack on Helen Haines. I'm praying and hoping for her swift recovery.
We're thinking of Phil and the family. It's a very tough time for them.
During the week, the Prime Minister has repeatedly called to "take the temperature down".
Now it's been suggested by some that there's a causal connection between robust parliamentary debate and political violence.
I disagree with that view.
The Westminster system is about resolving differences through robust and rigorous debate, not violence, never violence.
I've been reminded that the distance between the Opposition Leader and the Prime Minister in the House of Reps chamber is two lengths of a sword.
The principle is that we debate with vigour, but we must never allow the vigour to spill over into political violence. We must never allow that to happen.
Our democratic system has served us incredibly well from our colonies, through the Federation, through to the present day.
Those who commit acts of intimidation, threatening physical violence, cross the line that should never ever be crossed.
Indeed, their willingness to intimidate and use violence is a rejection of robust debate.
A refusal to accommodate difference and disagreement, which is an essential part of our democracy.
So, we must cherish, not compromise, that robust debate.
What we must do is call out and confront the actual sources of intimidation, intolerance, and violence.
Now the Prime Minister is right to call out far-right extremism but has been too reluctant to call out Islamist extremism, even after Bondi, or acknowledge the growing threat of far-left extremism in this country.
Indeed, since October 7, there's been an unholy alliance between Islamist extremism and far-left extremism.
We see it in the suburbs of Paris. We saw it on October 9, 2023, on the streets of Sydney.
Every source of extremism must be named, targeted, and fought.
That is what will protect our democracy and our way of life.
Now on my flight here from Melbourne, friends, I was reflecting on the history of this incredible state, WA.
The race to beat the French to settle the West.
The establishment of a garrison at King George Sound by Edmund Lockyer - and a colony on the Swan River by James Stirling.
The overland expeditions of Edward Eyre and John Forrest connecting east and west.
The discovery of gold that paved the way for prospecting and great prosperity.
The feats of engineering like the Golden Pipeline, the Trans-Australian Railway, Fremantle Harbour.
Do you know what transformed a struggling colony into an economic powerhouse?
It was people.
WA's exceptionalism - indeed Australia's exceptionalism - is the product of aspirational people determined to strive and succeed.
That is the great story.
And as Liberals, we believe in the power of people.
We know it is free enterprise and enterprising free Australians who create opportunity, jobs, productivity, investment, prosperity, and opportunity for all Australians.
In contrast, Labor believes in government, big government. And that big government is the solution to every problem we face.
Now for more than four years, federal Labor has run its big government agenda:
Centralising power.
Spending beyond its means.
Carving up a shrinking economic pie - not growing the pie.
Redistributing wealth - not creating wealth.
Expanding the welfare state.
Increasing dependency on government.
And what's the result after four years of Labor's big government agenda? What's the result?
Well, Australians aren't better off. They're worse off. They're poorer.
Our nation isn't prosperous, strong, and confident - it's poorer, weaker, and less confident in itself.
Project Albanese has been an absolute disaster.
Australians have experienced the worst collapse in living standards in the developed world.
There have been 16 interest rate hikes - the highest rates in 15 years - almost the highest in the developed world. And expectations they're going to go up again.
Instead of power bills going down 10 per cent as they did when I was Energy Minister over a similar time frame, they've gone up by 40 per cent under the hapless Chris Bowen.
Some 30 businesses are going bust every day under Labor.
And it's highly surprising when almost none of the federal Labor Cabinet come from a small business background. They simply do not get it.
Our industries are closing, needing bailouts, or moving offshore to other places.
Here in WA, Labor is impeding enterprise, especially in the resources sector.
It's weaponised the Environment Act, the EPBC, to halt and hold up projects.
It's using taxpayers' money to fund activists to conduct warfare against some of the most important projects in the country.
It's given the green light to the union officials to move in on the Pilbara and acquiesce to cartel behaviour by the Chinese Communist Party.
There hasn't been a more hostile government to mining in our history than the Albanese government. It simply does not like the industry.
Across the nation, confidence is smashed, endeavour is obstructed, investment is hindered wherever you look.
And productivity has absolutely collapsed. Five per cent down in the time Labor has been in government.
Australians are having to work five per cent harder than they were four years ago to produce the same. That's what Labor has done.
Mass migration is the only thing propping up Labor's stagnating government-directed economy.
And the government is saddling our children with a trillion dollars of debt, as we just heard from Michaelia.
The last four years are a real lesson for our country:
The promise of big government is a false promise.
We're in a cost-of-living crisis and an economic crisis because we have a crisis of big government.
And the last few weeks have been revealing.
The wheels are falling off the Albanese government.
Cabinet ministers are leaking.
Backbenchers are briefing out.
Lefty is turning on lefty.
And Albo and Jim - Labor's Caesar and Pompey - are turning on each other.
It feels like Back to the Future.
Back to the Rudd-Gillard days!
And friends:
It doesn't matter if the Prime Minister sacks his Treasurer, or the Treasurer knifes his Prime Minister, or the union bosses replace both of them.
In the end, Australians still get the same socialist Labor government that has taken this country in the wrong direction.
Friends:
I am absolutely committed to getting rid of the worst Labor government in our nation's history.
I am absolutely committed to reversing the decline we have seen in our nation.
Unlike my opponents, I'm no career politician.
I grew up on a farm on the edge of the Snowy Mountains.
I'm the sixth generation of a farming family. Three brothers, four boys. Tough country. Not many have made a go of it.
But I tell you what that taught me growing up in that environment, it teaches you to appreciate the value of every dollar. How hard you've got to fight for it.
You've got to budget for every drum of drench. Every fence post. Every tonne of fertiliser.
And that's the mentality you need whether you're managing a farming budget, a small business budget, or a federal budget.
In addition to running my own successful businesses, I've advised others how to grow theirs.
I've worked across the agriculture, energy, resource, and infrastructure sectors and helped industries to deregulate and to grow, to invest, to make a go of things, to generate prosperity for shareholders, employees, and communities.
In the early 2000s, I was privileged to begin coming over here for many years to Western Australia. And we were seeing, of course, the surge in demand for iron ore in particular coming out of Asia
I worked alongside some of the most capable men and women I've known.
Together, we helped to reform, modernise, and grow WA's resource sector, particularly the ire ore sector, to capitalise on an extraordinary boom.
Now, it's important to remember that many of the foundations were put in place for Western Australians to take advantage of that by Liberal governments.
It was Menzies who opened up the iron ore export.
It was Liberal-National governments that ensured time and time again, at the federal level, to open up this industry, to make it possible to get those approvals and investments to happen in a timely way.
That investment of course, is paying off handsomely today for Western Australia and Australians everywhere.
It's generating wealth and prosperity for workers, for businesses, not just those who are serving the mining industry, but everyone.
It's pouring billions of dollars into government coffers.
Indeed, this federal Labor government has seen a windfall in its time in four and a half years of over $400 billion. That's a windfall $113 billion in the last year alone.
Yet, the national debt has got to over $1 trillion. How could this have happened?
In the most recent financial year, the government delivered $22 billion deficit. And this year, they'll run an even bigger deficit of $32 billion.
In fact, the Intergenerational Report showed that Labor will run a deficit every year for the next 40 years despite those windfalls; the rivers of gold that have come from the hard work of Western Australians.
Despite those rivers of gold, the books have never been in worse shape.
And that financial recklessness is not only delivering debt to the next generation, it is creating high inflation and high interest rates, an unacceptable burden for Australians.
A Coalition government I lead will fix this.
That's why we have committed to set up a Future Generations Fund.
This Fund would preserve 80 per cent of all commodity revenue windfalls to help pay down the nation's trillion dollars of debt as well as contribute to lon-term nation-building infrastructure.
We won't squander those windfalls like Jim Chalmers and Anthony Albanese have.
Under the Coalition, commodity windfalls will no longer be available to be squandered. We'll lock them away to ensure that future generations have the benefit of the extraordinary work of those great pioneers in this state.
That is what intergenerational equity looks like, ladies and gentlemen. And that is what we're going to fight for.
Now, friends, I know how, as you know, how to get this country out of the hole it is in right now, but we cannot do it alone. I cannot do it alone.
Strong government isn't built around one figure.
It's built around a plan and a credible team. And I'm surrounded by people of substance and skill, as you see in your extraordinary federal team you have here in Western Australia.
People with long records of success before entering politics.
People who have built businesses.
People who have kept our country secure and safe.
People who understand the economy and national security.
People who know that politics is about service, not just acquiring power, which is the left-wing approach.
And we are going to be fielding great candidates here and right across Australia at the next election.
And I know that the team here are going to be working with us to do exactly that.
Building on one of the most policy-rich budget replies an opposition has delivered, we will be continuing to lay out that plan all the way through the next election.
To fix our economy and to protect our way of life.
So let me turn to the key priorities in that plan that I know will dig this country out of the hole it's in and get us back in the right direction.
First, we're going to axe Labor's toxic taxes, waste, and red tape.
Every tax Labor announced in its budget will go. They'll go, the lot.
Taxes on housing, savings, trusts, aspirational young Australians, small and family businesses; being attacked by this government as we heard from Michaelia, constantly under siege by a government that simply doesn't get small businesses.
Taxes on farmers, on charities, gone.
But I'll go further and deliver generational income tax reform in this country.
And I assure you that doesn't mean raising the GST.
It would be totally reckless to raise a consumption tax in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. We won't be doing that.
But you can have my ironclad guarantee that we won't be changing the GST or the Western Australian GST deal.
Western Australia should keep a fair share of the extraordinary dividend that it creates.
What I mean by generational tax reform is that we will ensure that income tax rates don't continue to go up, driven by inflation, because that is how Labor is funding its government
Under Labor, Australians have paid an additional $65 billion in income tax due to bracket creep. That's over $6,000 for every household in this country.
Stealthily, the Treasurer has taken this away from Australians by allowing inflation to drive Australians' incomes up into higher tax brackets.
We will stop that steal.
And our Coalition government will give 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'll also end Labor's wasteful spending.
Under Labor, government spending is at a 40-year high outside the pandemic.
We need to cut spending to take pressure off interest rates and inflation.
We must save to save the nation.
That's how we get Australia out of Labor's cost-of-living crisis.
We will save billions.
Labor's ideological climate bureaucracy will be abolished.
Labor's ineffectual housing bureaucracy will be scrapped.
Labor's regime of pie-in-the-sky corporate welfare will be terminated.
Labor's handouts for non-Australians will be stopped.
When WA rises, the nation rises with it.
A Taylor-Canavan government is going to dig, drill, and pay down the debt with it.
We will restore the conditions that revive business, enterprise, and investment in this country.
We'll establish 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 making our industrial relations system one that's fairer, simpler, and can lift productivity.
And by requiring government regulators to stop regulating for regulation's sake and to start making life easier for Australians and Australian businesses.
All this means more businesses, more farms, more factories, and more infrastructure.
Friends:
Lower taxes, stopping the waste, slashing red tape - that's how we begin to restore aspiration in our country.
Let me turn to a second priority: energy.
We will scrap net zero.
Indeed, every single one of Labor's economy-crippling carbon taxes will be scrapped too.
In particular, the so-called Safeguard Mechanism, which disproportionately harms WA where businesses, industry, particularly manufacturing, processing is being forced to pay up to $4 billion in taxes by 2030.
It will go as will the tax on the most popular vehicles in Australia, the Hilux and the Ranger. They will go.
But we'll go further.
We're going to bring back cheap and abundant energy, which has been so central to the prosperity of our nation over a long period of time.
Gas, coal, oil, you name it, hydro. We will dig and drill to get those resources we need.
We will lift the moratorium on nuclear power as well.
Labor's anti-development and activist-driven laws, they will be torn up.
As I said, we're going to get busy digging and drilling.
We'll get more Australian gas, oil, and natural resources out of the ground.
That includes fast-tracking the Browse Basin offshore gas reserves.
And the Prime Minister should approve Browse today. He should get on with it.
He should stop listening to the activists in his own party who simply don't want any of these projects to proceed.
The federal government should simply get out of the way.
It should let WA get on doing what it does so well:
Getting gas out of the ground.
And on the matter of Labor's gas reservation scheme:
This is an east coast problem.
And it needs an east coast solution - not a west coast solution.
WA must be carved out of the reservation scheme.
My Western Australian team will be fighting hard to make sure that is the case.
A third priority for a Taylor-Canavan government is to shift from Labor's mass migration back to the skilled migration, which has been a successful approach for our country.
We're going to revive the dream of homeownership and get more homes built.
By investing $5 billion in supporting infrastructure.
By slashing the National Construction Code from 2,000 pages down to 90 pages to bring down the cost of a house by $70,000.
But we're also going to free up supply by capping migration numbers based on the housing supply in this country.
And we know to get housing and immigration back into balance.
We need to deliver the largest cut to immigration in this country's history.
We have to have breathing space to catch back up again.
Net Overseas Migration will be cut to 100,000 for the first two years of a Taylor-Canavan government, then going to 130 and 160,000.
That will give us the breathing space we need.
But we can't just cut the numbers.
We need to raise the standards. And that means having the skills we need as a country for our businesses and industries to succeed and prosper.
We'll bring in the skilled people we need to support housing construction, small businesses, regional Australia, and major infrastructure and defence programs.
That skilled migration will help to lift productivity and investment.
It has been the secret to our successful immigration, and Labor has wandered away from it.
We can't allow Australia to become a guest worker economy.
Australia is our home, not a hotel. And our immigration policy must reflect that.
We cannot have our universities selling visas instead of world-class education.
We need to take back control, too.
We'll put the Australian Values Statement at the heart of our immigration law as an enforceable visa condition.
A taskforce will be set up to boot out 77,000 unlawful overstayers.
You can't have an immigration system without integrity. So we'll establish an enhanced screening centre to vet every visa. We should put up a red light to radicals coming or staying in this country.
Now finally, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to put Australia and Australians first.
Australians will be safe when we crush the criminal tobacco trade that has got to the point where 80 per cent of cigarettes sold in this country are sold illegally.
We'll crush that trade by slashing the excise by 80 per cent.
Who would have thought that the solution to a problem in this country is to reduce taxes? Well, that's what we believe. And we know that's how we will crush criminal gangs in this country.
Australia will be better defended in a more dangerous age when we spend 3 per cent of GDP on supporting the capabilities we need for our brave warfighters.
Australia will be prioritised when we reserve access to housing programs, to the NDIS, to 17 different welfare programs to Australian citizens.
It is just extraordinary that one of the first things this Labor government did is set that support for housing deposits from the government should be broadened to include non-Australians. We'll reverse that.
We'll make sure that we have a government that puts our veterans and elderly Australians ahead of non-Australians. We have to get those priorities right.
We'll also reject the low expectations that have failed Indigenous children and demand kids are safe and attend school.
Australian kids will be better educated, when we reform the curriculum, make classrooms places of discipline not activism, and teach history correctly to restore a love for our country, for Australia.
Australian common sense will be restored when we correct the law to reflect the biological reality that a man is a man, and a woman is a woman.
And the achievement of Australia will be celebrated when we put in place laws to protect our national flag, our national day, and our monuments from activism that wants to destroy all of those things.
As Michaelia said, I am always happy to stand in front of three flags as long as they are all Australian flags.
Now across the country, so many Australians feel like second-class citizens under Labor.
Many Australians - who aren't political creatures - are mobilising. We see it wherever we go, always.
They're furious at Labor.
Young Australians who are seeing the ladder of opportunity ripped away from them. The opportunities that senior Labor politicians have, young Australians will not have.
Families and workers whose bills keep going up.
Small and family businesses who are struggling to hold it together.
Regional Australians whose communities are being steamrolled over by industrial-scale renewables.
Veterans and older Australians who are being neglected in favour of non-Australians.
Friends:
This is our moment.
We will not have a better opportunity than the opportunity we have right now.
To rally people to our cause. To mobilise Australians to be with us.
To speak up, to stand up, and to sign up for what we believe in.
To encourage Australians to take up the fight against Labor.
None of us can sit on the sidelines.
We cannot afford to do that.
We must mobilise - and mobilise others.
Don't leave it to the person next to you to do it.
We all need to be out there talking to our family, our friends, our neighbours, our workmates, our community members.
If we do nothing, a terrible, socialist Labor government will stay in power and we cannot afford that.
We will not let it happen.
We need to be out there talking to people about the state of our country, talking to people about our plan.
Tell them what I've told you today.
Get them mobilised.
Encourage our fellow Australians to get involved because we are in the fight for the soul of our nation.
We need to be out there every day fighting for our party, fighting for our future, and fighting for Australia because in the end Australia is worth fighting for now more than ever.
Thank you very much.
