Gerard Rennick – Fuel crisis, Toobeah (17 March)

0:00Welcome back to Rural Queensland today. Well, as we're talking today, there is plenty happening. Jared Renek joins us this morning, the former Senator joins us, and concern is an understatement where they are out at the moment in not only the state, but from a federal perspective. Brian Cortesall joins us as well this morning, but just the concern that has gone on with the lack of understanding around this fuel crisis. Also, we have real concern when you look at Tobayer and what has gone on there with native title claims. I thought we'd get a perspective from someone who has fought hard for this. Jerry, good morning and thank you so much for being with us. Yeah, thanks for having me on, Ben. You get it. You're born in Chile. You understand regional Queensland. You've represented Queensland as a senator in the past. How disillusioned are you at the moment with the political landscape? Look, I mean, look, I'm old enough. I've followed politics through my family. You know, I'm

1:0755, way back in the 80s. I mean, I had to put up with a decade of whole concateness. There's no doubt that people are very despondent, but I'm also very optimistic about the great country that we live in. And as you pointed out, I am from regional Queensland, and I know how beautiful our state is, and how beautiful our country is. And I also know the history of this country. And it was built by the pioneering forefathers who basically faced fires, floods and droughts. I mean, if you think we've got a bad today, go back 200 years ago, whereby you had to walk out into the bush, and if you got bitten by a snake, there wasn't a hospital in miles. You know, people lost their lives. I mean, my mother, for example, was two or five children. Her school, her three brothers died within the first year. She was born in the Great Depression in 1930. So I don't let the pessimism that a lot of people allow themselves to get into. I don't let that infect me. I'm still fighting, even though I'm no longer a senator, with people first. And the point about is to try and lift the performance of the other political parties in this country. So I think we have a

2:12lot of opportunity in this country. I think we have people with enormous, potential, enormous skills, our farming community, the ability to be able to plant crops, you know, breed cattle. You know, it's as good as I've ever seen it. You can't do that without fuel. You can't do that without fuel. You can't do that without roads. You know, like I understand that. That's right, Ben. So you're right. So what we need to do is actually have a vision. And that vision is to make sure that we give our children the same opportunities, our forefathers gave to us. And the way that we do that is that we've got to bring back things like our military apprenticeship schemes. So that's, first of all, we can give our children the skills to build these roads and the skills to go out and tap, you know, the shale or well, for example, if they're in central Australia, because unless we start educating our children and by educating on means training in our night tools. So, you know, the state of people, we literally do need to get back on the tools because we do have the resources.

3:13But if we keep sending our children off the university and some people should go to university because we do need our doctors and our lawyers and our scientists, but we also need a lot more people back on the trades. The second thing we need to do is bring back our infrastructure bank, whereby we fund the construction of infrastructure. It's no coincidence that since we started privatising our infrastructure, that we had gone backwards economically. And yet again, those old energy boards, electricity boards and that they used to have apprenticeship programs where they train people to the comes parkies or whatever. So we, yeah, there are solutions out there and all we've got to do is turn back the clock and look at how we did it once before. So I do agree with the fuel. It's not just the question however of bringing back refineries and which we should do. We've also got to find and continue to drill and discover more oil here, so that we don't actually have to export it and then rely on imported fuel. Even if it's you know, before it's refined, we've got to try and market make ourselves more energy and

4:18independent, independent. And that's a really good point. And I hope that we can get to that point. But until then, we need to survive. Now, to build refinery and stuff like that, we've seen America are going back to that. You know, is that a realistic, yeah, is that realistic in this country now because we've shut industry down or is it going to need a change of government? Because the green centric just won't do it. They will not do that. Well, Ben, if these are realistic and it will require a change of government, of course, because it's Albanese and the Labor and the Greens aren't interested in actually production and construction. And of course, that's what we need if we want to get back on our feet. So obviously this does without saying it's going to have to come from the right side of politics, not the left, but I do think that it's possible. But in regards to the fuel, there's two issues here. One is we need to bring, we need to encourage Trump to bring this war to an ASAP and open up the

5:19fuel lines and the fuel routes so that we can import, start importing fuel. That's for the immediate short term because unfortunately, we won't have time to rebuild all refinery, then find the oil and drill it out of the ground before we run out of fuel. So the first thing is we need ASAP and diplomatic solution very quickly so that we can bring out, you know, fuel lines back on and get the country moving again. The second thing is that we obviously need to change certain aspects of our government and the process is within government. And there's a whole, you know, pronger line of policies that need to change, getting rid of payroll tax is one of them because it's a prohibitive and it's a country that builds up to employ people. Number one, if we need to then standardize words of compensation insurance in this country, it's absurd if you're a national employer. You've got to take out words of compensation in six different states. That's another complexity of the law. The other thing, of course, is I just pointed out we need to build more bay flow power stations. I mean, my home

6:21damage insular coven creek there, power stations there, there's 200, 400 million tons of coal, sorry, we're only buying two million tons of coal there a year, which it easily add a couple of more turbines there in a coven creek and that would bring on cheaper coal energy. Yet again, no, not all cars run on coal, I realize, but yeah, yes, we can build more ore refineries and that can be run if we have cheaper energy and cheaper payroll costs. How do you get yourself back into the conversation because it's well documented and you've been outspoken and obviously, but you've got a lot to offer this country. Where does Jeremy Rennick want to be positioned in the next three to five years? Yeah, thanks, Ben. Look, what I want to see is not about me, even if I go back into parliament, if I don't have the numbers, I don't want to sit there in the opposition being outfoted again and just getting frustrated. What we really desperately need in this country, a democratic grassroots

7:26party whereby the politicians listen to the members of their political parties. Now, up until recently, as we all know, we've got 150 live house seats in parliament. Traditionally, it might have 60 safe coalition and 60 safe labour seats. That means that those who ever basically wins the pre-selection in no seat goes to parliament. That means that pre-selection or the people that represent you in parliament are actually the people inside a political party. Now, what happened in October 21, as we all know, was Scott Morrison back whipped on his 2019 election promise. I'm not signing up to Ned Zero. Now, the Liberal Party members of New South Wales were furious that he back-lipped on that promise and they wanted to, they were going to get rid of Susan Lai and Alex Hor, to Liberal MPs because they agreed with Ned Zero. Now, the federal executive of the Liberal Party stepped in and said that we weren't down a whole pre-selection for our existing Liberal

8:27Party members. That's where the rocks started. That's where the rocks started. Yeah, I mean, look at it sort of being growing and growing. This is a good example because what that meant was that the party was listening to the faithful man, the vested interests, and whoever in the Liberal Party supported Ned Zero. I'm still not sure who that is because you talked to all the members of the party and they certainly don't support Ned Zero. And that's the point. Was that the Liberal Party became a top-down party, where it listens to the backroom boys, the faithless man or the vested interests, and not to the grassroots members of the party. So we want people to put pressure on other parties as well as ourselves. Well, we started branches, so the first thing I did after the election last year was we started branches. And we said we were going to have democratic grassroots pre-selections so that the members can choose who does the parliament. That's really, really important because if the city members know that they're not going to have to listen to the grassroots members and they're going to have to listen to the vested interests,

9:28it means that they're basically listening to the establishment at the beginning of town and not the little guy. So the first thing to do if we want to get our country back on track and it's not about themselves is to actually improve the level of governance inside political parties, because until we improve the level of governance, accountability, transparency, inside political parties, we're not going to improve it in Canberra itself. Yeah, you're so right. You're so right. We are surprised that Carl apologise to you over COVID. I mean, you've been, you know, and people will go crazy. I mean, in a lot of ways, you've been vindicated. Yeah, look, I've always been a big fan of Carl. I mean, he's a Queensland regional boy, he's a canned boy. That interview where I think it was Ali Langdon's Langdon rigged into Craig Kelly. Do you actually watch Craig's body language there? He actually

10:29processes arms and turns the right way from her. And he was also the first big commentator to come out, so I'm not taking any more shots. I've had enough. So I, I, I look obviously, I, you know, I'm pleased for those people that were injured and everything. But look, for me, personally, I want the TGA. I want Greg Hunt. I want, you know, the, the, the bureaucracy who had a level of responsibility, a judiciary duty to ensure those vaccines were safe. I mean, as I said to Carl on the day, I said, you're not a biochemist. If someone in the health profession and the health regulator says to you, these vaccines are safe, you're not going to know that they're not safe. So I know a lot of people were angry with me that I went on Carl's show and they don't trust Carl. The Carl wasn't a biochemist, you know, who understood the different mechanism inside an MR and A vaccine to a normal vaccine, right? So why people are taking it out on Craig, that Carl's, sorry, and not the TGA. I mean, my, you know, beef and we still haven't got

11:31accountability from the TGA. They were the people who said these vaccines were safe. I then went and saw Greg Hunt, you know, I said, I'm being inundated with people who are injured, young people, who are getting this vaccine and then being severely injured, whether it's my caritis or being paralyzed, you know, some shocking injuries. Yeah. You need to stop the roll out of it. It is not safe. And I didn't push it. I only said you need to stop the roll out of the people on the 30. Yeah, and if I had gone, I sure had really gone out of it. You need to stop the roll out for everyone. Well, history will show that. Yeah, yeah. So, and I don't regret that point of the way because, you know, I still talk to a lot of people in Canberra, especially Alexander. He can, you know, as I said, well, look, I'd rather know that I did the right thing and have six quality years there standing up for doing what was right, rather than spend 12, 18 years there, just constantly nodding your head. Sorry, I brought you there. Yeah,

12:33yeah, doing what's right, then, you know, just going along with the flow, so to speak, unbelievable, unbelievable. Jared, we appreciate your time this morning. Thank you so much for being with us. We need to talk again, mate. Thank you for being with us. Yeah, thanks for having your own Ben. Have a great day. Good on you, Jared Renek. We'll take a break. Come back. This is Rural Queensland today across the Resonate Broadcast Network.