AMA: I'm Senator Malcolm Roberts, Senator for Queensland with Pauline Hanson's One Nation. Ask Me Anything.

Hi Reddit, I’m Malcolm Roberts, Senator for Queensland in Federal Parliament with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.

https://preview.redd.it/62pcri1ermje1.jpg?width=768&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9c4c495dc90bc84260b3f1e2ac2908aa5cba8a9c

One Nation has recently announced a broad set of policies for our 2025 election platform. We are incredibly focused on making houses more affordable and putting more money back in the pockets of Australians and look forward to answering any questions you might have about them. These budget proposals include:

• Increasing the Medicare rebate to better pay GPs and promote bulk billing while cracking down on up to $3 billion a year in fraud.
• Allow couples with a dependent child to file joint tax returns to split their income, saving a family who earns $120,000 through one parent $9,500 a year in tax.
• Halving the fuel excise to cut the cost of fuel by 26 cents a litre with flow on effects throughout the economy bringing down the cost of transport and reducing price pressure on groceries.
• Abolishing the alcohol excise for drinks served in venues to stimulate the hospitality sector and make going to the pub with friends and family more affordable.
• Slashing electricity bills by 20% by changing National Electricity Market rules that currently punish cheap, baseload power generators like coal.
• Allowing aged and veteran pensioners to earn more income without penalty, and raising the tax free threshold to $35,000 for self-funded retirees.

We'll pay for these proposals and more by:

• Ending the multinational corporate rorting on Natural Gas by levying royalties at the point of production and creating a domestic gas reserve, raising up to $13 billion a year.
• Cracking down on the estimated $3 billion in medicare fraud.
• Abolishing the Department of Climate Change and related agencies and programs, conservatively estimated to cost $30 billion a year. Environmental protection programs would be left untouched.
• Replacing the National Indigenous Australians Agency and associated programs with direct grants based on need not race, saving $12.5 billion.
• Returning the NDIS (on track to cost $50 billion per year) to its original purpose, helping the severely disabled, and introducing means testing potentially saving $20 billion a year.
• Withdrawing from international bureaucratic organisations (WHO, WEF, UN affiliated programs) to save approximately $1 billion.

These budget savings will go towards our core priorities:

1. Putting more money back in Australian's pockets.
2. Paying down the National Debt (on which interest payments are approaching $50 billion cost per year).
3. "Build baby Build" - Building the nation building infrastructure like ports, rail and dams that will secure Australia's wealth for the future, not for foreign multinational corporations.

On the housing front, One Nation would:

• Immediately end Mass Migration. It is clear we do not have the infrastructure or the houses to keep up with the amount of arrivals. We would deport the estimated 75,000 people here illegally without a valid visa and return to net-negative migration by capping visa issuances at 130,000 a year. By previous years numbers, this cap alone would result in net-negative migration of around 90,000.
• Implement a GST moratorium on building materials, cutting 10% of the materials cost of building a home.
• Conduct a root and branch review of the National Construction code, especially changes that force every single new home to be completely NDIS/wheelchair compliant, adding an estimated $49,500 to the cost of building a home.
• Ban foreign purchases and foreign ownership of Australian housing and farmland. Liberal and Labor are committed to a two year pause on foreign buyers of new houses. One Nation would extend that to new and existing houses, make the ban permanent, and also force current foreign owners to sell to an Australian within 2 years.
• Establish "People's Mortgages" - 30 year, 5% fixed interest rate mortgages issued by the government similar to government bonds (this would replace the governments current Housing Future Fund)
• Allow people with HECS debts to roll their debts into their People's Mortgage, allowing them to get into a home loan that the banks would never give them at a cheaper rate.

There are many, many more details I'd love to go into but there's already a lot here - this is One Nation's vision of how we'd like to see the country run. So fire away with your questions and we'll do our best to get it answered from 5pm QLD time (6pm AEDT) onwards!

EDIT: Thanks everyone, we are wrapping it up there! So many questions and we’re sorry for not getting to them all. Contact our office on senroberts.com/contact if you’d like us to answer something that wasn’t answered here! Thanks again for your questions!

Thank you all for joining and your many questions, sorry we couldn’t get to them all - get in touch at senroberts.com/contact if you’d like yours answered!