It's not normal for an MP to have their maiden speech banned by YouTube, but that's what can happen when you're actively defying the status quo.
John Ruddick MLC discusses the concept of libertarianism and its differences from the Liberal Party in Australia, and the inundation from careerists and lobbyists. Libertarians see government is a necessary evil, and that it always has the potential to grow and attract power-hungry individuals. To this end, the separation of powers is important, and so too is returning the upper house in Queensland's parliament.
TRANSCRIPT:
(This transcript is derived from an automated process. The video recording is authoritative.)
Thanks so much for organising this tour. Thanks so much for coming along. You're obviously highly intelligent to give up your Sunday afternoon to come out here. So I wanted to sort of spell out for you what we understand by libertarianism.
Now, you'll all be familiar with the political party in this country called the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party has very sound founding principles. If you go back to see what Robert Menzies was saying in the 1940s and the 1950s when he set up the liberal party, they're very similar to what we stand for. There were differences, but he was very big on free speech, small government, low taxes, pro free enterprise deregulation, all these good things. Sadly, what has happened in the last generation is that the liberal party all around the country with very few exceptions, and it has become taken over by careerists and opportunists and lobbyists.
People who see this successful party - and it is a very successful party - they say, well, I can join that party and I can get something out of it for myself, and we should be in politics because we care about the next generation and the generation after that. So the Liberal party, I really believe has look, the true believers are losing preselection all around the place. Now, you've got a very good liberal party senator here in Queensland, Gerard Rennick, who's very libertarian. He's just lost his preselection, okay? This is not just happening to Gerard Rennick, it's happening all around the country, but there are differences between the Libertarian party and the Liberal party. Now, one of those key differences is that the Liberal party in its founding philosophy does believe that we are much better off with a small government. So do we. And if you look between the century was really a battle between communism and capitalism.
And communism of course, is the biggest government of all, a hundred percent government and killed a hundred million people in the process. And the free enterprise countries around the world have basically had human prosperity, and that is good. Look at little Hong Kong and little Singapore, little specks of land, very low taxation rates, very pro free enterprise and absolutely boom, okay? And we believe that can happen all around the world where the government gets out of the way and the people flourish. But the people like the Liberal party and people like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who we admire very much, they still do believe that the government's fundamentally a good thing. It just needs to be kept small. The libertarians believe that at best, the government is a necessary evil because we know that it can grow and it always will want to grow. And it attracts people who want to sort of get Messiah complex, that they want a big powerful state so they can be on top now.
So that is Libertarians think. Look, the government consists of two major groups. When we talk about the state, the government, 99.9% of people who are the government are bureaucrats. They're people who get appointed to a job and they've got an incentive to make the government big and bigger. The other 0.1% of the politicians who often are bad, but they can be a restraint on the size of the government.
So now I sort of imagine, in my mind, imagine that if you are a young, bright kid, you're 35, you live in Canberra, you're on $150,000 a year, you're married with two kids, you've just had your third kid. You want to be a lifelong public servant, and your wife is saying to you, we need a bigger house. We need more money. So that person will be driving to work and he's thinking, okay, well I've currently got six staff under me. If I can have 12 staff under me, I'll get a bigger salary and I can buy the bigger house, keep the wife happy.
This happens at a granular level. So that person is then going to set out on a plan. They're going to sort of get stories into the media. Look, there's this big problem over here, and the answer is a bigger government. And then they'll sort of talk to their seniors and the public service. They'll say, look, we do need a bit more funding to address this problem. And it could be a long-term plan, but then they'll end up with 12 employees under them rather than six. They've all got an incentive to make the government bigger and bigger and bigger. It used to be the case when I was growing up that there was a trade off. If you worked for the public service, it used to be you had job security, but you got paid a bit less than the private sector.
That is no longer the case. You still got the job. Securities a bureaucrat. They're getting paid extremely well, more with state governments, federal governments, and it's happening all around the world. So do, as Jewel mentioned, I do encourage you to keep an eye on what's happening in Argentina. Argentina and Australia a hundred years ago were twins, southern hemisphere countries, resource rich, basically a European country with all the migrants. And Argentina had fantastic government. It was boom. Now for 80 years, it's been on a very steady slider down into hell because it's big governments. It'd be like when I got back from Argentina, people asked me what it's like. I said, well, look it. I said, we had go Whitlam running this country for three years, and his big plan was to make Canberra bigger and bigger and bigger, but we got rid of him after three years.
But I say, imagine if Gough Whitlam had been running Australia for 80 years. That's Argentina, and it's an absolute mess. It's tragic to see. You can tell the place was once very rich when I was there, but it's now it's in decay. But they've got this magnificent leader now, he's not like a Ronald Reagan or a Margaret Thatcher who just wants to keep the government small, but it's still fundamentally a good thing. He knows that the government will always find a crisis to grow. So even when Thatcher and Reagan say, we want, they didn't make the government a lot smaller and England and America, boom as a result of that, and it was great. But then crisis has come along and the government always says to us, oh, look, we just need a temporary increase in the size of the government.
It never shrinks.
Now, I would like to say something about the second best state in Australia, Queensland, where all of my family lives, and except of the lone New South Welshman. Now, I believe that there is a way that we can truly help Queensland fulfil its potential to be the California of Australia. Now, what do I say? That's California of the old day, not California today. We just gone the other day. But California used to be the golden state For a century it was booming. Silicon Valley, Hollywood, all these used to be the place to go. Now I know it's gone to hell now, but Queensland can be a truly great state, and I would like to open up a discussion today about correcting a mistake that was made in 1921 in this state, and that is when against the will of the people Queensland, the labour government of course abolished the upper house.
And I want to tell you why that's important, because we believe that governments will eventually end up as tyrannical. We believe in the separation of powers, and it's important. Now, people think that the Greeks were the ones that kicked off the democracy and they did, but their democracy was very, very simple. It was the Romans right next door in the Italian peninsula who for 400, Jerry Ugland knows all this. The Romans had a very, very sophisticated political system, a very complex democratic system, and they had the separation of powers. They had the Senate and they had the assembly of the people, and they had magistrates. And it was a good system because they said, look, we don't want a king. We don't want a tyrant. We've got to separate the powers between groups. Okay, now then we had the Roman Empire, which was a dictator and the dark age of the mediaeval age.
But then we get to England in the 1600s and they had a few civil wars. They killed the king at one point. But by the 1680s, England has stumbled into this what we now call the Westminster system, where the king would have a bit of power. The House of Commons would have a bit of power, and the House of Lords would have a bit of power, but the English didn't really set out to do that. That's just what they ended up with. And it's turned out to be a very good system of government. Now then a generation later, there was a very smart French political theorist called Montesquieu, who looked across the channel, saw what the English had accidentally fallen into, and they said, look, this is really great. We need to have, it's a very good idea to have the separation of powers if we want to avoid a tyranny, which of course we all want to avoid a tyranny.
So Montesquieu wrote books about and papers about, look, the separation of powers is critical. Then the Americans come along at the end of the 1700th and they write the world's best constitution. And it is the US Constitution very strictly says, we're going to have the House of Representatives, we're going to have the Senate, we're going to have the President going to have the judiciary. And that was a good thing. And now when the colonies of this continent started to have democratic elections, and I think in this state it was in 1860, we had the Queensland Legislative Assembly and we had the Queensland Legislative Council.
And every other state in this country has the same thing. Now then what happened was you had a Labor government first got elected in 1915, and Labor governments - Labor at the time were openly socialists. They called themselves Christian Socialists. A lot of them were genuine church girls. But they really believed, this is before the Bolsheviks had gone and killed millions of people, but they genuinely believed socialism is the way of the future to lift the poor up didn't work, but that's what they sincerely held it. And they thought the Legislative council is a hand brake on our plan to make the government really big and powerful. They wanted a big powerful government to boss us all around to be central planners. So the Labor Party comes in here in 1915 for the first time, and the first thing they want to do is they want to abolish the legislative council. I said, we don't want the separation of powers. We want to grow the state.
But to pass that law, they had to get the legislative council to agree to it. And so the legislative council in Queensland rejected it, and then they rejected it again. So then the Queensland Labor government said, well, let's put it to the people. Should we abolish the legislative council? And there was a referendum in this state and the people at Queensland by about 62%, which the thumping majority said, no, no, no, thank you, but very much Labor premier. We want to keep our legislative council. That's the only time that people of Queensland have been asked whether you want to keep a legislative council that wasn't going to stop the Labor Party. So they then said, I think they had a friendly governor at the time, or they twisted his arm and they got the governor to appoint more Labor party mates to the legislative council, and it became known as the suicide chamber because once they had a majority in there, they said, yes, we're going to abolish ourselves.
That's what happened. And now what has happened since then in Queensland, you've really had, if we're going to be a democracy, it is a healthy thing to do, to have a change of government from time to time. Okay? We don't want a one party state, do we even under a democracy keeps the parties on their toes if there's going to be a change of power. Queensland, since you were advised to legislative council, you've really only had three periods of government. Labor was in from 1915 without a break until 1957. We worked. That's right. Now then you had a National party government from 1957 to 1989, and then since then you've basically had Labor governments. Now we had the magnificent Campbell Newman give it a red hot shot, and we had Mr. Borage there in the 1990s. The problem with having only a one chamber running the joint is that they control the bureaucracy to a very large extent, and they can sort of manipulate things so that one party keeps winning.
And that's where we find ourselves Now. I think that Queensland's potential would be far greater. If we had a restraint on the legislative assembly and we brought back the legislative council, it would of course be fully democratically elected. And I think now when I've raised this with people, they say to me, well, look, it's a good idea in theory, John, how do we bring it about? And I've thought about that question. And of course this is just friendly advice from a southerner, but it's from someone who genuinely loves Queensland. I was thinking about it that the Queensland Greens who were not fans of who our party, you could not ask for a more polar opposite of the Greens, but they support a legislative council in Queensland. Pauline Hanson is a significant person in this state. She supports the legislative council coming back. Now, that's an odd coalition, and I think that Richard, just to suggest it, Richard say, there we go.
The Libertarian party in Queensland also supports the return of the legislative council. So I was thinking, and I think the counter party probably would, I think there'd probably be one or two other little parties out there that would say yes. And I think how we could bring the problem with arguing this is if a party's in opposition and they're fairly competent, they're going to win the election. The last thing they want to do is they say, well, we are about to come to power. We want to do all these good things. So we don't worry. We don't want to have a hand break on our power, so that's why they don't talk about it. How can we get an opposition in this state to say, or the government, and we only need one major party to support it. I think the people of Queensland will support it.
If we make the case, we've got to make the case intellectually. I think what we could do, we could have a compact between the various minor parties, including the green, including us, including One Nation, Katter and others. And we could say that as a block for one election, we will preference either of the major parties, that 100% is committed to bringing back the Queensland Legislative Council. And one of those major parties is going to say, gee, well, I can win the election with all those preferences from all those parties. Now to get that debate happening, we've got to start writing opinion pieces. We've got to be talking about it on talkback radio. We've got to be passing motion to our parties. And now then we need to convince the people they were convinced a hundred years ago. But a superficial criticism will be, oh, we don't want more politicians.
We've got to beat that argument. Because the truth is, as I said before, the government is 99.9% of them are bureaucrats who are appointed. The 0.1% are the politicians. Now, most politicians are pretty useless. Yes, I agree with that. But we can get some who will say, make the case for limiting the size of the government. So we need to say, look, if you want to have a more Democratic government, if you want to return to the Westminster roots, which the rest of the English speaking world lives under reasonably successfully, more successful than other parts of the world, we need to bring back the Queensland Legislative Council. So I will leave that point with you, and I hope that can be the beginning of a discussion in this great state. Thank you.
