Well, prior to the last federal election, I brought you the news that both of our major parties, Liberal and Labor,

had promised that they would return ownership of the Port of Darwin into Australian hands if they were elected. Well, it’s been brought to my attention thanks to the excellent work of Senator Malcolm Roberts that Anthony Albanese has yet to make good on that promise, and Senator Roberts is seeking to hold him accountable and get some answers. He joins me right now on the Topher project. Senator Malcolm Roberts, thank you so much for making time for me today.

[From video]

Pleased to be your guest, Topher, as always. Accountability, I know, and truth are very, very important to both of us. [End video]

Well, it certainly is, and it’s worrying the level of cynicism when you talk to the average Aussie when it comes to promises that politicians have made, particularly around election time. Unfortunately, things like this don’t really help that situation. Can you bring everyone up to speed? Why does the Port of Darwin ownership matter? Why did both Labor and Liberal promise that they would return it to Australian hands? And why do you think that hasn’t happened?

[From video]

Well, let’s talk about, before we move on to that, the fact that people are not just cynical about government, Topher, they’re sick to the back teeth of it. They’ve had a gut full of lies. They’ve had a gut full of non-delivery. They’ve had a gut full of Aussies being put last instead of first. They’ve had a gut full of World Economic Forum and UN policies driving both cheeks of the Labor Party. And, um, that’s Labor and Liberal. So, I think it’s much, much more serious than people think. Now, the Port of Darwin. Why don’t they do anything about it? Because they’re afraid to. [End video]

I’m sorry to interrupt my interview with Senator Malcolm Roberts. We’ll get back to him in a moment. But first, my name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project, and this is what I do. I bring you stories and interviews that matter, doing things like trying to hold the Prime Minister accountable for his pre-election promises. I am 100% viewer supported. I don’t have any sponsors, any advertising partners. I’m not here to sell you any skin creams or crypto or anything like that. At least not at the moment. I’m not saying that’s never going to happen, but it certainly hasn’t happened up to this point. And I rely on you guys to keep me going. So, if you appreciate what I do, then please buy me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And also, if you like my videos and my interviews, then you’re going to love my books. They’re all about civil disobedience. There’s Good People Break Bad Laws, Good Christians Break Bad Laws about the theology of civil disobedience. There’s also the DVD of my multi-award-winning documentary Battleground Melbourne, as well as my t-shirts and hoodies and a range of different designs. And everything that you buy is going to help me to keep the Topher Project going. Thank you so much for watching. Now, let’s get back to this interview with Senator Malcolm Roberts.

[From video]

And they both make election promises and don’t deliver at all. And they’ve got no intention of delivering on so many things. Look at Scott Morrison. The biggest problem… Oh my goodness. Where do you start? The main problems we’ve got right now, and they’ve been this way for several years since John Howard in fact, he started all three of the things I’m about to say. First, mass immigration driving up house prices. He doubled it. Mass immigration and set us on the path to “Big Australia” that’s now driving house prices and both parties are ignoring it. They’re paying lip service to it because we’ve been chasing it for five years before the election. It became an issue. The second thing is the housing crisis. We’ve got people coming into this country, migrants coming into this country, being put in public housing and then being booted onto the street by the next wave of migrants that comes into the country. So even the migrants coming in are finding difficulty getting housing. So that’s a serious problem. And the third one is our energy catastrophe, which is man-made. It’s artificially driven, and that’s driving… We can get onto that in a minute. No, big security thing. [End video]

Yeah. And can you help people to understand Darwin? It’s an Australian port. It’s a major hub for Australia. How is it even possible that we don’t own it in the first place?

[From video]

Exactly. Well, what happened was Andrew Rob, I think he was… I can’t remember the ministry he had in the Liberal Party, um, one of the Liberal Party governments. He was a minister. He authorized the flogging off of the Darwin port. So it wasn’t quite sold. It was put on a 99-year lease, which is as good as selling, you know. So, sure. So, he sold it, and from what the reports in the media said, within months of him resigning from ministry and resigning from parliament, he copped an $880,000 per year job with the company that got the lease. So, no questions are asked. [End video]

A disturbingly common incident where we see ministers holding portfolios, awarding contracts worth an enormous amount of money, and then after politics, going very quickly into board positions and things there. But this is not just an issue of, “Oh dear, there’s a piece of Australian infrastructure that’s foreign owned.” I am a genuine capitalist. Foreign ownership doesn’t concern me inherently. But what concerns me is the vulnerability of Australia from a geostrategic point of view, particularly when it comes to defense. If there were to be a conflict in the region, the Newcastle port is another one that is foreign-owned. Ports are obviously very important to us as an island nation, and our resources and our manufacturing capacity are very, very limited. Can you help people to understand, without intending to fearmonger? I hate to do that, but we are exceptionally vulnerable.

[From video]

The truth is absolutely essential Topher, as you know, because it reveals reality. Once in the ’50s-’60s, Australia was independent almost independent for everything. We could make here in Australia. Even our tool-making equipment, our lathes, our mills, milling machines, everything was made here. We could make anything. We made cars. We made planes. We made planes in the Second World War. Some of them were Australian-designed. All gone. All gone. And the number, you know, manufacturing has been automated, and that means that labor costs are very, very low compared with other costs. The number one cost component in most manufacturing sectors is not labor anymore. It’s electricity.

And what we’re doing, and this is what’s happening, it started with John Howard, yet again. He brought in, put in place the basic climate and energy policies that are now killing our country. So, what happens is that we used to have the cheapest electricity in the world, bar none. We’ve now got the most expensive outside of Europe and pretty close to the most expensive, including Europe.

So, electricity… What we’re doing with our coal, which is amongst the best in the world, we’re exporting it to China so they can use it to generate coal-fired electricity. They sell their coal-fired electricity at 12 cents a kilowatt hour. These are after conversion currency, and we sell it here, and just think of what’s happening. Our coal is going from a mine mouth onto a rail, onto a port where it’s handled and stored, and then onto a ship and gone thousands of kilometers. Then it’s shipped at trans-shipped at a port, onto a rail, rail line for hundreds of kilometers into China, and they sell their qualified electricity at 12 cents a kilowatt hour. We sell it here at a power station, at the mine mouth. No bloody transport. And we sell it for 26 cents a kilowatt hour to 33 cents a kilowatt hour.

So, yeah, so more than double and almost triple. So, we’re sending the best coal in the world, and what we’re doing Topher, is helping them to get cheap electricity and cheap steel for wind turbines and solar panels. Then we’re subsidizing them to send them to Australia. The subsidies add to the cost of electricity. We subsidize mainly foreign companies, including mostly Chinese companies, to install the damn things, and then that drives the price up. And then they operate them, drives the price up all subsidized. So, we are destroying our electricity sector and making it vulnerable for reliability and security. [End video]

Yeah. Well, you’re absolutely right. The price of electricity is such a fundamental arguably the single biggest, but it’s certainly one of the fundamental input costs into any sort of manufacturing base, and Australia has lost its manufacturing base in large part because we simply can’t be competitive when it comes to the cost of electricity. I want to come back to the issue of the port, though, because this is something that you are trying to do something about. You have put forward a motion calling for that to be debated. Now, there’s a lot of Australians, and a lot of people that watch my channel, that don’t live and breathe politics every day, so can you help us to understand? You’ve become aware that Anthony Albanese has not delivered on this promise, and your response is to say, “I’m going to move this motion to get this debated.” What does that mean, and what is it that you’re seeking to achieve?

[From video]

Well, there are two forms of debate. There are many, many forms of debate in general, but the two in the type that you’re talking about are a matter of public importance (MPI) or a matter of urgency (MOU). The difference is that they’re pretty much the same in format. We can sponsor a topic, for example, the sale of the breaking of promises to sell the port of Darwin or any topic at all, whether it’s a matter of public importance or a matter of urgency, similar format. The only difference is that at the end of a matter of urgency, we put it to the vote. And so what you find from us, yeah, what you find from us with our matters of urgency, we usually go for matters of urgency, not the matter of public importance, because we want to put a vote. We want to see where the rats will go. We want to see where they will scurry. And so quite often we embarrass the Liberal Party because they won’t stay and support us because they haven’t got the guys, for example, a net zero or the Port of Darwin, but they won’t vote against us either. So they’ll scurry outside and abstain. So that’s the two. And so what we do is we offer an MPI or a matter of urgency, and people from the other parties nominate speakers and they jump in into the fray. And that’s all it is. [End video]

And so essentially, this is just highlighting on the floor of Parliament, on the floor of the Senate, excuse me, and obviously, for the Australian people, at least those that pay attention, that this promise has yet to be delivered on. I want to pick up something you said there about how when you force a vote at the end of a debate using a matter of urgency, that there are people who leave the room. It is often something that surprises people, people who haven’t previously really watched politics, just how often people like yourself are making important speeches and talking about important topics. And the room behind you appears to be largely empty. What are the games that are being played there?

[From video]

Well, that’s standard for most speeches in the Senate and in the House of Reps, I believe. And that’s, if you like, quite normal because debates are no longer debates in this country in Parliament. They’re just proposing their view. They’re biased. They’re close-minded. They don’t go on facts. We see Tims and I’ll list him individually as a Labor Party senator but also the Greens, they just drive on ideological grounds. They just use labels. They don’t use facts and data. They make insinuations about the other party, about the other person. So, it’s not really a debate. But in addition, we have so many things to do. Sometimes Parliament starts at, well, I start at 5:30 in the morning, yeah, and 5:00 sometimes, and I get to the office about 7:30 and then go home at 11:00, sometimes later. That’s for four nights a week. It’s pretty intense. So, during that time, we have speeches to deliver, research to do on topics of speeches, on legislation, legislation to read, meetings with other politicians, meetings with constituents, meetings with lobbyists. So, it never stops. It’s full-on for four days. So, you can’t be expected to be down there the whole time. [End video]

Okay. So that’s fair enough. So that isn’t necessarily the disrespectful thing that a lot of people interpret that to be. That is just something of the reality of how things have to be. So, we’ve covered a few things, Senator. We’ve talked about this, obviously, the situation with the Port of Darwin explicitly.

[From video]

Excuse me, Topher, then what happens is, of course, it becomes a matter of a little bit of cunning now and then a little bit of strategy as to what we talk about and how we engage when there’s no one in the chamber, how we force people to take a position. So, it becomes a matter of we can we’ve only got four senators, which is a doubling of our previous number. We’ve got four senators, nearly elected senators in four other states, three other states. So, it’s looking good for the future, but we can influence things by raising things. For example, we stopped the cash ban bill, we stopped the misinformation, disinformation bill just by raising these issues and pointing out the ridiculousness of them, and the Labor Party and Liberal Party then scurry away. So, sorry I was talking, I interrupted you. [End video]

No, no, no. I look, I appreciate that insight because even myself, as someone, I observe politics all the time. I don’t live and breathe the realities of what’s actually happening minute-by-minute within the halls of Parliament House. So, I do appreciate the insight, but we’ve covered a couple of topics here, and I want to get to, I guess, what could Australia, if we had different leadership, what could we do about things like the foreign ownership of ports, things like the lack of strategic reserves and industrial capacity, 30 days worth of fuel supply, these sorts of things that put us at risk? And then perhaps even if I can dream how do we start to make Parliament House function a little bit better? How do we get it to the point where they really are actually debating and that things are being done on facts? Are these fixable problems?

[From video]

They are fixable, but we’ve got to understand that we are not a monarchy in Australia. We’re a constitutional monarchy. In effect, we are a republic. And I’m sure you know that. We’re the top governing body in a monarchy. The king or queen monarchs, they give orders. They run the show. In a constitutional monarchy, the constitution is the top governing body, if you like. So that makes it a republic. It’s ruled by the rule of law. And so we’re really a republic. The other thing that sets us apart is that our king or queen is not some clapped-out politician elected to be president, but it’s handed down through lineage, which I used to detest as a young man, but now I can see the merit of it. I think we’ve got a fantastic system, a combination between Westminster and the American Congressional System. But so we have a very good system. The king or queen actually serves the people, serves the constitution. They’ve got, as you know, limited power and their reserve powers to be held in reserve in case something happens. And they don’t act as dictators, they act as servants to us. And I mean that sincerely. So I was long opposed to a monarchy until I understood what it was. We’ve got a fantastic constitution.

What else? Oh, that’s right. In our constitutional monarchy, the king or queen is not the top. The politicians are not the top. The parliament is not the top. The government is not the top. The people are the top entity in this country. What’s happened is the people have become fat and sloppy and lazy. [End video]

What are you saying,

[From video]

What we’re supposed to do is hold the government accountable and make sure the government serves the people. What’s happened is people have been conned and lied to for so many years now that we are serving the people, we’re serving the government. And so it needs to be completely reversed. So nothing’s going to happen until the people wake up and start serving and start holding the government and their politicians accountable. So that means not just looking at the candidates, bypassing the parties, not just looking at the candidates at an election, but looking at their character, looking at their strength, the strength of character, their policies, their values, and then being informed about the options and making an informed choice. And that also means, and probably more importantly, holding your member of parliament accountable, telling him or her what you want, what you want them to do. They are supposed to represent you. I’m paid by the taxpayer. We go out, Pauline and I, and we listen to the taxpayers. We listen to the residents and then we respond accordingly. So we were the first to jump on this housing issue five or six years ago and we just bashed and bashed and bashed away because we could see people homeless in every major city in Queensland. Everywhere. So, we made it an issue. We made energy an issue because I believe a politician should be going out to get the hard data. No one in this Parliament pushes the hard data except for Pauline and myself, and now we’ve got Sean Bell from New South Wales and Tyron Whitten from WA. So, we’ve got to get the data. So, it’s the people who should be saying to the politicians, “Well, if you’ve got net zero, where’s your bloody data? What are you basing it on?” [End video]

Yeah. So it’s quite extraordinary in the case of net zero, it’s very clear that they’re basing it on sort of back of the envelope calculations. And even when you do go through the cost of electricity presentations that have been prepared by AMO and various other organizations, the assumptions that they put into those make them very, very dishonest conclusions, unfortunately. So we’re not being given the truth. So that’s at the people level and I couldn’t agree more. We need to be much more judicious about who we offer these privileged positions to. But at a policy level, what would you like to see being done if we were going to fix some of these problems in Australia?

[From video]

Get back to small central government. The worst form of government is large central government that controls everything. Our constitution and the American constitution is set up with competitive federalism at its heart. That means the majority of services there are some services like defense, trade, in trade between states, communications possibly, foreign affairs that belong at the national level. But everything else should be at the state level. And then what happens is and we pinched this idea, our forefathers pinched this idea from the Yanks competitive federalism, most of the services there are some services that government must do, particularly in Australia where we couldn’t have three electricity networks, just send us, we couldn’t have three road networks, three water networks. So, we’ve got to have some government services, I accept that. But the government, competitive federalism means that we have sovereign, independent states. That’s what’s supposed to happen. And so that means if Queensland well, if Queensland comes up with a better way of running its power grid, then people move to Queensland because the price of power is cheaper. If New South Wales comes up with a better way of running its schools, people move to New South Wales because they want their kids to get a good education. That’s competitive federalism. So, if you think about it, it’s a marketplace in governance. What better system of governance could there be? Small central government and most of the services that are provided by government come from the states and many come from the local councils. But the majority of services should be provided by private enterprise, personal enterprise, free market. So what we’ve got to do is get back to that. [End video]

That certainly would be a lovely thing and I’ll throw in something that many people, many of my audience have heard of, but most Australians haven’t, and that is ideally I’d love to see a lot more states for exactly the reasons that you’ve just articulated, is to increase the amount of jurisdictional competition between various regions. But I’m not sure whether Australia is quite ready to go down that pathway just yet,

[From video]

But you know, our country to get back to so that’s fundamental. People probably weren’t expecting for me to answer that way. But the tangibles, the resources. We are the most blessed in the world per capita with resources. We’re squandering them. We’re wasting them. One of the things we’ve been promoting is the what used to be called the Iron Boomerang. It’s no longer called that. It’s called Capricornia Steel because it had governance problems under Iron Boomerang.

But basically, having a railway line across the north of the country opens up the north, which boosts defense capability, defense transport logistics, and opens up the whole of the inland. It takes the Aboriginal communities to the world and brings the world to the Aboriginal communities. We take iron ore from Western Australia to Mumba, which is in central Queensland, where we’ve got the heart of the best coal reserves in the world. Steel mills are there. The train goes back with coal, and you have steel mills at Port Headland, and everything is there. That would open up the whole of the country. It opens up so many possibilities. There are so many byproducts these days that can come from the manufacturing of steel and the coke-making processes. That’s just one thing.

And then, you know, what struck me I’ve traveled through all 50 states of the United States when I was younger, and I love the United States. What struck me was that the Yanks build a railway line or build a road or build a bridge, and they build it, and then the people come. The British and the Australians, to a lesser extent, say, “Why build a bloody road there? Why build a train there? There’s no one there.” But the point is, they’ll come once you build it. And then we could open up so much in the way of rare earth and copper, zinc, lead in inland Australia, inland North Queensland, just by putting in a line. [End video]

Look, I need to let you go, but I do want to finish with one final point of agreement, and that is the Canadian model. They built their early railroads across exceptionally remote areas of Canada, actually funded by people buying land that was going to be adjacent to these railway lines. They actually funded the railways themselves through the value that the railway was going to add to the land that was going to become accessible and opened up. Something like what you’re talking about, I can imagine, would open up enormous opportunities across those regions.

[From video]

Exactly. And we’ve got the Or River Dam I forgot what the dam’s called, Lake Argyle in Western Australia. The soils are not good. Apparently, the logistics is terrible. So, we’ve got a massive dam there that was built without the thought of how the water would be used. That water is ready to join the railway line and bring water to a lot of central Australia, northern Australia. And also, put an optical fiber link in there just to open up communications. Imagine what that would do for communities. So instead of relying upon welfare, Aboriginals would have something that they could really get their teeth into, because Aboriginals are wonderful, wonderful workers very creative, very intelligent, very resourceful, very innovative, free thinkers. And they’re being wasted. The community just needs to give them an opportunity. They’ll take care of it. [End video]

Yeah, no, I’ve seen the same thing myself in my travels. I do need to let you go though, Senator Malcolm Roberts. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for the work that you do in Parliament House and trying to hold Anthony Albanese accountable regarding the Port of Darwin. Thank you so much.

[From video] Thank you, Topher. Independent media is the key. [End video]

Well, that was Senator Malcolm Roberts laying out his vision for how to make Australia a better place. I’m sorry I had to cut that off, but unfortunately, I had other commitments, and so did Senator Roberts. He’s working hard for the people of Queensland and indeed the people of Australia there in Canberra. My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project, and this is what I do. I bring you stories, interviews, and perspectives that help you make sense of the nonsense and cut through the crap so that you can understand the world as it changes around us. I’m 100% viewer-supported. So, if you appreciate what I’m doing, then please buy me a coffee via the button that you’ll find at topherfield.net. Also, make sure that you check out my books, my DVDs, and all my merch available at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.

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