40 YEARS OF FAILURE.
IT'S TIME FOR A NEW PLAN.

This letter is being written because someone has to say it plainly.

Australia has been managed by two parties for forty years. In that time we closed our refineries, sold our water to speculators, allowed power prices to triple, handed our resources to foreign shareholders for cents on the dollar, built a housing market so broken that a generation cannot afford to live in the country their parents built — and accumulated over $500 billion in federal debt while doing it.

This is not bad luck. This is what happens when government serves the people who fund it instead of the people who elect it.

40 YEARS OF FAILURE — THE LIST

Not one government. Not one party. Both of them. Across four decades. Here is what was done:

• Commonwealth Bank — sold 1991–1996. One of the world's most profitable banks. Profits now flow to shareholders.
• Qantas — sold 1993–1996. The national carrier, built with public money. Now foreign-owned and union-busted.
• Telstra — sold 1997–2006. The national telecommunications network. Privatised then regulated into dysfunction.
• The merchant fleet — wound up. Australia now has no sovereign capacity to move its own cargo.
• 167 tonnes of gold — sold in 1997 at generational lows. Coordinated with the UK and other Western nations simultaneously.
• Six oil refineries reduced to two — no sovereign fuel production. 23 days of diesel held. IEA minimum is 90.
• The car industry — Holden, Ford, Toyota all closed. No sovereign vehicle manufacturing capability remains.
• Steel industry — Whyalla near collapse. Newcastle steelworks gone. No sovereign heavy manufacturing base.
• Murray-Darling water — 40%+ of irrigation entitlements removed through buybacks since 1997. Farms dried up. Towns died.
• Agricultural land — significant foreign ownership. Water rights held by foreign funds as financial assets.
• Defence land — $2B+ of strategically located barracks and training ranges sold to property developers in the past decade.
• Army personnel — fewer full-time soldiers today than in 1999. Cut to fund submarines we won't receive for 20 years.
• AUKUS — $400B committed by executive decision. No referendum. No plebiscite. No real parliamentary debate.
• Negative gearing — maintained for 30 years despite evidence it inflates prices. A $30B+ annual subsidy to property investors.
• No Sovereign Wealth Fund — Norway taxed its oil at 78% and has $2.8 trillion saved. Australia gave its gas away.
• RBA QE — $350B printed at near-zero rates in 2020–21. Rates then raised 13 times. $36.7B in losses. Households paid.
• Media concentration — two companies control the majority of Australian print and broadcast media. No diversity laws.
• COVID — emergency powers used without sunset clauses, vaccine mandates without genuine consent frameworks, no Royal Commission held afterward. One line. It happened. It has not been accounted for.
• Australian household private debt — $3.33 trillion and rising. At 112% of GDP, the second highest household debt ratio in the world. The average Australian household carries $313,633 in debt. 41% of mortgage holders say they are struggling to make repayments. The two parties that presided over this call it a sign of confidence.
• No accountability — for any of it. No Royal Commission into asset sales. No accounting of proceeds. No prosecutions.

This is not a conspiracy theory. Every item above is documented in government records, parliamentary reports, and public data. Nothing here is contested. Everything here was done in your name, by the people you elected to represent you.

THE CRISES ARE NOT ACCIDENTS

Housing. The median house price in Sydney is now more than fifteen times the median income. Negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions have redirected wealth from productive enterprise into speculative property for thirty years. The people who funded the parties that legislated those concessions have done very well. Young Australians have not. A young woman chose to live in a tent last week — not because there are no rentals, but because after paying rent there was not enough left for food. She chose to eat. That choice should not exist here.

Fuel. Australia holds 23 days of diesel. We are the only IEA member that does not meet the 90-day reserve obligation. Diesel runs every tractor, every truck, every mine, every ambulance in Robertson. We export 94% of our crude oil, then import it back as refined product at a margin. The Liquid Fuel Emergency Act 1984 has sat unused for forty years while the supply chain it was written to protect was dismantled, refinery by refinery.

Water. The Murray-Darling has had more than 40% of its irrigation water removed through Commonwealth buybacks since 1997. Water entitlements — created by the public for productive agricultural use — are now held as financial assets by institutional investors and foreign funds while farms dry up and regional communities collapse.

Power. Australian households and businesses pay some of the highest electricity prices in the developed world. We put wind turbines on productive farmland and left the desert empty. We built the most expensive grid in the world while sitting on the best solar resource on earth.

Health. Bulk billing has collapsed across regional Australia. A family in a country town pays over $1,000 a year just to see a GP. The nearest specialist may require a 400-kilometre drive. Suicide is the leading cause of death for Australian men under 45. In Robertson, the rate is higher than the national average.

WHAT CHANGED

None of this was inevitable. Norway found oil in 1969. They taxed resource extraction at 78%, built a sovereign wealth fund, and today have $2.8 trillion — approximately $500,000 per Norwegian citizen. Their healthcare is world-class. Their housing is affordable. Their regional communities are alive.

Australia found gas. We gave it away.

WHAT WE CAN DO

The MMP platform is specific, costed, and honest. The Sovereign Build Corporation builds six corridors across Australia — power, water, gas, road, rail, maglev — funded by a Resource Extraction Levy that finally captures the wealth that has been leaving this country for fifty years. Phase 0 terminates at Newcastle — the gateway to Robertson and the Hunter.

AUSTRALIA NEEDS A NEW DEAL — NOT ANOTHER PATCH

Every party that has governed Australia in the last forty years has offered the same thing: a patch. A rebate here. A subsidy there. A taskforce. A review. A commitment to a commitment. The problems compound. The patches accumulate. Nothing is fixed. The next election arrives and the cycle repeats.

There is no plan. Not from Labor. Not from the Liberals. Not from the Greens. There is $500 billion in federal government debt, a structural deficit of $77 billion a year, and $3.33 trillion in private household debt — the second highest household debt ratio in the world. Neither major party has a credible path to addressing any of it. There are policies — thousands of them — but a collection of policies is not a plan. A plan has a destination. A plan has a sequence. A plan shows how the pieces connect and what Australia looks like when the work is done.

MMP has a plan. It is called the Australian New Deal — named deliberately. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt faced a country in crisis. He did not offer patches. He offered a program: the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority. Government as the deliberate builder of a nation. It worked. The infrastructure lasted a century. The dignity restored to workers held the country together.

Roosevelt acted after the Depression hit. He was brilliant but reactive. MMP acts before the disruption peaks — because we can see what is coming. We can see what forty years of managed decline has cost. We can see what AI and automation will do to employment. We can see that a country with 23 days of diesel, no sovereign refining, no manufacturing base, no sovereign wealth fund, and a housing market that prices out a generation is not resilient. It is brittle.

The Australian New Deal rewrites Australia from the ground up:

• The Sovereign Build Corporation — six corridors, 180 towns, sovereign energy, water, maglev, the continental infrastructure Australia should have built fifty years ago.
• The Resource Extraction Levy — Australia's resources taxed for Australians. The REL funds everything: the SBC, the hospitals, the prevention fund, the regional housing fund, the billion trees.
• Sovereign manufacturing — drones, steel, defence equipment, pharmaceuticals. Built here. Owned here. Dependent on no one.
• Fuel sovereignty — 90-day reserve on Australian soil. Domestic refining restored. The Liquid Fuel Emergency Act enforced, not ignored.
• Housing at continental scale — 180 new towns, granny flats as of right, commercial conversions, ghost home taxes. The SBC makes housing affordable by making new places worth living in.
• A health system that prevents — not just treats. GP rebates restored. Prevention fund constitutionally protected. Healing centres. Food transparency. The system built around keeping people well.
• Eight Royal Commissions — family law, local government, media concentration, lobbying, COVID, the drug epidemic, asset sales, the RBA. Sunlight on forty years of unaccountable decisions.
• A Bill of Rights — the rights Australians thought they had, written into law so no government can take them away by decree.

This is not a list of policies. This is a direction. A destination. A country that owns its resources, builds its infrastructure, houses its people, feeds its sick, protects its borders, and governs itself transparently. That country can be built. The plan exists. The funding mechanism exists. The political will — for the first time — is being organised.

HOW MMP WINS — AND WHY IT MATTERS

Good policy sells itself. A solid plan, honestly presented, builds its own coalition. That is what MMP is built on.

We do not need every Australian to agree with every policy. We need enough Australians to recognise that the current arrangement is not working — and that a party with no donors, no factional machine, and no obligation to anyone except the people who vote for it is worth backing.

MMP policies align across the political spectrum. Farmers and environmentalists both need water. Workers and small business owners both need power at a price they can afford. Families across every voting bloc need housing they can buy, healthcare they can access, and a fuel supply that does not vanish in a crisis. These are not left or right issues. They are Australian issues.

At the next federal election, MMP contests as a party. Where MMP holds the balance of power, every vote in Parliament becomes a negotiation — and the negotiating position is the platform. Not a deal with a faction. Not a concession to a donor. The policies. All of them. As written.

Independent members, Liberals, Labor, and Greens have all found common ground with MMP policy positions. That is not an accident. It is what happens when a platform is built around what Australia needs rather than what a party base demands. The coalition MMP builds will not be built from party machines. It will be built from Australians who read the platform and recognise the truth in it.

This is not the letter of someone who thinks politics will save us. It is the letter of someone who has run out of patience watching it fail us — and who has a plan to do something about it.

I am standing because someone has to. And I have a plan for Australia's future.