#107 - Steve Baxter - Labor's Budget Will Destroy Australia's Future

46.117 - 63.988 Steve Baxter

Yeah, we spent nine years here from 93, eight years here from 93 to 2000 or thereabouts. I was with Adelaide Log Battalion, which is down at Waradale initially. And then 16th Air Defence up at Woodside Hills back in the mid-90s, essentially. So, yeah, worked on the Rapier and RBS-70 missile systems.

64.228 - 67.213 Sam Bamford

And I was just reading about you. You left the, left Squad 15? Yeah.

67.565 - 81.424 Steve Baxter

Yeah, joined the apprentice, yeah, 15, Rockhampton. So Rockhampton, central Queensland. Was in grade 11, so there was no prep back then. So I was quite a young person in grade 11 at the same time. That was probably not good. I pretty well failed grade 11, but the army still took me as an electronics technician. More for them.

82.185 - 103.298 Steve Baxter

And yeah, went and joined the apprentice scheme, signed up for nine years. Spent three years in Wodonga in Latchford Barracks, just south of Bandiana. And then got posted to Brisbane, to Bulimba, which was a base workshop battalion. Great posting on the Brisbane River, right across the road from the Hammer Hotel. It was quite nice. And then out to Enoggera with 1C Regiment workshops.

104.119 - 122.743 Steve Baxter

So I was a technician out there. Whilst I'll talk about repairing compasses, I'll talk about repairing surface-to-air missile systems, most things I repaired were compasses and binoculars. which sounds about as exciting as they are. You know, compasses, these things that should point north and don't, God damn them, and binoculars who are quite a precision instrument.

708.639 - 727.886 Steve Baxter

That person's better than you. You just can't shout Tall Poppy because your product's shit and theirs is better, right? So just drop that crutch. But what I see, the big thing I see in Australian commerce in general is the fact that large Australian companies typically don't like buying from small Australian companies. Yeah. In the US, large US companies will buy from any small company.

728.687 - 745.127 Steve Baxter

Why is that? I don't know. I don't know. Is it for profit? I've road tested this past lots of people who sort of agree. We don't know how to test that analogy. And then if we do test it and think that's it, how do we then change it? We don't know how to do that either. So this is a conversation I want to start having.

745.147 - 762.094 Steve Baxter

It's almost berating large companies to buy off small Australian companies easier. In my other investment business, the non-military stuff, if... Someone comes and pitches me and says, I want to sell to Rio or BHP or some other large Australian business. I just click off and go, yeah, no, not with my money. I know that will take too long. They'll get these guys.

762.154 - 776.14 Steve Baxter

And if they do buy, it'll be just enough to keep them alive, like a Biafran diet, like a starvation diet, right? And that's just bad. And this is what the Australian Defence Force does to companies. They'll just feed them enough, feed them enough so they just don't quite die. And these companies just limp along and don't grow.

776.16 - 790.039 Steve Baxter

I believe it's a deliberate policy to keep these companies in shape just in case we do need them in a future conflict. We can then start spending, which is how bad their thinking is because you just can't spill up from starving to nothing. It doesn't work that way.

1260.644 - 1272.759 Sam Bamford

I mean, NDIS sector definitely needs a big review on it. The climate change department is $30 billion. That can be sort of scrapped. The bureaucrats in Canberra, we're a bloated democracy.

1273.56 - 1283.412 Steve Baxter

The prime example, I think, that runs through the Australian bureaucracy, and that's the actual Australian Department of Defence, do you know what the ratio of generals to other ranks are?

1283.392 - 1308.42 Steve Baxter

our highest in the world yeah we are the highest in the world in the u.s it's one to thirteen hundred in australia one one to 56 one to one to 300 in australia okay yeah there you go so um all right that's um that seems excessive okay we're a smaller defense force you think it wouldn't shouldn't be the same because it's just pure scale numbers but you know we maybe should be one to 1200 instead of one to 1300 you know it's not it's not a factor of three or four too many chiefs not enough indians

1308.4 - 1325.262 Steve Baxter

Yeah. There's a Royal Navy saying, which is after a well-known naval defeat, they had an inquiry. And one of the sayings that came out was too many regulators and enough rat catchers. So we need more rat catchers and less regulators, right? Yeah. That sort of sums up our economy, to be honest.

1325.242 - 1353.342 Sam Bamford

and yeah i mean so many people have been uh have reached out to me about the budget there because i i honestly thought to myself coming in monday um you know on my car canberra is about to sit for the next couple weeks one of the hot topics is going to be the budget anthony albanese and the labour government you know this is what they do in politics they throw out some absolute hand grenades which they're willing to pull back on to then think that the budget they're pushing through is okay because they'll take out the capital gains but

1734.983 - 1751.198 Steve Baxter

Yeah, in Queensland, for example, you could say, as an example, you can say in Queensland, if you move your business to the north of the Tropic of Capricorn or north of Mackay or Northwood. Better tax breaks. Yeah, and that top tax bracket doesn't exist. You'd empty Sydney into North Queensland. That's how you can do this, and then you get competition.

1751.879 - 1771.081 Steve Baxter

So I think going back to that point before about how big businesses don't like buying from small businesses, I mean, is that part of it? The fact that we've got this comfy, cosy federal blanket sitting over us, if you know what I mean, where we can be dictated from on top about how everything works. I can see an element or a theme of that running through that problem, if you know what I mean.

1771.101 - 1783.521 Steve Baxter

Do you think it boils down to government control? Oh, we love the government control. That's what it sounds like straight away. Yeah, you've probably heard the saying that we're proud we're descended from convicts. We just don't realise that the Jarls are still here as well, right?

1783.541 - 1787.186 Sam Bamford

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Adelaide was a settler state.

1787.307 - 1790.331 Steve Baxter

Yeah, and I lived here. You guys are proud of that.

2124.56 - 2145.555 Steve Baxter

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely going to result in that, that's for sure. There won't be zero business formation. But the thing is, the big game-changing businesses are the outliers. So it's your Google founders, your Facebooks, your musks of the world, for example, right? They don't sit on the bell curve. They sit way outside the bell curve, right?

2145.535 - 2158.772 Steve Baxter

and you want those because they are generation-changing businesses, right? And we're sort of saying now that if you want to strive for that, then this really isn't the place. In fact, we openly hate you, to be honest. So there's lots of good things about Australia in starting a business.

2158.812 - 2173.652 Steve Baxter

So we still have a couple of great, really great tax incentive schemes, and believe it or not, out of the budget, one of those tax incentive schemes was actually improved. One of the ones that our fund is actually under, which is great. So it's actually, we did exceptionally well out of the budget from our fund. That's only one part of my business world.

2173.632 - 2191.658 Steve Baxter

But there's another one called ESIC, which is an angel investor incentive, which gives a 20% tax break and capital gains tax free. And there's a venture capital one, which gives a 10% tax break and capital gains tax free. And they've remained so and actually expand a little bit, to be honest. So it's actually quite good in all truth.

2191.638 - 2211.03 Steve Baxter

But other than that, if you're outside that, and they're pretty narrow definitions of early stage businesses and technology and innovation businesses as well. You are sort of buggered, to be honest. But so you have some tax breaks in Australia. You have the R&D tax concession. So you get a rebate back for money you spend doing innovative research and development, which is great.

2500.057 - 2517.789 Steve Baxter

Yeah, no, but given his history with the EDL and other bits and pieces as well, unless you research him heavily, you could buy the narrative easily of the worst of Tommy Robinson, if you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think he's probably somewhere between the best and the worst. I think everyone we're on a spectrum somewhere in the middle. No one's universally good or universally bad.

2517.849 - 2531.773 Sam Bamford

Well, someone always wants to paint you on a certain spectrum as well, right? The media try to paint me on a certain spectrum by saying, you know, I did a whole bunch of serious stuff when I never said it. So people are going to have their opinions depending on what media organisation they follow.

2531.905 - 2539.803 Steve Baxter

Yeah, I mean, I haven't listened to the car one yet, only five minutes. I did listen to Holly one on the flight on the way here. That was actually pretty good. I like Holly. She's a shit-stirrer. She's great.

2540.123 - 2545.375 Sam Bamford

Well, she stands up for her principles. Yeah, yeah. And she's not employed by anyone, so no one controls her.

2545.405 - 2554.935 Steve Baxter

Yeah, that's it. So I love what she did for the song. She did the song for the Please Explain movie, which is great. Was it Kiss Me or something? Kissy Kissy?

2760.187 - 2777.99 Steve Baxter

And I think in Australia we should have a – I think my ideal system would be voluntary, optional, preferential. So I don't want to give my vote to a cannabis or a sex party person, excuse me. I want my vote at some point to stop. If there's seven candidates, I like three. I want to go one, two, three. And everyone else can go to hell. That's my preferred system anyway.

2778.971 - 2792.475 Steve Baxter

So I think we currently have the compulsory preferential, which leads to all sorts of issues. They have first-past-the-post involuntary, which leads to all sorts of issues. I think there's a happy medium in the middle. Yeah. Well, our one always leads to a two-party system, right? Yeah.

2792.455 - 2809.978 Steve Baxter

But also then we get the weird... Then in the Senate, for example, you get the very weird sort of preference dealing in the Senate at the same time. So, you know, for me, it's like just optional preferential. You should be able to tick one or... Between one and 100, you should be able to pick. And they shouldn't line up in the parties. You should have to hunt out the people that you like.

2810.018 - 2821.213 Steve Baxter

It should be name alphabetical, and you've got to hunt them down. You'd get a lot more honest representation. If you really want to do the Labor Party thing, go and do the How to Vote card. You can then do that. But just ticking one at the top won't...

2821.193 - 2847.336 Sam Bamford

and going through and finding people i mean for the last decade um apart from the last couple years i have never ever really cared about voting at all i didn't really pay any attention to politics and for me mate pardon my pun but it was always dicks on ballots you know what i mean like uh like the younger generation no one really cared about what they want or were voting for because no one paid attention but time's changing now you know living's getting tough times are changing and people are actually going in and caring now about who they're voting for and

4747.824 - 4763.816 Steve Baxter

80s Battlestar for me. But anyway, let's not get into science fiction. Whereas I think many other nations, the Chinese in particular, have other motivations. And it's not just their version of Hollywood they want to sell us. It's something quite different, right? Communism. Yeah, it's communism.

4763.996 - 4768.849 Steve Baxter

It's like I said, it's this lovely warm nanny state where there's cameras everywhere and if you don't say the right thing, you lose your money.

4770.032 - 4776.047 Sam Bamford

Or you can also be locked out of your digital ID and then you can't get on trains, access their money system or anything like that.

4776.268 - 4776.368

Yeah.

4777.63 - 4798.187 Steve Baxter

One of the things that I actually love the utility of digital money of tap and go. I also appreciate just how I don't like centralizing information. I appreciate how bad that can be. If some political party should come out with literally a constitutional amendment, the only way you can reinforce this and sort of say that governments cannot control your money.