Party Games 2025 - Gerard Rennick People First Party - 10/TBD

Gerard Rennick People First Party is another senator splitting from a major party to form their own party. As the name suggests, the senator in question is Gerard Rennick who was a member of the LNP until he lost preselection for the 2025 election at which point he left the party and set up his own party of which he is the president for at least the first 3 years (as per the party constitution which has some weird redactions like in half the instances where Gerard's full name is listed his middle name is redacted). 

Having split from the LNP, his policies are a mix of economic populism and scientific misunderstanding. He wants to shut down all action on climate change and put a 10% tax on all renewable energy to cover end of life site clean up, which one seems excessive for the amounts involved, and two I'd be willing to consider if it was applied all energy wholesalers regardless of how the power is generated. And saying "oh no, look how much resources goes into building a wind turbine, how detrimental to the environment that is" while completely ignoring that building a fossil fuel power plant also takes resources is just disingenuous.

On the economic side he wants to make super entirely voluntary because people retiring still need pensions, and I'm not sure how allowing people to put less into super solves that problem. He proposes allowing the first $25,000 put into super each year to be tax free, but that you can also withdraw money from your super at any time for any reason, which is a roundabout way of saying you want to increase the tax free threshold by $25k (actually by about $45k as he also wants to raise the base tax free threshold to $40,000).

He wants a people's bank and insurance company to provide affordable financial and insurance services, but seemingly expects these to run without cost to the tax payer and doesn't realise that if they want to undercut commercial providers they will likely need ongoing financial contributions from the government.

Not a lot to recommend this one other than they don't seem to indulge in some of the cruelty to minorities other similarly aligned parties do, but that's faint praise.