Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

A person who was not a gentleman would take great advantage of that, but I will not. I will let that one pass. However, I will take you up on a couple of other points. The member for Grayndler, with his 50 acres of farm at Hyde Park, who grew up tough in the suburbs of Sydney, should understand that one of the reasons we are not dealing with climate change in the white paper is that, whatever your position is, I do not believe we can change it back—not from Australia and not single-handedly. We certainly cannot change it back with a carbon tax, because we have actually got a carbon tax. We have got one—so everything now should be better; it should be fixed. If we look out there at the great vault of heaven, it is around about where we left it before the carbon tax was introduced. But what I do know is that we are all poorer; I notice that. If a tax fixes the climate, let us just jack up the GST—that should fix it; that could do it as well.

The other thing I noted was that the absolute spear-chuckers on this—the Australian Greens—did not go so well down in Tasmania the other day. It is quite clear that, if this is your calling card, you have not got much of a political future. That is because the Australian people are now focused on other things such as getting some money on the table, keeping their job, getting the price of power down and basically trying to cut the cloth to fit the wearer. You are just not going to win a trick with a carbon tax. If I were to give my meagre advice, I would say that it would make life a lot tougher for us, and a lot easier for the Labor Party, if they ditched the carbon tax, because it just gives us spruiking capacity on every issue. Anyway, as long as you keep it, we will keep knocking you down over it.

There are a couple of other issues here. Infrastructure is a good point. That is why we have allocated $300 million in the forward estimates for inland rail. I was deputy chair of the dams committee and I hope at some stage to pursue that agenda in a greater way. I know that if we do and we try to build some dams there will be a battle. When that piece of infrastructure comes up it will be interesting to see who stands in the way, because we know the Greens will. They will be out there fighting for the frogs and fighting for the moths; there is no doubt about that. They will be out there making sure that every toad is sacred while we will be trying to make sure that we actually build something and have a mechanism that creates commerce, that creates a future and that gives the nation a greater place to go. One of the greatest deliveries of infrastructure was obviously the Snowy Mountains scheme. There were some political giants that stood behind that process. In the future, when we try to build the next lot of dams, we will see whether those giants still exist or whether we will have people who will just stymie the process, who will drag it down, who will try to belittle it and who will try to make sure that the boggomoss snail has more rights than people. I note the member for Grayndler has returned to the chamber. He is like moth to a flame—he cannot stay away.

The member for Grayndler might be the person who stands up to the Greens. He will understand, because he is the actual people's choice. The other guy is just a usurper. He is sitting there, but he is not there for long, because the people's choice is just over there. The people's choice is going to move up and he is going to move back; that is basically what happens. He moves up and the other guy moves back. And the lady behind, the member for Sydney, keeps on focusing on sections that would fit neatly between the ribs. Anyway, I digress.

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