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

and right down through Shepparton. This is real vision. Do you know how much the Labor Party had put towards that for the next 10 years? $30 million. What were they going to do with that? That is the sort of vision you get! So we have 10 times vision that they had. What vision do you call $6.7 billion on the Bruce Highway? What do you call that? A lady in a nightie? That is real vision.

What do we call it when we managed to actually turn around the live cattle trade, when we have record numbers going through Townsville? I call that real vision and real direction. What do we call it when we open up the trade to Egypt? I call that real vision. What do we call it when we open up the trade to Bahrain in live cattle? I call that real vision. What do we call it when we get the protocols through so we can open up the trade into Iran? I call that real vision. What do we call it when we have record numbers moving out, in live sheep and live cattle? I call that real vision. What do we call it when we are getting record increases in the movement of chilled and frozen beef into China? I call that real vision. I call it happening in agriculture, and it is happening under our watch.

What do you call it when in January they suspected that we may have a $100 million deficit, and we got a $1.4 billion surplus, so we got a $1½ billion turnaround, and it was predominantly driven by agriculture and it happened under our government? I call that real vision. This is how we actually start getting the money coming back in. This is how we get the money coming back in, and it is under us that it is happening.

What do you call it when a government brought in tree-clearing laws? Who did they come in under? Labor Party. That is the sort of vision you get with the Labor Party: new caveats on closing you down. They came in with tree-clearing laws and when they were not doing that they decided to change the temperature of the globe, single-handedly. The carbon tax. I remember that. I don't know how it is going. We have got a carbon tax. It has been awfully warm lately, so I don't know whether it is working. We are certainly paying for it. And we have still got it, even though we won an election on it. What vision have you got for regional Australia on that? I will tell you what it is.

Your vision is that when a person gets up in the morning and turns on the electric radio they pay the carbon tax because you believe you can change the temperature of the globe. When they decide to go out and knock in a steel post, the steel post is made out of steel, so that has a carbon tax on it. When they want to roll out some barb to keep the cattle in, that is made out of wire that is made out of steel, so that has the carbon tax on it. When they move diesel onto the place, that comes in under the carbon tax. You are putting the carbon tax on it everything. This is the vision of the Labor Party: basically, taxing every mechanism of production. You are trying to say that is a vision. Well, I tell you what, it was so visionary they kicked you out of government—that is how visionary it was.

What we are trying to do is basically remove the impost so we can get the economy going. We are doing this in a position where you left us with this absolutely incredible debt. To think that when we handed government over to you we were actually lending money to the world. We were rich. We had money. But by the time you handed government back to us we were going out the back door. We were going broke. That is the predicament you have landed this whole nation in. Now we have this ridiculous scenario where at this point in time we are paying a thousand million dollars a month in interest, 70 per cent of it going overseas. That is a thousand million dollars a month that we will never see again. We could be spending it on hospitals, on roads, on so many things, but we are spending it on interest. Yet they say that is not a problem, that is not an issue, that is contrived, that it does not exist.

As I said, you have stolen most of my thunder because you gave us a great rendition of the other things we have done, such as the quarantine facility. I accept that we are building an in excess of $300 million quarantine facility and I think we are doing a splendid job at that. That is real investment in biosecurity. We do admit that we did keep the diesel fuel rebate. I accept that we have gone into bat for regional Australians and have kept the diesel fuel rebate.

Mr Fitzgibbon interjecting—

They would not have much luck under you guys. I admit the temerity that I personally would move an office from Sydney, God help us, to Armidale. That cannot possibly be helping regional Australia, to move it to a regional town. Let us leave it, let us put it where former minister Joe Ludwig had it, in Brisbane.

Correct me if I am wrong, but the Leader of Opposition Business, who was the minister for agriculture at the time, had it at Kogarah. There is a big rural centre if ever I saw one. Every time I go through Kogarah I cannot help but think of cows and sheep and sunflowers.

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