Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Flynn for his question and note the promise that was made at the election for the $215,000 preliminary study to connect Gladstone to Toowoomba, connecting it up to the inland rail and extending that corridor of commerce from Melbourne all the way through to Gladstone. I also note the $45 million Gladstone boardwalk project that the CFMEU did their very best, in their thuggish way, to threaten workers and try to extend this project to extort money out of the people—the taxpayers. What we always realise, of course, is that the people building the project just put that on the price and the people who pay are the taxpayers. The people who pay are the mums and dads who have to buy the houses. The people who pay are everybody else. It is almost like there is a cultural cliff within the Labor Party that believes that the CFMEU has a right to extort this money from other people, and you can see this in their actions.

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