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

You don't have to, I suppose, require some form of pseudoprofundity or Latinate mysticism to speak on a subject where we agree we need this levy. The Liberal party agrees we need this levy. The Labor Party agrees we need this levy and so does the industry. Therefore what is about to prevail is probably one of my most difficult 15 minutes, to basically prattle on about something that everybody is in roaring agreement about. What I would say is that the ESCAS system has provided a great capacity for the export market, and you can see in the export of cattle it's provided a great capacity for the tapping of further markets.

What I can say is that, back home on the dairy farm, the problems still abound, with people getting ripped off by processors who are being pressured by major retailers. It doesn't seem to stand up to the reality of what this House is supposed to do that we still have farmers, especially in Queensland, who are just being held over a barrel. If we keep going down the path of squeezing these people, we won't have a fresh milk market. It will start devolving from the top and make its way down. Once upon a time there was a heap of farmers on the Atherton Tablelands. Now there are maybe a couple. Once upon a time we had dairy farmers in Central Queensland. But the pressure just remains on them. If you have a desire for fresh milk, you've got to support the dairy farmers who produce it.

Obviously in the southern part of our nation, we have different climatic circumstances and we also have a different market—predominantly, a solids market. That means they turn the milk into milk solids and export that. But the fresh milk market of the north, which I would say is so vital for one of Australia's accepted standards of living—that you can go to the shop and get fresh milk, not reconstituted milk or long-life milk, but actually fresh milk—can only happen if you've got dairy farmers. I always feel sorry for them because their numbers get smaller and smaller and smaller each year. And each year that their numbers get smaller is a sign of policy failure from both sides of this chamber.

We always say that we're going to stand up to the major supermarkets, but we never do. We have consumer laws and we have market laws, but we never really want to step on their toes. We never go that far. They're a bit too big and too powerful for us to take them on. Then you hear of other issues where they go completely off the rails—and we heard tonight that the Business Council of Australia are supporting zero carbon emissions. Are they the ones who are going to reach into their pockets and help the people out when they lose their jobs? We've successfully managed to send our whole manufacturing overseas—that was a clever trick! And now we continue on in a precarious world where we're being tested by things such as COVID-19 as to what our resilience is if borders shut down. Yet a policy such as net zero carbon emissions gets put forward and we say we're going to reinstitute a manufacturing industry. It's like saying that we're going to drive our car on square wheels. It's just not going to work. And, if it is going to work, then where is it going to work? How are you going to do it? Are you going to start subsidising manufacturing again? How on earth does that actually stack up?

I also heard about the NFF, from the member for Hunter. He's got dairy farmers in his electorate—there's no doubt about that—that don't believe in zero net carbon emissions. I say to the NFF: be really careful what you wish for, because one of the super greenhouse gases is methane. Guess where methane is prominent? It's in bovine ruminants. What's one of the big areas where you get methane? It's in dairy farms. So how can you say that, and how can you get yourself on the sticky paper on subjects such as this? Be careful—we know how this works.

In everything that we do, I believe there is a challenge between socialism and private enterprise. Socialism ultimately wants to have greater control over private assets, such as land tenure and title, and also income stream. We've seen this—and I say this to the NFF—with the tree-clearing legislation that came in. It basically divested the landholder of their title to something that they formerly owned and vested it in the state via state governments—so they didn't have to pay compensation—without payment. That means it was divested from a private individual and vested in the state, just like they did over a number of years with the hydrocarbon materials that resided under the soil which were initially part of the title as well. This is all part of the creeping socialism. The next stage, of course, is to impose on the income stream. What better way to impose on the income stream than with a carbon tax? To think that everything you do and the more industrious you are, the more the government taxes you!

We're going to have a carbon trading scheme. Of course, in having a carbon trading scheme, you'll end up with a methane trading scheme. What we'll have is farmers with a licence to expel into the atmosphere a certain amount of methane, beyond which they'll have to buy permits from somebody else—and this in an industry such as dairy, which is doing it so tough. It would be the final nail in the coffin to try and put yet another cost on top of them. Of course, all the noble people will come out and explain to them the ways they could get round it, deal with it or manage the government tax.

Another problem we've got here is that, while—I think—Nola Marino is a dairy farmer, I don't think there are any others in the whole building. Maybe I'm wrong. In fact, to be quite frank, these days you can't find an awful lot of farmers, or people who are actually on the land, in this building. So the problem we have with policy coming forward from here is that it's predominantly driven by a construct of the policy desires of an urban constituency which are ultimately then foisted on a rural constituency. Things such as zero carbon emissions don't really affect a white-collar workforce in inner suburban areas. They don't really make an awful lot of difference in the short term. In the long term, as you put more and more pressure on your real income earners, they do, because the actual money that's floating around the country starts to dry up. But in the short term they don't affect an inner-suburban white-collar workforce, so they can virtue-signal and feel morally responsible in going forward with a policy that sounds great but doesn't affect them. But, in regional areas, it does affect us; it affects us massively, and it affects blue-collar working areas massively.

When the member for Hunter talks about zero carbon emissions, he has to remember that in his electorate—and I'd say it's probably similar for the member for Paterson and for Labor Party members who want to be members for Central Queensland and North Queensland—that is just a clarion call that you don't want your constituents to have a job, and they're seeing it as such. We're also seeing now that, in the realm of this debate about so-called carbon policy, climate policy and whatever you want to call it—we managed to cure climate change in New England. I know the Deputy Speaker was going through there the other day, and he almost froze to death. Maybe we're doing a good job, because it's been snowing up there. Mind you, I'm waiting for someone to blame snow on climate change as well! It's just a matter of time. What we have to understand is that if we go forward with these policies we are going to be putting people out of work. We should realise this with things like the recent election in Eden-Monaro—Labor with a record low vote, and on our side we didn't win the seat.

This bill should sail right through. It's agreed by the Labor Party, the National Party, the Liberal Party and industry. Basically we're oxygen thieves at the moment by talking about it, but it allows us to touch on some other issues which are just as important, such as water policy, which is vital to the dairy industry. Access to water is crucial whether you're in the north of the nation or in the south of the nation. One of the biggest political issues that we've had, especially in areas within the Murray-Darling Basin, is dairy farmers' capacity to get access to water. If they don't get access to water, we won't have a dairy industry, no matter whether you're exporting it or dealing in the fresh milk market. That's something I think has to be addressed in a real way, in a way that shows real respect for places such as Shepparton, Coburn and Mildura. We have to have a water policy that underpins our agricultural capacity to produce for a domestic market and also allows us to do our very best in an international market.

In closing, I'll say one thing. We've spent an awful lot of money during the COVID crisis. We see our gross debt grow. I think it's $744 billion today, or it was last time I checked on AOFM. I remember, when I was the shadow minister, getting booted from the job because I'd had the gall to say the debt was going to break through $100 billion and that, if we didn't change the trajectory, it'd go through half a trillion. We can leave that behind! It's three-quarters of a trillion now. But we are going to have to have an economy that can actually pay this back, and I haven't heard a plan from anybody for how we pay this money back—not one.

Going back, if you want to hear pseudoprofundity and Latinate mysticism, as I started with, then it's people telling you that they are going to pay back the debt by, I think, 2061. My God! Most of the people in this room will be dead. And between now and then there'll be further depressions and recessions, wars and pandemics. So we've got ourselves into this position whether we like it or not. I said back in 2010 that we wouldn't pay any of the debt back. We haven't. I said the trajectory would continue on. It did. And it's not going to change.

If you did want to pay it back then water policy is not the cure, but it is one of the component parts. We should've been spending the money on major infrastructure items, such as the Bradfield scheme, which moves money not to Lake Eyre but actually into the Murray-Darling Basin to try to secure that water supply for the further development of Queensland and of the western areas of New South Wales, to actually secure water and funds for the dairy industry. If we had done that then we would have created our own Snowy Mountains scheme, which was the economic stimulus after the Second World War. But now it has become more difficult because we are getting further and further into debt. I hope we, the coalition, are maintained as the government, but, if we are not, it's going to be the Labor Party's problem as well, and they go to an election and make a promise without someone asking the obvious question: 'How are you going to pay for that?'

So we have to grow our economy. That works side-by-side with the support of the dairy industry. One of the biggest components of that will be water policy, and one of the vital components of water policy is water infrastructure, which is going to require people to put away their sneering and sniggering and understand that you'll have to get water from where it's in abundance and move it to where there is a paucity of it. We've got rain at the moment, but that will pass and another drought will come. Water's in abundance in the north of our nation and there is a paucity of it in the south of our nation. That is just a historical fact about Australia. If we're going to create a stimulus package then one of the parts of the package that will actually create a legacy and a benefit for Australia in the very, very long term—just like the Snowy Mountains scheme did—would be to get underway the Bradfield scheme.

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