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

I must say it's a pleasure to be in this building today. I've been rostered off for most of it, but I promise: if there's a vote, I'll leave.

The reality that we now have is this. We are walking into a mountain of debt, and it's a debt that the Labor Party, if they had their way, would actually make even bigger. That means that we're going to have to have a reality check, not on how we got into debt but how we're going to get out of it. Getting out of it—and this is one thing I don't hear anywhere—means you're going to have to have some very honest conversations about where you spend money, where you invest money and where you intend to get a return. So the future is to be one of debt. There are threats from overseas that are becoming paramount, and we're seeing more of them, especially from China. We must have exponential growth to try and bring our economic circumstances back into something that's manageable. And, where the government invests, it has to get a return.

It's an unfortunate reality that, if you just skidded through on an arts degree, you probably would have been better off doing a trade—becoming an electrician or a carpenter. I'm an accountant. I've done the books for both, and I can tell you which ones make more money. Basically, people who are competent in the trades make substantially more money than people who have a matter-of-fact degree, especially an arts degree. So this is the reality that we have to deal with, and if we didn't have the debt that was started right back in the issues surrounding the GFC and the stimulus package—and I might note for this House that I didn't vote for any of them, not one of them—then we could probably have a more generous capacity in a whole range of degrees. But, if we are going to invest, we must invest in where the future lies, and the future is going to lie in the STEM degrees.

Last night we heard about a new avenue opening up before us: how affordable it's going to be to launch a satellite. We're seeing private companies coming into this space, whether it's Virgin or Elon Musk. They have capacity now to take part in that new frontier. Once it was the domain of the Soviets and China and NASA; now it's coming to private enterprise. One of the fastest-growing countries in that area is Australia. Australia has great capacity. But, for that, we need the people with the skill sets.

Another issue I always had was with the NBN and what happens when you invest in a technology. You can invest in water or dams; there's no replacement for that. But, when you invest in technologies, be careful, because they become out of date. Now, with the investment in the new technology, they're talking about broadband speeds from satellites of terabytes per second, which of course means that the NBN will be out of date and obsolete and you can book it as an impairment on your nation's books—an $80 billion or $90 billion impairment. Once more, to be in that space, you're going to need people in the sciences. You're going to need people in those degrees that are at the cutting edge.

In the future of this nation, one of the great strategic advantages we'll have will be in agriculture. But you are not going to survive in agriculture unless you're at the very top. If you think you're going to just be in agriculture then you'll just be in agriculture with Somalia and Kenya and Mongolia and a whole heap of other countries that are just in agriculture as well. But if you want to actually make a premium for our nation then you'll have to be at the very top, and to be at the very top means that you have to have the skill sets, whether they're in such things as genetics or nutrition or pastures. Those skill sets are absolutely essential.

We can look back through history to see why we are sustained at the moment and why we can sustain a world population of between seven and eight billion people. It's because of the investment we made in the so-called green revolution—the utilisation of fertilisers and other agricultural inputs. That's the only reason we have the capacity to feed the world's population as it is now. Now we've eaten that up, and, as we go on towards 10 billion people, we're going to have to make that next quantum leap. And where are the skill sets going to have to come from? I'm just being a realist: they're not going to come from the arts faculty but from people in the sciences, who have those skill sets. For the satellites, the people will not come from the arts faculty; they'll be the people with the skill sets in physics and chemistry and mathematics. The telecommunications of the future are going to comefrom people with those skill sets; they will not come from the arts faculty.

We're dealing right now with the COVID-19 pandemic , and people are in a race. We know the first person to develop a vaccine will own half of Babylon . They'll be the richest person in Babylon . And they're all lining up. We ' ve got Oxford University , and I note there are some concerns about the source material . M y own position, I have to say, is that I don't agree with material from an aborted person being utilised as the base material for the development of vaccines. I have to say that because it is my philosophical belief . But , moving on, w e've also got the Chinese who are moving forward in that space, racing forward ; we've got the Americans racing forward , and we've also got the University of Queensland racing forward. At this stage, i t looks like Oxford is at the front of the pack . And where are the se people coming from ; where are their skill sets coming from ? They're coming from the science faculties.

As marvellous as the arts are—and I love having a conversation with a person of letters ( I have written a book myself, not that I profess to be a person of great literary merit ) and of course it's an incredibly beautiful thing — we have to deal with the reality of the world we're about to walk into. Soon, in the coming years , our debt will pass a trillion dollars. And it isn't just a word. I t doesn't stop there. It keeps marching forward. We' re going to be leaving that debt for our children and grandchildren, because we ' re never going to repay it , and giving them the task of trying to manage it . So we have to provide the nation with people with the skill sets to do it, and the skill sets of those people, as much as we would love them to come from a knowledge of Shakespeare , are probably going to come more from a knowledge of chemistry and physics, mathematics , biochemistry , biomaths and those areas.

I'm not saying for one second there is not merit and virtue in any de gree. If we hadn't, way back before 2010, start ed spending money and putting it on the credit card like there was no tomorrow , then we wouldn't have to make a decision between this one or that one. But we do. We do. And those decisions and that corner that we're in are going to become more pronounced, whether we're the government , or the Labor Party and their associates are the government. It won't matter. The Expenditure Review Committee will follow the same patter, the same discussion , and it will be about this: s avings —o r , more to the point, 'Y ou don't have to worry about spending , because there ain't no money there. ' There is no money to spend.

P art of this process, and I'm trying to be as honest as that, as chair of the committee, is that there will be a need for the near ly four million degrees that the previous speaker, the member for Wills, was telling us about. There are no arguments about that . But we've got to make sure that we focus that investment by this nation—b ecause , overwhelmingly , university degrees are paid for by the taxpayer. They're n ot paid for by the student . And I've got four kids who go to university . They're paid for by the taxpayer and they'll be paid for by the taxpayer in the future. The person who's out on the building site as a labourer, the person who' s in the shed as a shearer, the person who ' s on the road as a plant operator, the person who ' s on the farm and never went to university — they're the people who are actually paying for the university degrees that other people are getting, and you 've got to ask what ' s fair to them. It's not just a position seen through one set of eyes. There 's the beneficiary , but there's also the benefactor —a nd the benefactor is the taxpayer, a nd , in many instances , the taxpayer never went to university . S o they also have a right to be heard in this debate and they also have requirements that need to be addressed.

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