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

We arrive once more at the end of another year. It's been a tumultuous year, obviously. We had the bushfires at the start. We seem to have got through to the end of the drought, which is good. At the start of the year, we had a bushfire at the bottom end of my family's place and the other day we had the start of a fire at the top end, so we seem to be back where we started! Nonetheless, it's a much better outcome than where we were, because we do have feed and things are looking up.

One of the things that should always happen at this time of the year is the obligatory thank you speech. Sometimes it's nauseating—you can hear one of these speeches, press rewind, press play—they're all the same, But there's a group that always goes through without proper mention—of course, they're your branch members. The people who actually run your political operation for nothing, for free, whilst we are down here doing our job that they send us to do. I want to say a special thank you to number of them. One is Russell Webb, who is the FEC chair of New England, and his ever-patient wife, Gail, who has recently fallen over and broken her hand and had to go back to Newcastle to get it reset. Another is the local branch chair, which is and Ian Coxhead, and his ever patient wife, Liz, who does most of the work. I want to thank people right throughout my electorate, right up to the north with Josh Moylan, branch members right down to Aberdeen, people such Duncan McKenzie, Sonia O'Keefe out at Walcha, Gay Hammond up at Nundle and on and on it goes. All these people do all this work so that we can participate in the democracy that we have. And I just want to say a huge Happy Christmas, Merry Christmas, and a big thank you to them, because if it wasn't for them, I wouldn't be here. And I think of that all the time: what is the job that I'm doing for them today and how much more can we possibly get done?

I'd also like to thank my staff, the ever-patient Leigh. Hello, Leigh! He's down there in the room, watching this. Hi, Leigh! He'll put this on Facebook later on. Then we've got my media adviser Sam, who I yell at a lot. We've got Karen and we've got James and we've got Ryan, Who's coming back to work with us again up at Tenterfield. In the office, we've got the very Dutch Miranda Broekman, making sure that everything happens on time and precisely. We've also got Andra and we've also got Michelle—a great team!

We are very, very lucky. We are very, very blessed. It's a great team. For those in my office and for those in my branch and all those who are part of the Nationals team in New England, I want to say a very, very big thank you and have a very happy Christmas. We might go down to the Cockburn River and have a barbecue and a few sausages and a beer later on.

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