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

I think that it's really important that, whilst you are the member of your electorate, you operate in such a way as to make that electorate a small country for which you, as a servant, try to do the very best job you can. You work towards a theme and within that theme you try to bring delivery. One of the key themes that has been part of my role in parliament, certainly my role in New England, is dealing with water infrastructure.

We have now put quarter of a billion dollars at a federal government level towards Dungowan Dam. This is a vital piece of infrastructure for the security for the Peel Valley and the city of Tamworth, which is probably the epicentre or the most prominent area of growth in the seat of New England, which also includes the Upper Hunter. It was important. Whilst we already have Chaffey Dam, if we hadn't have expanded Chaffey Dam—I was very happy to be part of that program when I first arrived back home to New England—then the city of Tamworth would have run out of water. We took it from 60,000 megalitres to 103,000 megalitres. As we speak today, I believe it's about half full, which would have been more than three-quarters full in the old volume. But it's not just Dungowan Dam or Chaffey Dam; it's also other pieces of water infrastructure, such as the first lot of funding for the Mole River Dam in the north of the electorate, the Quipolly Dam in the south of the electorate, the upgrade of the Tenterfield water treatment plant in the north of the electorate and also the recreation capacity of the Dumaresq Dam at the centre of the electorate. Water infrastructure is so vitally important.

If it's not dams, it's the upgrade to the Upper Horton water supply in the west of the electorate. They're drilling a new bore and installing tanks and pipe work to the underground. This assists the town. There's also the construction of a new swimming pool in Bingara. Upper Horton is basically a small village. It's got the Upper Horton Sports Club. It sort of sits between Bingara and Moree on the back road. But this shows that we even reach into those small areas.

I think that's the next step. What I'd like to discuss is how we look after the smaller areas. There are many, but I'll pick out one. I grew up in the hills in a place called Danglemah. I still live there. Across the hills from us is a place called Weabonga. It is like it sounds: it's been forgotten by time. It used to be a gold mining town. I made it a goal that as a member I would do things for those communities that I grew up in. At Weabonga we got a new mobile phone service in. We had about 30 people, I'd suggest, in an area where no-one believes anybody lives that turned up because they wanted improvements on that mobile phone service. They were very thankful that they got it. The fact that Weabonga could get a mobile phone service is an incredible reflection of the Nationals and what the Nationals do in regional areas. Our focus is particular and pertinent to the people who live in the weather board and iron on the edge and outside the spotlight of the urban electorates. Whilst I was there, I said, 'What else do we need here?' Their hall was falling over and they needed a community focus point. So we went to work again and we found money to build a new community centre, a new hall, which is going to be incredibly important for the people of Weabonga. It was $82,500 for the Weabonga hall development.

There are a whole range of areas, whether it's tennis courts, whether it's water facilities, whether it's swimming pools, whether it's walking tracks—these are all vitally important. But roads and bridges are also seminal to how we get the commerce and the economy of New England also going ahead. We have been instrumental in such things as the Legume to Woodenbong road, making sure that that corridor that takes people from the tablelands down to the coast is upgraded. We have invested immense amounts of money in the New England Highway. In fact, I've almost taken people ad nauseam in showing them the Bolivia Hill realignment. But it's not just that. It's the money we have poured into Waterfall Way between Armidale and Dorrigo, or the work that we have started on between Kempsey and Wollomombi. Unfortunately with massive the rains we're back to square one. We poured money into the second range crossing over the Liverpool Plains between Merriwa and Willow Tree—which we have to start working on again because of the weather.

There are other roads as well and other bridges. Retreat Bridge is a classic example of the Nationals once more investing away from the major spotlight. Retreat Bridge is on the most direct route between the city of Tamworth and the city of Inverell. It's near Kingstown. To open up that area this bridge basically needed to be replaced. We got more than $1 million to make sure that we worked on that bridge. There's also Fishers Bridge. There are a number of bridges. I might remind people that over half a million dollars of the funding for Fishers Bridge came from the federal government. As much as I admire my state colleagues, we've got to know where this money comes from. It was the Paddy's Flat Road bridge that we put money towards, as well as the Martin's Gully bridge and the Benama Bridge. There's the Yarrow Creek Bridge replacement on Mount Mitchell Road. All these bridges go on the back of everything we have done before, such as the Munsie Bridge in Uralla. We could go right around the electorate and show you the bridges in New England that we have replaced—so that we build the economy, so that people have capacity to move B-doubles of cattle across to get them to the saleyards. The wealth from the saleyards flows back to the hairdressers, flows back to the tyre businesses on the high streets of the regional towns in New England.

Sporting infrastructure is so important for the social fabric of New England. Sporting infrastructure also has to take into account the populations. In places such as Glen Innes we've put a substantial amount of money for the upgrading of the Glen Innes netball facilities—in excess of $1 million towards that facility. Glen Innes, of course, has a bigger population. When we go to Sunnyside Hall Road, which is west of Tenterfield—which is really a location more than any sort of town—we've put in money that assists them to upgrade the tennis courts. The great thing about tennis is you only need two people. Two people and an esky and you've got a tennis match. This is important in keeping the fabric of those small communities going. It shows them that the Nationals reach out to the small areas to make sure that their lives are better. You could see it in the Ben Lowmond Hall. You could see it in the Bundara hall. You could see it in what we've done at the Deepwater Hall. We know these halls are the focus of those towns—of Christmas celebrations, of school celebrations. We have put the money in there because we acknowledge that Australia is not just a story about Sydney. It is not just a story about Melbourne. It's a story about those people who live towards the edges, in areas that're not recognised. We've put money in there to make sure that we show them a sign that they're part of this nation as well.

People will always look at what you've done and they expect you to go into bat for them. They expect you to do such things as the chlorine mix at the Walka water treatment plant—yet another piece of water infrastructure. They're thankful for what you've done.

Back near where I went to school, Woolbrook Public School, we've upgraded what we call the 'stampede grounds'. We don't recall it a rodeo. We call it a stampede, which is basically a bush horse, bush stockman event. All the time I was there those facilities were never actually upgraded. They were quaint but they were probably out of date in about 1943. Now they've been upgraded. The community all went together to upgrade them. Everybody was working towards making sure that we got the best bang for our buck for what we've fought for. I do get a sense of pride being able to go back to a village like Woolbrook and see that there is advantage from what we've done.

Also, going along some of the roads there, there is sealing on either side of the ramp. One of the greatest annoyances in some areas is that on a public road the grader comes along—it can't help it—and pushes the dirt into the ramp, so the cattle just walk across it and you can't control the stock. But if you just put a little bit of asphalt on either side of the ramp, then the grader, when it's grading, has capacity to stop and not damage the ramp. The other thing we've had is trucks, looking after the railway lines, going up and down our roads and smashing our ramps. So it's great to get some assistance in trying to deal with those issues. When they're over their load limit they're supposed to use the gates, but they never do.

What is our vision for the future? We've got to have a vision for the future. Sooner rather than later, this nation is going to have to start thinking about what the path ahead is, and there are some major issues before us that this nation is going to have to contend with. We have seen the rise of China and, unfortunately, it is run by a regime, not a democracy. We have seen the fading of democracy across the world. We always believed that democracy would be the pre-eminent form of government and would grow into the future, but it has not; it's fading. And we are lucky and blessed that we live in a democracy.

However, we must prepare ourselves to live in a world where the superpower in our region is not a democracy but is unitary control. It is almost a tyranny, a new lineage, which, as we've seen in how the Uighur people have been dealt with, can be very belligerent. We see what's happening in the South China Sea. We see the recriminations on trade. So, Australia had better be a strong place. We have only one job in this nation: to make it as strong as possible as quickly as possible. If we believe in the ideals that I presume people on both sides stand for in this parliament then we must be able to stand behind them with a capacity that says that we will never be browbeaten, never be pushed down, never be silent, because we're strong enough to stand up for ourselves. That is our No. 1 goal. I say that, and this will sound pretentious, but our No. 1 goal is not about climate change and our No.1 goal, to be quite frank, is not about COVID; our No. 1 goal in this nation is to make ourselves as powerful as possible, as strong as possible, as quickly as possible, because you've got no hope of managing the other two unless you do that first.

So, how are we going to do that? We have to rebuild sovereignty—sovereignty in our capacity, in our manufacturing industry. We don't have a sovereign satellite capacity, even in our weather predictions. We use American satellites. We use three Chinese satellites. We borrow information from them. We use Indian, European and Korean satellites. Australia does not have them. This is, once more, a flaw—to think that if things went wrong, although people say it could never happen, we don't have the sovereign capacity, if other people decide to switch it off, to even get a weather report, let alone GPS. These are the sorts of things we ought to look for. These are the sorts of visions we've got to take forward. We've got to take the next step in the development of this nation. Taking water from the north to the blacksoil plains of western Queensland, into western New South Wales, to give a stronger environmental security to the southern parts of the Murray-Darling Basin, is a project that other nations would have done by now. But we are such cynics, and everybody finds a reason to snigger and laugh. Well, that has to be put aside. Our nation now has to take this forward as a program over the next 40 years and drive towards it.

With the Nationals, I was very proud of what our party did, when so many people sniggered and were cynical about the inland rail, saying it would never happen. Within the Nationals, with my colleagues, we negotiated a coalition agreement to get that money, and that project has now been started. It is being built—just as we started on decentralisation, a Regional Investment Corporation that no-one thought we'd ever get, and the Murray-Darling Basin medical school. These are the things, amongst many others, that we fought for and achieved. And now comes the time, as we're probably within about a year of an election campaign, at the very least, for us to start laying down a path and a vision for the future that stands on the foundations and the structure of what we've delivered in the past. I believe that with the work we've done thus far we have set ourselves up to do precisely that.

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