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

Every time we go down the process of trying to construct dams, like we have at Scottsdale—and I know the member for Riverina is very much across the dams that he was instrumental in building down in Tasmania—and the work we're doing with the construction of Rookwood Weir and other water infrastructure projects such as the Macalister Irrigation District or the Wimmera Mallee pipeline, the biggest problem we always have is the caveats placed on us by green tape and green legislation supported by the Greens. The Labor Party is obviously joined at the hip with the Greens. You can see this permeating right through and even into the left wing of the Labor Party.

I was amazed the other day to read a tweet by the member for Moreton, Graham Perrett. We are now funding driving infrastructure not only for big projects but for small ones, including roads that have not had major upgrades in the last 50 years. But Mr Perrett said:

My grandfather was a grader driver during the Great Depression. If a road hasn't had a grader on it since the Thirties why on earth would a responsible federal government make it a priority now while the population in the bush is decreasing?

That is the attitude of the Labor Party.

The attitude of the Labor Party is that they take the regions as a joke. They sneer and jeer at the regions. They think they're a joke. They don't respect them. They don't respect Central Queensland. They don't respect regional areas. They have never come to the dispatch box with a vision for regional Australia or a major piece of infrastructure for regional Australia. They have never come to the dispatch box to talk about these things because they don't have them.

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