Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I might start where the previous member finished off. The problem with the costing of the Inland Rail is that the Labor government has never actually told us how they came up with this number. It's this fantastic number that's been plucked out of thin air. There's no tabulation of how they arrived at that number. But what we can say when people are cynical about Inland Rail is that, if you believe in decentralisation and in not having people all live in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, you have to create the economic infrastructure for them to live elsewhere, and the Inland Rail does precisely that. It has done that in other parts of the globe where rail networks have been the conduit to the decentralisation process and to the economic advancement of those who are not doing as well as those in the capital cities. It would be an incredible blight on our nation and a reflection not only on inland areas but on Indigenous Australians if this major project were to be kicked into the long grass, like they've done with so many other major projects.

I'd also like to reflect on other infrastructure projects such as the Outback Way, which creates a direct road from Townsville, through Boulia, down through Laverton and into Perth. Seventy-five per cent of that workforce is Indigenous. If that project is to be put aside, then how can you say you're looking after Indigenous—in that area they call themselves Aboriginal—people if you're going to cut the projects that actually gave them employment and brought about economic development. We know that economic development is such a vital mechanism of social advancement.

In the coalition, the Nationals made sure that there were regional mayors on Infrastructure Australia, that there were regional people there. We also had people of economic experience and academic qualifications that go a mile long. They were on the board, but we also made sure that there were people there from everyday life, because we think Australia has to be represented in all its facets by people who have experience of all parts of Australia. That's why Infrastructure Australia's board had people from regional areas. Of course, the first thing the Labor Party did was get rid of them. It said, 'If you don't resign, we'll sack you.' That was belligerent and a forerunner of what they were going to do next, which was the cutting of so much of the money that had been put aside for original Australia. Some people say it was pork-barrelling, but the big investments were actually in Labor seats. Lingiari, Solomon, dealing with people in the Pilbara, the Hunter Valley—these were Labor seats we were putting the money into. We believed that if we inspired the economic growth of those areas we took the whole in Australia forward. That's why the Nationals drove the agenda to have those billions of dollars put into those vital pieces of infrastructure.

Where we find ourselves now is that, to be quite frank, the current government—and it would have been any government; it would have been us—has been slapped in the backside with an economic rainbow. There are record coal prices, record gas prices, record low unemployment, strong agricultural exports. These are the things that put the money in the bank that delivered a surplus. No matter how wise we think we are here, no matter how flashy your suit is or how colourful your tie is, Mr Bowen, that is not the thing that delivers a surplus. What delivers a surplus is mums and dads paying their taxes and the fortuitous position that Australia found itself in where, in a world where we say we're not using fossil fuels anymore, we found we had the highest demand on record. We were selling as much as we could at the highest possible price we ever did. So the money flowed into the Treasury because, with a corporate tax rate of about 28½c in the dollar, a corporate tax which meant that, basically, for all the companies making a profit we were a little less than a one-third shareholder of it by reason of the corporate tax rate, and that money came back to the Commonwealth. So the reason we can do the health issues, education issues, the NDIS issues and all the other things that people want to do is you've got to be an adult and understand the economic reality of Australia is we don't make Hewlett Packard, we don't have Boeing, we don't have the London stock market, we don't have Krupp or Siemens, we don't have Volvo. We have coal; iron ore; gas; cotton; beef; grain; education, but that goes in two ways; banking, yes, but it goes in two ways; but the big net winners come from regional Australia, and this is where the infrastructure has to be. As a cost accountant—I spent years as a cost accountant—I can assure you that if you want to make money, invest where you make money. If you want to lose money, invest where you're already losing money. There's the difference of how your business will go. We wanted to make sure that we invested in the capital assets that drove the economy to be stronger in the areas where strength was so well pronounced and so easily seen.

I also want to go to the oxymoronic economics I have seen in this budget paper. Apparently, in the next year the inflation rate is somehow going to nearly halve but real wages growth will go up to four per cent. We are putting about $180 billion into the economy, but it won't be inflationary. This is like saying I am going to freeze the ice-cream and cook the chook in the same kitchen appliance at the same time. It's just not going to work. It doesn't work like that. We are seeing a bearish sentiment on world economic markets, which would suggest the world is more likely seeing a decline in global economic activity. You don't want that, but I presume that sentiment is out there from the people who are much wiser than me and make a lot of money by going onto futures markets and taking positions. That would mean that it is likely that in the future the prices for coal, iron ore and gas are not going to be pushed up and there's going to some downward pressure on that. So the presumption in the budget is that they sort of shun these projects, but we're still selling an awful lot of them. If those economic circumstances arise, what are people going do with our coal? Stick it under the bed or wrap it up in cellophane and give it to their family for Christmas? It is a sign. It is absolutely linked to economic activity. Strong economic activity means strong iron ore and coal sales. Low economic activity means low coal, gas and iron sales. In Australia—boy, oh, boy!—we are linked to them.

For instance, the government say they want to have a manufacturing policy. That's great. Don't we all? It's as if the nation, regardless of its party colour, never wanted a manufacturing policy. We always did. But you have to have your seed stock right for that, and the seed stock for that is your input costs. You have a range of input costs. You have your commodities. They're on a global market, so there's no real advantage to that. The price you get them for is the price for which they could sell them either to you or to somebody else, unless you want to go completely socialist, like Cuba. We're doing a little bit of that and saying, 'You can only sell to Australians.' I can assure you that economically that does not work. It does not work in the short term and it most certainly is devastating in the long term. Then you have labour costs. I don't think anybody in Australia is punting for cheaper wages. We don't want that. We want people to have a good standard of living.

Then you have energy costs. That's where our strategic advantage always was. But we have lost that. You see, we have gone on this mad, mythical trip—well-meaning but mad and mythical—with the idea that we could replace baseload power with intermittent power. No matter how many times they tell us that it's all worked out well, your power bill tells you something completely different. Power bills have gone through the roof, not just for mums and dads but for businesses, including businesses that buy gas. The more caveats, imposts and impediments we put on that, the higher those bills will go. The more we get fascinated with the idea that wind factories festooned over our countryside, littering the landscape, connected with a cobweb of intermittent transmission lines over our land, are the solution, the more we are fooling ourselves. That's the recipe of the cake we've been cooking, which has given us the power prices we've got.

If we don't have that, what sort of manufacturing are we going to get? What person, when money can go anywhere on the globe, is going to say, 'I'm going to invest in Australia even though I could make a bucketload more money if I did it in Mexico, Bangladesh or another country that can give me a modicum of social stability and has a vastly greater cost advantage in how I do it'? In the past, one of our strengths that people would overlook was that investors would say, 'They're very reliable and stable and don't make erratic changes in policy,' but we've lost that one now too. We've become erratic. There was a premium that we were able to charge when we didn't have quite the best price but we were the most stable, but we are losing that with some of our excessive environmental policies, which are an impediment to people investing here.

I want to touch on a couple of things that it is so disappointing that we're losing. One is the Stronger Communities Program, which provided grants of up to $20,000. We had RSL clubs, men's sheds, women's groups and sporting groups that wanted just a small amount of money that could help them put in a footpath or a disabled ramp or fix up a toilet. With this Stronger Communities Program, we didn't have oversight; we had a local committee of people that would sit at a table and work out what was best for our areas. They made the decisions. But that's been scrapped, and that's a terrible shame, because, if you just saw the difference that $5,000 or $10,000 made for some of these groups, you would see that you would sometimes get, to be honest, more bang for your buck and happiness out of being able to fix a disabled toilet at the local showground than out of spending $100 million on a road. It's a thing that people really connected to, and it's been lost, and it's nasty and mean that they did that. It didn't need to happen. The Local Roads and Community Infrastructure Program is another one. That's gone. The Building Better Regions Fund? That's gone.

In closing, I want to talk about something that's very close to me, and that's Dungowan Dam. We now have 737s landing in Tamworth. Tamworth is growing—flat out. You can fly direct from Tamworth to the Sunshine Coast, to Brisbane to Sydney to Melbourne. It's growing because people are moving out of Sydney and into the country areas. But our water supply isn't. We almost ran out of water. It's only with the extension of Chaffey Dam that we managed to get through the last drought without running out of water.

If we hadn't extended Chaffey Dam—so many people argued about it; the booroolong frog, this frog, that frog, this skink—Tamworth, the major city in regional Australia, would have run out of water. They would have had to have brought in almost the equivalent of 1½ coal trains—about 80 carriages—a day, full of water, just to keep the city going. Dungowan Dam was imperative, as the city grew, to take it to the next step, to secure those jobs, to secure that standard of living. But it was kicked into the long grass. Now they've gone out into the long grass and jumped all over its head. It's gone.

When people come to Australia—and they're coming in at 7,000 a week—where do they live? Where are you going to put these people? If you can't get the infrastructure right in the city of Tamworth, I'll tell you where they're going to live: Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Here they come! The people they're going to bring in—I think it's 750,000 in 18 months; it might be a bit more now. Just so people understand, that is the city of Canberra, basically, almost two and a bit times, coming in, in 18 months. Think of all the houses in Canberra. We're going to need them across the nation—with the football fields, with the hospitals, with the schools and with all the accoutrements that are part and parcel of that immigration.

If you don't look after Tamworth and you don't look after Rockhampton and you don't look after Gladstone and you don't look after Longreach and you don't inspire people to go to Wagga or Geraldton or Alice Springs, then they're going to make a logical decision, as human beings do—and we're all the same—they're moving to Sydney! If you thought your road was packed before, wait till they turn up, because they'll all want a car and they'll all want a house and they'll all want to put their kids in school and if they get sick they're all going to want to go to hospital, as is their right, as they should be allowed to. This is short-sighted. What this government are doing in infrastructure shows they don't have a real sense—they don't have a statesmanlike vision—of where this nation goes and the infrastructure that needs to be built so that we can arrive there.

I conclude by saying if we have a government that wants to be a government for all, it must, once it obtains the Treasury benches, put aside its parochialism and partisanship and say, 'Actually, we have to govern for all people now, not just the people in our seats; therefore, regional infrastructure is vital for the growth and sustenance of our nation.'

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