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

They do! There we have it. To the people of Macnamara: you are getting wind towers and transmission lines. Your member is standing up for you. He's doing a marvellous job! Here they come, a few transmission lines, buzzing all night over your house—a bit of a bee field happening there—and you're going to have your wind towers. Once they start rusting, they'll be squeaking for the rest of your life, or they'll be struck by lightning. Member for Macnamara, I don't know how you're going to go at the next election after that, mate, but it's not going to be as good as you thought.

So we've got this perverse world where we have a side of politics that does not believe in coal, does not believe in gas, is shutting down farming and believes in transmission lines—filling the place up with wind towers and solar panels and believing that there's some virtue in it, then claiming responsibility for a surplus that actually came from fossil fuels. When you decide that that is the crowd that you want to run the country, what you'll have is power prices that go through the roof, reliability that goes through the floor and the companies that own them sending the money overseas. It's a trifecta of virtue: power prices through the roof, reliability through the floor and the overseas companies taking these silly taxpayers' money overseas.

We don't make these wind towers in Australia. We don't make the solar panels in Australia. The money goes overseas. You're the suckers. You, the public, are the suckers. This is why we've got to make sure that we actually have an epiphany so that people have a capacity to basically understand where the problems in their lives have emanated from and to make certain that after that epiphany that we get some logic that comes in. Moving against this is part of that statement of moving towards logic. (Time expired)

See this speech in context