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

What we're getting now is, if you have a fence line—two foot six is how far you dig a fencepost down—you literally have to get cultural approval to put in a fence. We are seeing this now in other areas. What we have in regional areas and why we take so much of an affront to this is that we are always foisted with the requirements of the inner suburbs; these are requirements that they see as a virtue, when they're in the area which is the most environmentally changed in Australia—covered with concrete houses, tenements, high-rises and roads. Their lives don't change. Their lives stay exactly the same, but we get the wind factories. We get the solar panels. We get the cobwebs of filth going all over our land, which are the transmission lines. We have the poorer people who pay for the power prices that they cannot afford. As you bring this forward, you say to the people in our towns, in our weatherboard and iron: 'You deserve to be poor so that we can feel good. You deserve to have power prices you can't afford. The power goes onto the production of processing food, and that's all right. You can go through your shopping trolley and get rid of the meat. If you can't afford the mince, go to the pasta. We can do that to you because we're virtue signalling down here. It feels so good in here because we're on $200,000 a year plus. We can do this sort of stuff.'

But the lady who can't afford the petrol even to get to town now or who can't afford her power bill and so has to turn off the power, or pensioners who stay in bed because they can't afford their power—they're not worried about your 82 per cent renewable target by 2030. They're worried about the next power bill that's turning up on their table. When we see that smug look from Minister Bowen as he goes to the dispatch box and smugly turns around and gleams at the Labor Party—hasn't he done something clever? The clever cat! He's done something really clever: he's made life virtually impossible for people who cannot afford the basics of dignity in their lives.

Then we go to a macro sense and we see the virtue signalling. 'We don't really believe in coal. We don't really believe in gas. We've sort of got problems with sections of farming. We need transmission lines everywhere.' However, when they get a surplus: 'Oh, aren't we clever? Aren't we just the cleverest people on earth?' Where'd your surplus come from? There were three main things: coal, gas and low unemployment. Where did low unemployment come from? It was one of the legacies of the coalition government.

If you don't believe in coal, you don't believe in gas and you don't believe in surpluses, and when you stand idly by while they sat down Liddell—the government in Victoria shut down Hazelwood. You sit idly by. You don't even go up to AGL and say, 'If you don't keep that open and refurbish it, we're going to divest you of it.' No, you just sit idly by. Now you're part of this almost pathological religion. If you're not part of the 2030 82 per cent zeitgeist, you're somehow inferior. You're not wise. You're not part of the enlightened.

We're saying to the Australian people—and they are wising up to it—'If you've got a problem with your power bill, they're the people to blame over there. And them too—the Greens and the Labor Party are your two groups. Go have a yarn with them about the power bill you can't pay for. If you're a farmer in New England, in my area, actually in my district, or in the Upper Hunter, or the Wimmera, or if you go up to the back of Mackay, where they're going to basically knock the top off a hill—you know, we get knocked around if there's run-off from a sugarcane field into the Great Barrier Reef. That apparently is a great evil. However, the Greens can knock the top of a hill and put in wind towers, and that's not a problem. They can put a dam in and flood a rainforest, and that's not a problem, because it's the great god Gaea clause, which means that, if it comes with a wind tower, a solar panel or transmission lines, it's virtuous and to be allowed.

We're seeing now what're going to do, and the people out there have to get organised. The people in the Wimmera have to talk to the people in New England, the Upper Hunter and the back of Rockhampton and Mackay. They all have to start talking to one another and coordinating. These people, the virtuous here, are not going to listen to you until you do one thing: you turn up out on that lawn. That makes a change. That certainly changes things. When we hear that from here and the people are upset because they can't afford their power prices, they can't afford their food prices, they can no longer afford their rent, they're getting absolutely infected with transmission lines and wind towers in the whole structure of regional areas—

I put this to her, because I hear the member for Hasluck interjecting. You will propose wind towers for your electorate, will you, Member for Hasluck?

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