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

What we have to understand is this. If we take this out, what is the future for Dirranbandi? What is the future for Mildura? What is the future for Shepparton? What are you putting on the table to give these people? What—a painted roundabout? A new park? What are you actually going to do for the people that you are going to send backwards? I can assure you: there will be farmers who'll take your money and go to reside on the Gold Coast; they'll be gone. But what will you do for the hairdresser? What will you do for the tyre business? What will you do for the schools when the children come out? It will put the schools at risk. What will you do for the hospital when there are not enough patients, so the doctor goes and the hospital is taken down? Do you realise, whilst you are talking about bringing equality to people in remote and regional areas, counterfactually and counterintuitively, you are putting forward a policy to make them poorer.

One of the greatest advantages in where I used to live, in St George, for quite a while, while I built up an accountancy practice from a zero start, and then ended up with about 600 clients, was: a lot of my clients were Indigenous. Do you know what they had? Businesses. It's a great way to get ahead, small business: hotels; cotton chipping operations; farm machinery contractors. These people actually got ahead. And they got ahead on the basis of access to water. But what you're doing is saying: 'No, we'd prefer you go backwards. We're going to send you people backwards.' I know the member for Parkes has got some serious Indigenous businesses in the city of Dubbo—yet another one from an agricultural precinct, and the agricultural precinct of places such as Warren relies on irrigation. So you're taking all these people backwards. And you're doing it on a theme. The theme is: to garner an environmental vote in sections of urban Australia, you're willing to send regional Australia under a bus.

I go back to the member for Watson. He was actually diligent enough to go out and do the research and understand this issue. As hard as it was, I believed at the time it was best to land a deal so we could remove the uncertainty that has surrounded this issue, so people could get on with their lives and accept the pain that was coming their way. And there was pain. There was massive pain from doing this.

But the 450, as stated by the Australian Labor Party, was premised on a socioeconomic detriment test. Now, that is a premise of what you are now removing. So I can only say: you care nothing about socioeconomic detriment in regional areas, because your own actions are deriding that principle.

Obviously water is an issue of importance no matter where you go. By the way, 425 gigalitres is what's in Sydney Harbour. This is a massive amount of water—450 gigalitres—coming out. We don't know where it's coming from. If they have to pull it from Goondiwindi, it won't be 450; it will be 4,500-plus.

See this speech in context