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

No, you've actually got to follow the media. He's been in the media. He's been everywhere on this. He mightn't have been in the media circles that you listen to, but he's certainly been in the media circles of western Queensland and other areas. We need to pay respect to that. It's hard to break into Sydney media from Gladstone. But this is an incredibly poignant thing.

I rarely speak to amendments. But I'm speaking to this one today in the hope that, at this stage, you consider exactly what you're doing.

It is going to look—I'm being very polite—confusing. And I warrant that you have great concerns about the water issues in one area. But this is exactly the same thing; it's a water issue. The only difference is the direction the water is going. We're not talking about taking water out; we're talking about putting water in. But if we foul the resource, it won't really matter what you do with the water—whether you take it out or not—because it'll be unusable.

Also, there's a sort of commercial nuance behind this. If you actually look at what Glencore can make out of this, they can make, basically, billions of dollars—billions of dollars, out of something that could be to the detriment of, and could cause the destruction of, a large section of the Murray-Darling Basin. They'll basically get paid a credit for what they're going to be putting into the Great Artesian Basin. I think it was a really neat trick by some big corporate minds and big corporate accountants to come up with this, but they've come up with this at the behest of those getting a return. This will leave bereft the people of western Queensland and western New South Wales, and others, right down into sections of South Australia and up into the Northern Territory.

So just really think about this. You're about to go on the record, and you don't want to be on the wrong side of history.

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