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

Mr Speaker—and to all who are listening before the State of Origin—Australia only has one job and that is to become as strong as possible, as powerful as possible, as quickly as possible. The world is changing. It is changing very quickly, but it's following a very reliable path in history with the waxing and waning of powers and how things ebb and flow. To become a powerful nation, you must have the feedstock of what makes a powerful nation.

Tonight, in inflation figures we hear that power prices have gone up by 6.3 per cent in the assessment of the increase in inflation. Now, I don't want that. This means in the best way—the best litmus test, rather than the to-ing and fro-ing throughout the chamber and everybody selecting things—we must ask this question: is one major manufacturer in the world making their way to Australia because they believe we've got it right? Not one. Who is actually leaving Australia? Our plastics industry, our aluminium industry, our oil refining industry—and now our food processing industry.

Those who might want to cause us harm would be sitting back and laughing at us. Now we have this intermittent power lobby that has hold of the government—billionaires wanting to turn themselves into multibillionaires. In my electorate, where a lot of this future obsolescence is going to be cast, we have the Hills of Gold Wind Farm about to be approved. The government's solution is swindle factories covering the horizon, up to 230 metres high to the top of the blade, and then fields of a new photovoltaic black in the valleys, and, connecting them, a cobweb of filth, of transmission lines. And there is this perverse belief, like tulip mania, that we are going to run a modern economy on a windmill.

Every now and then a country loses its mind, and we seem to be doing that right now. What is it going to take for people to understand the paradox, the irony, that we've just been talking about a so-called 'nature-positive bill' yet we are allowing this intermittent power lobby, who are so good at lobbying with the orange lanyards. They are so good at schmoozing their way through this building.

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