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

We believe in a multiplicity of buyers, the multiplicity of sellers and the transparency of transactions because these are the things that give the individual the capacity to transcend through the economic and social stratifications of life to their highest levels, limited only by the individual's innate ability. It's called 'freedom', and it's a marvellous thing. Freedom allows you to say what you want. Freedom allows you to be who you want to be. Freedom allows you to hold an asset, whether it's your house or a business, and say: 'This is mine. Because I've got this, I've got security and I have protection.' But when you get things like this Nature Positive (Environment Protection Australia) Bill 2024—they never come out and say it's the 'socialism bill'; they always come up with this marvellous nomenclature. The 'nature-positive bill': who wouldn't believe in positive nature? Of course you'd believe in positive nature. But we have other things which are all part of this nomenclature. They always have this impending catastrophe which comes hand-in-glove with legislation and which always does the same thing: it imposes on the rights of the individual.

We've heard about renewables, and that sounds good. Who wouldn't support renewables? But they aren't actually renewables. In fact, when they finish with them and they have a period of obsolescence, these swindle factories bury them in landfill. It's intermittent power. And who sits behind it? Centralised wealth and people who have a bucketload of money—multiple billionaires who are turning themselves into more billionaires. It isn't your intermittent power; you don't own it. You have to pay for it, though, through your power bill. Every time you turn on that switch, money goes from you overseas to Chinese real estate companies, Singaporean companies or Dutch companies. It goes straight off to a billionaire.

And we accept that because the nomenclature says that you're a guilty person; you're below contempt and you aren't an enlightened person unless you unquestioningly believe in their right to take money off you. That's how they do it. They do it by virtue-guarding themselves and reaching into your pocket. And then they talk about wind farms. Farms? Farms grow carrots, peas and spuds. These are towers and transmission lines, all subsidised! They have capital investment schemes which are secret. You're not allowed to know how much the government is paying those billionaires to build them. It works like this, basically: no matter what they do, they get money. Even if they produce fairy floss, you pay them. If you're going to rip someone off, you need to say nice things before you do it. As I say, you need to kiss me before you go the next step—this is how they do it in a commercial sense.

Let's go to a deeper morality about this nature repair bill. This is about closing down the land so that it goes back to scrub. If you do that, you close down some of the capacity for us to produce food. The world is going towards 10 billion people. We are past eight billion people. Now, because we had the big green revolution back in the 1940s—fertiliser, better genetics, all started in the late forties.

Go back and read about it. We then had the capacity for the world to catch up to its food task but now we're falling behind again, so the number of people who are starving is now increasing exponentially. But you don't see them because they eat from the bottom of the food stack. They are in the Horn of Africa. They are in Central America. They are in the Pacific Islands. They are in parts of South-East Asia. They don't eat anymore. Well, they might get one meal every couple of days but there is a real paucity in their diet. The more we take food out of that food stack, the more people will starve. They are not going to starve just because Australia doesn't produce; we are not the food basket of the world. But we are on the moral positive; we add to that food stack. This says that, for the purpose of a feeling, you are going to remove food from that food stack. So absolutely you are connected to basically exacerbating the issue of starvation, and it is as pure as that. If you don't think so, are you adding food to the food stack or taking it away? Because if you are taking it away, you are exacerbating the problem because it is very connected.

This is paying for the philosophical zeitgeist of socialism. 'We are that far into our term, getting close to an election, better fix up the live sheep trade—close that down. Better shut down some more country and put it in the hands of the state.' You don't even need to buy it; you just put so many caveats on it that ipso facto the state is the owner, and that is socialism. That is all it is: socialism—the social ownership of assets. That is what this is: 'We need to pay these people off before we get to the election, square the accounts with them.'

We have also seen the Murray Basin Plan. We have to save the Murray River. What happens? We stop producing food. It is really simple: we stop producing food. We remove people's opportunity to get ahead. Overwhelmingly, the people who become farmers didn't go to university, many of them. They are just people who, by the sweat of their brow, got ahead. And if it is not them, it is the contractors who work for them.

I just got off the phone. I heard about another form of socialisation. Up there in the Hunter Valley, protesters are sitting on the railway line so we can't move coal. They are doing that because they believe it is morally proper that somewhere in the world they can't turn on their lights, can't afford their power. They want to shut down the coal industry. Once more, it is for the moral paradigm—I want to save the world. But in saving the world, there is a pensioner somewhere who can't afford their power bill right now.

New England gets cold—very cold. Woolbrook, where I went to primary school, cracked a record once. It got to minus 17. That's pretty cold. At minus 17, if you leave the window open, you die—a very simple equation. People who are poor, and there were a lot of poor people in my area, have to stay warm, so they either cut firewood or turn on the heater. Poor people have poor electrical appliances that cost a lot of money. They have poor cars that cost a lot of money to run, they have poor electrical appliances, and we moralise about making them poorer. We think it is morally good that poor people become poorer, and that is exactly what happens.

It amazes me that we say we want to look after Indigenous Australians—they call themselves 'Aboriginal' in my area. A lot of poor people in my area are Aboriginal. I know them very well—very well. They're the ones who are hurt the most. But we don't worry about that, because it's not the kind of vision we want. We've got a different vision of what we want to see. These 'nature positive' bills are really just another mechanism for socialism to creep, by caveat and by addendum, further into the capacity of private ownership.

We've seen this with vegetation management. Once upon a time, the hydrocarbonaceous material that rests below the land was actually owned by the landholder. The gas, coal and oil were owned by the landowner. Then, through laws, they said, 'It's proper that we vest this in the state,' and they did. But then the war ended and they never gave it back; they just kept it. The last part of that was under Neville Wran. Then it became an environmental issue, a biodiversity issue, and they decided to take the vegetation—the trees you owned. They didn't pay for them; they just took them. They just made laws: if you touch them you go to jail, literally—but not the swindle factories; they don't. They can do whatever they like. That's the billionaire lobby group, the intermittent power lobby group. They are very powerful. They have orange lanyards and they get whatever they want. They're very clever. When you've got big money, you've got big lawyers and big solicitors and you go a big way in this building. You can basically buy what you want. And they say, 'Don't argue about it, otherwise you're a denier. You don't believe. You're contemptible.' We lost the vegetation and now this is the next intrusion. We still pay the rates, we still pay the insurance, we still have to try to employ people and somehow produce food, but more and more of our lives is owned by the state or controlled by the state.

It's great to see the member for Parkes here, who's now in the New England electorate. I say to my side: you've got to understand why you come into this building. If for nothing else, it's your belief in private ownership, the liberty of the individual—that you can go unmolested through life; live your own life, not be ruled by the state, not have another boss; live by your own corporate manual, not the state's corporate manual; dress in your own uniform, not the state's uniform; go to a job on your own terms, not the state's terms; own your own house, not have the state own your house or your property; get the state out of your life and be free. Be free. Enjoy that freedom. It's a fading concept across the globe.

Be very sceptical about things such as this, the 'nature positive' bill. Any time you see that euphemistic nomenclature, start looking very closely at exactly what is going on. Be the cynic. There is nothing wrong with being the cynic. Be the cynic and ask the questions. Don't blindly accept that intermittent power is renewable. Don't blindly accept that wind funds are farms. Don't blindly accept that a whole heap of private overseas companies, billionaires, are trying to look after you when they put in intermittent power. Don't go without question. Ask the questions: 'Who are you? How much money are we paying you? What are you actually doing? Are you really looking after the environment, or are you making yourselves a bundle of money?' If you come to the conclusion that they are, call it what it is: 'This is a swindle. It's not environmental; it's a swindle. You're swindling me out of my dough. That's what you're doing.' And when you see this, which goes hand in glove with that, just be cautious.

I don't support this, because I've been around here too long. I've seen this game too long. I'm telling you: when you fall down this trap, you become the endorser of socialism at the expense of private enterprise and freedom.

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