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

This obviously is a well-meaning thought, but it's complete and utter fantasia. It's fantasia dressed up as a policy. If you want to create manufacturing, we all support that. There are three fundamental components of it. The first one is wages and labour relations. No-one is advocating for lower wages. With our competitive nature, we are at a disadvantage to India, Bangladesh and China, nor do we ever want our wages to be where theirs are. There is no competitive advantage in wages. Resources are the next component. Resources are at a global price. There is no advantage in resources. They're at a global price, less transport; that is it. The price of coal is the price of coal, and the differentiation is transport.

But there is one thing that we used to have an advantage in—and it's gone—and that was energy. Power was the mechanism that got us in the game. You can have as many subsidies as you want; it is not going to last unless you get your energy process under control. This idea that you're going to drive the Australian economy on a windmill is complete and utter fantasy, yet you're religiously attached to it. You're almost pathologically attached to it. If we got all the speakers up and asked, 'But what's your position on trying to drive Australia on swindle factories, painting the fields a photovoltaic black and covering us with 28,000 kilometres of new transmission lines?' and then they sat back and said, 'Oh, we want a manufacturing industry,' it'd be just childlike and illogical.

Let's look at your most recent one: you're going to set up a solar panel factory for Liddell. What's it called? Sunsol or something?

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