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

Whatever it is. You've got Mike Cannon-Brookes and Malcolm Turnbull swanning around saying how wonderful it is. They're putting people off. It's going well, but they've just retrenched 35. This goes to show you the fantasia of it. Going out like this is the height of naivety. It means that you've never actually been in business yourself, and that is a crucial difference.

Business is an interesting concept that, unfortunately, is rarely experienced on the other side of this House. If you're in business the first thing you've got to do is make a buck. There's got to be a difference between your costs and what you get, and in this global economy, what you get is overwhelmingly determined by the global price. I'll give you a few instances of where we actually do go alright in Australia: beef, wool, mutton, lamb, cotton, grain, iron ore, coal, gas, gold, copper, bauxite and education. When we look at these industries and we ask: 'Is the government helping them?' the answer is: no, you're working at odds with them. You've just brought in the Nature Repair Market. You want to turn 30 per cent of Australia back to scrub. How on earth does that help the cattle industry?

I was out the other day and had a whole heap of farmers on a front verandah. These are some of the things they've got to put up with. Do you know that, if a bushfire goes through plains country and all of a sudden, where there were no trees, gum trees come back—because bushfires germinate seeds—you're not allowed to clear them? You've got to leave them there. As a result, the land becomes completely and utterly unproductive. You will actually send people to jail if they clear them. Do you know now that, to get firewood from dead trees, people have to get a logging permit? This is the sort of Kafkaesque socialist insanity that has now become part of our economy.

Do you know that, if there's a drought and you go to dig a hole in a named creek—not dam the creek—you can't? So where you've got sand, you're left with nothing for stock to drink. This is how insane it's become: there is an area, Emu Swamp Creek, which is just a dry gully. The only time it ever runs is if there's heavy rain, and then it does so very temporarily, and it's a flood. There are 650 people who work at a blueberry farm on the other side of this creek, and they've got to move product out. The bridge goes; it just runs out. So they said, 'We'll just put in a temporary bridge of dirt,' and people came up, outraged. Why? It was in breach of fish legislation. Fish legislation! What fish was going up there? A grass fish? A flying fish? That'd be about the only fish that would have got up there.

Nonetheless—this is Kafkaesque; this is how it happens; this is what the Labor Party does—they came back and they said, 'Okay, you have to put in pipes.' And I said, 'Pipes! For what?' Nonetheless, they'd asked for it, so they put in pipes—big round ones for the pretend fish on the grass to somehow get through—so the fish could go up. Even if they do go up, I don't know what they're going to do. Are they going to go up and eat rocks? There's nothing there. So they put in the big round pipes. The officials came back. Outrage! They're the wrong type of pipes. They had to be square ones. They needed square ones for the invisible, pretend fish to go up a dry gully that never had fish to go to goodness knows where to do I don't know what. Then they say, 'But we believe in a manufacturing industry and we're completely sensible and this is all going to work.'

The coal industry is almost being thought of as evil. It's the evil coal industry. They can't mention it—'Don't mention coal! Don't mention the coal industry!' The fact is that it's the only reason we've got a surplus. They forgot about that part. All the investment houses are starting to say, 'Actually, the coal industry makes a lot of money,' and their shareholders and the people who are part of it say, 'Why aren't you investing in coal. My friends who are in the coal industry are making a bucketload of money and we're not?' All of a sudden they're changing a little bit, because people inherently, with their super fund, want to have some money at the end of it, and this is a great place to invest. Do you know why? It is because the world is buying coal. I hate to say it, but the world is buying coal—an awful lot of it, more than has ever been bought before, and at a higher price. But, of course, no, you can't have that. It's evil.

There's the cotton industry—yes, evil cotton. It drinks water. So what are they doing? They're taking water out of the Murray-Darling Basin. This is completely counterintuitive. These are the areas where, actually, if you were to invest and if you just let these people alone and you stopped putting your foot on their throats, they would employ more people.

Go to a boning room of an abattoir and you will see that it is the industrial Olympics as they go flat out. There are hundreds of people flat out working, and it's great. You get to see people hard at work. It's about going out there, listening and saying, 'We're going to help those in the meat-processing sector.' Are you doing that? No. Everything you do is about putting more caveats on how people produce beef. In fact, people and banks out there now have to have a net zero plan. Of course, this is inspired by government policy. Even farms have to have net zero plans. That puts so much pressure on small farms.

Do you know what? People now can't be a boilermaker or a fitter and turner or an electrician if they work in a coalmine, because they won't get insurance. Yet you say, 'We believe in jobs.' It's garbage. The last speaker talked about our universities and TAFEs, and these are great institutions, but they're not creating manufacturing jobs. These are not manufacturing jobs. They are the service sector, and they do a great job.

There's this counterintuitive Peter Pan fantasy, and we see it in its absolute, black-and-white form in country areas. Areas around us are looking like hell now. Complete fields of what was farming country are completely black with photovoltaic panels. It's being destroyed, as is the farming produce that came out of there. They say you can graze underneath these photovoltaic panels. Have you gone out and had a look at them? There is no grazing under photovoltaic panels, except by rats or maybe a couple of rabbits. There is no grazing going on there. What type of cattle would graze under there? Dexters? And they would starve to death. That's the fantasia of this policy. It's an absolute fantasia.

If we want cheap energy, we could go to water. Okay, we've got to comply with the fantasy. Let's look at baseload. Right, hydro—we're going to have to build ourselves some dams. No, we can't dam the creeks. Why can't we do that? It comes back to the fish. Apparently fish don't live in water! Let's come back to the real fish that actually do live in water. You can't do it. There's not a plan for a dam in the Labor Party—not one. If you want hydroelectricity, you've got to have a dam, and then you've got baseload power.

Ultimately we think, 'Where do we go?'

Let's think about where the rest of the world has gone and how they're doing it, how they're getting cheap power like the Fins, the French, the Chinese, the Indians and the Indonesians. Basically, every country in the OECD either has it or uses it, except us, and that is nuclear—nu-cle-ar; three syllables. So we say, 'Okay, let's go nuclear,' and they say, 'Oh, no, no, no, we can't do that.' Why? 'Oh, that's just thinking too much; we can't do that.' Why? Because they're happy in the cave of 1986! It's secure in the cave of 1986.

They have this vision that every nuclear plant is somehow Chernobyl, and they're not. That was a Soviet plant built in the late 1960s. It was a boiling-type plan. It was a graphite-moderated, dual-purpose reactor for the creation of, amongst other things, plutonium for atomic weapons. The enrichment percentage was 98 per cent. We're talking about three to five per cent enrichment, a different rock to boil water, to create steam, to turn a turbine. Black rocks, but you don't like them. So we're going to another rock, uranium, but apparently, that rock is immoral. It's immoral, like the black rock. What other alternative do you put up? Are we going to do it on windmills and solar panels?

Look at the power price. Forget about what the minister says; forget about what I say. The only truth you need to take comes in an envelope with a little window in it, called your power bill, and it is going through the roof. In the last quarter, it went up by six per cent. And they say, 'But it would have gone up by more without our subsidies.' Quod erat demonstrandum, QED, which means the power price is a fiasco. It would have gone up by over 12 per cent. And you reckon that's going to run a manufacturing industry. On what planet in the solar system can you possibly run a manufacturing industry with an energy crisis like that? We are out of control. I'll tell you the proof of how you're going with your manufacturing plan. This is simple. With all the dancing and prancing as the minister comes to the dispatch box, with his rather tight shirt and glamorous ties—

I know, I have no fashion statements. I've got no fashion. I don't pretend to have any. That's the difference. This is the thing. If your plan was so good, there are some very big companies out there, multiple billion-dollar companies, and these people would be lined up at the door to come to Australia. Siemens, BMW, Hewlett-Packard, Rolls-Royce, General Motors and General Electric would be lined up saying: 'We're going to Australia. They're so clever; they've got it all worked out. Go now because Mr Bowen's saying the power prices are going to go through the floor. Let's line up now!' Not one of them wants to come here. In fact, they're all running for the door. They've worked out that this place is a basket case under the Labor Party. It's a complete and utter basket case! How do they solve it? They say, 'Oh, we'll have a piece of legislation and throw a bucket of money.' It would be better to get in your Comcar and, as you're driving home, pour it out the window. That would have more efficacy than this policy, which we just can't support.

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