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

I think I come to this debate with some credentials, having worked on country-of-origin labelling, which was fought for over a long period of time whilst I was the leader and deputy leader of the National Party and then the former Minister for Agriculture, as part of a coalition agreement with the Liberal Party. That's part of the reason we brought it forward and managed to get it through. It was a bit of a battle at the time, and final negotiations were between myself and the former member for Groom, Ian Macfarlane. Every time you pick up a can of goods and see the triangle with the kangaroo in it and the bar graph below, I get a great sense of pride, because I can say I had very much to do with that. In fact, it will be a notation, when I leave here, in my memoirs of something I did. If I forget about the time I was in parliament, I'll go buy a can of beans and see what's on it!

That was just a statement of fact about exactly where something came from. If you actually want to make things in Australia, then you've got to be completely honest with how it comes about. You have three basic components. One is the raw materials, like gas, iron, coal and iron ore, that go into it. They're sold on the global market, and they come at global prices. There are no real tricks to them. That is what it is. Then you've got labour costs, for which you're at a distinct disadvantage to places such as Bangladesh, China or India, and nobody is suggesting we match them in labour costs. That is not what the great joy and blessing of living in Australia is about. It's about having quality of life in an egalitarian nation where you have equal opportunity to get ahead. The third part is incredibly important: it's the price of energy. That used to be our strategic advantage. That was how we did it. We had some of the cheapest energy in the world.

Other issues have come to the fore and take primacy over that. Other issues are now apparently more important than having the cheapest energy. We no longer have the cheapest energy, and there's no prospect of us ever having the cheapest energy again under the current party. The best way to ameliorate it is nuclear, and I'll get to that in a second. We have to be the adults and understand what we are doing. You can have all the modelling from here to gazoo, from the CSIRO, AEMO and whoever you want. But the trick in accountancy—these are the former sins of an accountant—is, as we used to say, to get in the helicopter of reality and fly above your papers, look down on them and see if they make sense. When you fly above the reality of our energy grid, we had a direct correlation between the increase in 'intermittents' and something else. They are not renewables, and that is a sort of benevolent nomenclature and a very good trick—to call it something it's not to make you feel good about it. They are not renewables. They are intermittent power. The places they are procured from are intermittent power precincts. They are certainly not farms. Farms grow spuds, beef, carrots and marvellous things like that. They do not grow steel towers. That is not a farm; that is an intermittent power precinct. That is an industrial area.

But, as we increase our draw on intermittent power, the price of power, unsurprisingly, keeps going up. In fact, last year it would have gone up by 30 per cent. I know the government gave some of the taxpayers back their money—temporarily—but it still went up, and there's nothing that's saying it's going to change. It is so astounding that we live in this pixie world—this absolute alternative universe. Last night I saw people earnestly look down the barrel of the camera and say: 'The way we're going to deal with our power crisis is to turn the power off. Turn off your air-conditioners. Don't have them on. Don't be cool.' It's almost a cry: 'You can't be cool, if you want intermittent power.' That's just a sign of abject failure.

My area is one of the poorer electorates. People can no longer afford to live. 'You can heat or you can eat,' as the saying goes. In winter, they can't afford the power bill to stay warm. In summer, they can't afford the power bill to stay cool. So they move out of the house. You do get people living in their car. This is not Australia. This is not the Australia we're supposed to have created. We've created an area where we've made the poor poorer, and we do it because we say, 'There's some virtue in it.' The Australian teachers federation says, 'It's virtuous to do this.' It's not. It's garbage. It's cruel, and it has to change.

When it comes to manufacturing, no-one is going to come here and set up a factory if you can't even keep your air conditioner on. No-one is going to take you seriously if you've got the highest power prices in the world. No-one's even going to look at you. You can have all the bills you want, but, until you decide to get the fundamentals right, it's just a narrative. It's just rhetoric. The people who can judge whether or not you can make something in Australia, naturally, are the major global manufacturers: Krups, Siemens, Microsoft, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, General Motors, General Electric, Rolls-Royce, Boeing, Airbus, Embraer from Brazil, and more. They'll determine whether or not you can make something in Australia. They've made a choice: the answer's no. If they thought that we were on the correct path, if they truly thought that we had it worked out—they're not dumb—they'd be lined up. They'd be saying: 'Quick! Go buy some industrial area, because we're going to set up a factory. Australians are geniuses! They've done it! They're power alchemists. They've finally done it! We're all going to go to Australia.' No major manufacturer is coming. They might be selling their products here, but they're not moving here. They might even assemble them here, but they're not moving here. They're not making them here.

Take the swindle factories—your intermittent power precincts. Why do I call them 'swindle factories'? It's because even things like the capacity investment scheme get a return despite the power that they don't produce. That's bizarre, and it's secret. It's commercial-in-confidence—a rolled-gold, taxpayer-backed government annuity for no real purpose but to make rolled-gold billionaires richer. That's what it does. Yet they've got you on a string because they say, 'If you don't support my right to provide a vital and essential product—only for me, the private person; not from the government—you can only buy my product at my price.' That's called a monopoly, and that's why they make so much money out of you. We sit back and say, 'That's okay,' because we know that, if we don't do that, the children will instantaneously combust. They guilt trip you into it. You've got to step back from them and say: 'Look, my position on climate change—for or against it—is irrelevant. My position on whether you are ripping us off is incredibly important.' If it's so virtuous, then it should come at a virtuous price, and it's not. The taxpayer is paying for this garbage by underwriting it, and then the pensioner in the weatherboard and iron is paying for it when it arrives there.

It affects the price of groceries. For the essential manufacturer, it must happen domestically. So the price of your groceries goes through the roof, your power bill goes through the roof and, because other people are saying, 'How do I get a return to maintain my lifestyle?', rents go up and then builders—we have builders going at home at the moment—say, 'Well, mate, the price of products is going up, so the price of your house is going up. It is no longer 1,300 bucks per square metre or 1,600 bucks per square metre; we are now talking about $2,000-plus per square metre.' The extension of the new house costs more, so guess what you have to do? You need to charge more rent to pay for it.

We sit back here living in this alternate universe because we don't pay for that. We don't pay for the power. As an accountant, I get a bill for that. As an accountant, I get a bill for my staff. As an accountant, I get a bill for my car. As an accountant I get a bill for fuel and my phone, but not here. There is this disconnect of the actual realities of what happens in people's lives. You have this aura, you have this protection, you have this life ring on that, unless you are really focus, disconnects you from the reality of the person in the weatherboard and iron and the pensioner who can't pay their power bill.

Going back to making things in Australia, if they can't afford to live, how do you think a smart organisation with rooms full of cost accountants are going to ever make any decision? When you make a decision in a big corporation, you have to get it across the board. It is called a capex proposal—a capital expenditure proposal—and there is a lot of work in it. If it is small, you have discretion and you can basically approve it yourself. At a certain level, it has to go to your branch line manager, but, if it is big, it goes to the board, and you have got to muscle it through the board. I was a very small-wheel cost accountant in a very big organisation called Conagra, a big American multinational in big food production. Big decisions had to go to Chicago and go through the board. These were small bald men who could make grown men run and cry. They were rather tough. You are not going to get anything through a board if it does not stack up and as a return to the shareholder—nothing. You have to actually put a proposal of the cost of energy at the time and going forward. You can try and hedge it. Sometimes for big things such as fuel, you can take hedging contracts out through Singapore but you would have to be buying diesel in megalitres. They look at Australia and go, 'Apparently they are going to do it with windmills and solar panels that are made in China—they can't even make them themselves.' We had one person who tried to make wind turbines but they have gone broke. They were in Tasmania. It is ridiculous. The people who make them for us use coal-fired power.

This nation has to become as powerful as possible in the full sense of that word as quickly as possible. With the rise of totalitarianism, the rise of China, the waning of democracies globally, yes, we have a duty to try broaden our economy is make it strong because the time is coming quicker and quicker when we will have to more and more stand on our own two feet. We have to be aware.

We want the United States of America to be strong, we really do, but they have got to the inversion point where their interest bill will be higher than their defence bill. We have to read the tea leaves for our children about what could possibly be coming their way. Yes, I want us to become as powerful as possible as quickly as possible and, yes, I want us to have a manufacturing sector. In the past—to be honest, it is all over now—I raised a very good argument at the time about why we shouldn't close down our car industry. I was derided, with people saying, 'Do you think this thing will make tanks if we get into strife?' And I said, 'Absolutely, 100 per cent, that is precisely what I think it is going to do.' But those days are gone. If we want to bring them back, we must become adults and flood the market with baseload energy.

Energy is like physics. It doesn't matter what you think of me, or your views. It is just physics. It goes out a little bit below 50 hertz. If it does not go out a bit under 50 hertz then it does not work. It is like arguing against gravity—9.9 metres per second. That is how it works; you have to get baseload onto the grid. We used to use it with the spinning capacity of coal-fired power.

If you want to do a proper analysis—I know the analysis they throw around; I had the CSIRO in my office the other day. You have to have a more fulsome analysis of everything, a complete system analysis, which, to be quite frank, would show that the cheapest form of power would be to the refurbish coal-fired power stations. Nobody disagrees that that; that's how you do the cheapest form. But, if we're going to go down the path of zero emissions, if that's the goal, if that's the grand nirvana, then you've got to have 24/7 spinning capacity at zero emissions, and the only way you're going to get that is with a different rock boiling steam to turn a turbine. We used to use a black rock called coal; now we're going to have to use a different rock called uranium. There are no other tricks to this.

The only other nation on earth, serious manufacturing nation, that's neither got nuclear power nor imports it via a transmission line from a nation that does is New Zealand. That's it. Even Ghana and Bangladesh are going down the path of developing a nuclear industry. Kenya, Uganda, Laos, Vietnam are all going there, and we're going to go there too; Australia is going to go there too. It's just a matter of time. We can get there now and be the smart ones developing it, or we can buy it like we've bought everything else from overseas at a later stage. That's what you're going to end up doing. You won't even be manufacturing your own small modular reactors. You'll be importing that with your car, your fuel and every other cursed thing that you need in your life in Australia!

See this speech in context