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

I'm an accountant who's been in practice and had my own practice. I worked in corporate, cost and tax and had my own business for about 10 years. I had about 600 clients. This document just confounds me. What I see in this document is obviously a document that people thought they didn't have to write. It's a Balmain budget brain burp. It is the tie you put on as you run out the door when you didn't think you had to go to work. It's like the homework that's been written by the student on the bus to school.

You have to have productive assets to underpin a profit and loss. You must buy assets. You've got to have productive and prudent assets. A prudent asset for a nation is dams, rail, roads, mines and ag country. They're the things that allow you to produce wealth so you can pay for your NDIS, so you can pay for your pensions and so you can pay for other policies that are essential. But this didn't talk to it. What it spoke to is how we spend money, not how we earn money. That is always a very dangerous outcome.

I will give you one example. We've never had a trillion dollars in debt, but we are going to get there now. The concept of a trillion dollars—it's such an easy word. But you can't fathom exactly how much debt you're going to have. If a trillion dollars was in seconds, it would be 31,700 years. If a trillion dollars was to be split up amongst the—I don't know—28 million people we have, that would be about $35,700 for every man, woman and child on their own individual credit cards with their own name on it. It has to be repaid. If you don't meet your interest payments on your credit card, you know what happens.

Ladies and gentlemen, your second-biggest expense now is the interest on your credit card. Do you understand what that compromises—the other things we could have done, from cancer research to defending our nation, that we can't do now because your debt is out of control? I said that maybe 15 years ago. I got sacked from the shadow finance minister job because they said, 'That's outrageous.' Then, ladies and gentlemen, it was $150 billion. I said: 'Be careful. This is getting out of control. It could go through half a trillion.' They said that was outrageous. They didn't know what I was talking about. You know—laugh, giggle, laugh, giggle. I got my backside booted out of the job.

Now you've outdone me. You're going to a trillion. You've really done well. Congratulations. Superb effort. We have a time right now where we should be, as this nation, becoming as powerful as possible as quickly as possible. It is not time for the vagaries of teals and Greens. There are only two sides—I have to say it—that have ever had the responsibility of running the show. It's the Labor side and coalition.

Everybody else can have marvellous commentary, but we've had the communist party of China off the coast of Sydney practising live fire. Do you get that? Do you get what that means? Where do you want them to go—into Sydney Harbour? When do we understand how serious this really has become? They circumnavigated Australia, probably working out where all our communications are. They're working out how they get to a place, what they can do and how quickly they can do it. We couldn't even get one of our own naval vessels out there to follow them. We had to rely on New Zealand. We didn't even know what they were doing. We had to rely on a Virgin commercial aircraft to tell us.

You look at this budget that follows it up—that's right. You would think it would be screaming at that issue. It would be working out right now what to do. It would take the Australian people into their confidence and say, 'We've got this. We know it is before us. The rule book is going out the window now. We are going to focus absolutely 100 per cent on this nation and protect it. We don't care.' Other things are great ideas. They are benevolent ideas and they are well-meaning but we haven't got the time anymore; that is beyond us. Whether it is our side or their side, we don't have that epiphany. We had better have it—in a big rush.

The other issue in our seats and in regional seats—in the member for Cowper's seat and my seat—is we have the poorest people in Australia. To be quite frank, they probably don't follow the budget; they wouldn't watch it. They would probably know very little about it. We actually do see them. We see people who are living in their cars and they are not drug addicts, not alcoholics. Some of them have jobs but they just can't afford to live in a house. In this incredible nation, with all our resources, more and more of these people are becoming destitute. When the floods went through Queensland and northern New South Wales, so many people who were living in parks didn't even have those at the end; they were gone. We have an obligation to those people as well to throw out the rule book. We have an obligation, as we make our nation as powerful as possible, as quickly as possible, to give them some dignity back in their lives and to understand what is the essence of this. How do you do it? Where do you go?

You have to have a fundamental structural analysis of your balance sheet—your assets and your liabilities. You know your liabilities are there so you have to get red-hot productive assets to drive the PNL to a profit because it is out of that profit that you get the capacity to help these people. One of the fundamental things that sits underneath our capacity to do any of that is energy prices. If you don't have cheap energy and you want to be competitive, you really only have two places to go. You can have cheap labour, but the member for Watson would rightly stand up and absolutely smash us on that. Cheap labour is not the solution. Or you can have your minerals, your base commodities, cheap but you can't because they are on the global market. They come in on the global market, are tradeable on the global market and that is it.

So you only have one strategic advantage—that is, cheap energy—but we don't have it. We have become infatuated with intermittent power. Intermittent power—res ipsa loquitur—speaks for itself. It is not working. It is now the most expensive power in the developed world. Getting more of it is not going to make the problem better; it is going to make the problem worse, much worse, and the chances of getting that lady out of her car and into a house becomes fewer and fewer because nothing fundamentally changes the dial. This is a part of the process. These things, our external threat and the internal dilemma, work together—that is, the external threat of what is happening geopolitically and the internal dilemma of how we manage to get dignity back into peoples' lives.

Does this budget address that? I fundamentally believe that there was a belief that they were going to call an election but for the ex-tropical cyclone, and this budget became an afterthought. Nonetheless, it should be a document that gives some respect to the job that it has before them, which is to take Australia to a better place, and it is not doing that. Last night in the Treasurer's speech, I never heard the word 'agriculture' once. It was never mentioned. I did hear the words 'climate change'. 'Regional development'—didn't hear that. When you think about it, where is our wealth coming from? These are not made in Australia. This is not made in Australia. Shoes are not made in Australia; although maybe they are if they are RMs. The car you drive, the fuel that is in it, the stereo at home, the phone in your pocket, all come in from overseas. Going back to your P&L and going back to your assets and your balance sheet, all that comes in from overseas. For that little piece of polymer in your pocket, called your dollar note, to have any value, somebody from overseas must want it. And what do we want off us? We don't make anything really, so what they want off us is iron ore, coal, gas, cotton, beef, grain, banking—there is a bit of banking—and education. I'll give it to you there with education. But overwhelmingly those are products from regional Australia. Given a document that was prudent and that was competent, whether you liked people in regional Australia or not, you would speak to it. You would speak to how that was going to segue into the national purpose of having a fundamentally cogently constructed document that would give us both the prospect of a better standard of living to deal with the cost-of-living crisis, and the capacity, in what are incredibly vague times, to defend our nation.

If you don't give it in that document, then where are you going to give it? Because that is your election pitch. Last night was it. There it is, Australia. There is the reason to re-elect the Labor government. Make a decision—do you believe that they've done their homework, or do you believe that was scratched out on the way to school?

If there has to be, within this coming electoral debate, a decisive and clear understanding of the predicament that Australia now finds itself in—very assertive moves must be made to deal with that issue. The courage is needed to put aside what are wonderful ideas but which are obviously not working, such as intermittent power, and just to say, 'We are only going to do one thing here. We are going to make Australia as powerful as possible as quickly as possible, and we're going to go to the person who is at the bottom end of the social strata and say, "We are fundamentally changing the structure of how we do business to give you a prospect of getting ahead, of getting out of your car, of getting back into a house and of getting away from the indignity of, basically, living"'—I've seen them around. There are no toilets, no police, no hospital and no sewerage around the house. Come out to regional areas. You actually see it. What we're seeing for this is $5 a week, truly. It's supposed to be the seminal item of where this electorate will go. When you watch television, they say there's going to be a debate about this—about $5 a week! In Peel Street in Tamworth, there is not a coffee shop where you can buy a cup of coffee for 5 bucks. Those days are over.

Is this as complex as this debate's going to get? Is this where we've arrived? To try and get some sense, we have to have, across the parliament, the ability to attract people to this place who have run a business. I think that is something that we are desperately in need of. We need to attract more people, on both sides, who have actually run a business, because it is that fear you get when you've run a business—when Friday comes and you have to pay the wages for the staff and you think, 'I don't know whether I've quite got it in the bank,' and you have to ring up the people who owe you money and say: 'You gotta pay me. You've gotta pay me. You've gotta pay me.' It is drilled into you—the realities of what happens when your budget, your document, is unsound.

In my life, in closing, there were three groups of people, and two fascinated me. There were the people who became exceptionally wealthy, and I had to deal with them. They were very lucky. My best client paid about $160,000 a year in the accountancy fees that I charged them. There were the very wealthy, then there were a big group in the middle. They're really nice people, but you don't really learn much from them. And then there were the people that went broke. They fascinated me as well. You look at those two different types of people, and what were they doing? The one fundamental thing you could say is that the people who get ahead are brilliant at understanding the value of productive assets, and they have a thing—it might be old-fashioned—called prudence. The people who go broke have an absolute desire for chattels—for consumable goods—and no idea about the value of money. They go broke, and we better get with the first group and away from the last one.

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