Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to ask a question. It is such a shame that within this nation we have become so timid. We have become so timid and we lack what was once there, what was once the vision of those such as Curtin, Chifley and Lachlan Macquarie. We've become timid because we don't wish to grasp the opportunities that are before us. A CSIRO report that came out the other day proposed that we have the capacity to irrigate another 400,000 hectares of land. It requires the building of dams. But so often with these things we get back to revelling in the primacy of the bureaucracy and the god of inertia and not wishing to ever upset the status quo. Why we believe the status quo of where our nation resides at the moment is so superior, I don't know. I don't know why we haven't built Nathan Dam. I don't know why we haven't Aspley Dam. I don't know why we don't further develop the Fitzroy and the Margaret rivers in the Kimberley. I don't know why we believe that where we are is as good as it gets. I don't know why we have not taken the next step.

The next step is there before us. We have a drought happening at the moment, and we could better manage this now if, in the past, we had built the infrastructure to allow us to take that next step. But, right now, when we try to take a step towards a more effective and better outcome in the produce of our nation, in the GDP of our nation, our biggest problem is not the money, because we can get the money; it's not the engineering capacity, because it is there—our biggest impediment is always the internal bureaucracy which has built up over so many years and which puts the primacy on environmental issues over social issues and over the further economic development of our nation. We have to—not at some point in time but right now—say: 'Enough is enough.' The pendulum has to swing back in the other direction. The pendulum has to start going towards the path of common sense.

We have to have a debate in this chamber that is not on the minutiae of policy, the tricky games and the tricky words but rather on something that has a grander vision—a grander vision on which we can debate back and forth about how we are going to build the dams of the North, about how we are going to generate more baseload power and about how we as a nation have a vision for sealing, maybe, our third road across this continent. After close to 230 years of settlement post-1788, and noting that we have an incredible Aboriginal heritage, which reaches way back, over all the time that humankind has been on this continent, we have managed to have two sealed roads that go across this nation, one through Camooweal and one across the Nullarbor—and that's it. I reckon that is a little bit of an indictment. I reckon we are bigger than that. I reckon there is much more that we can do. So why don't we step out now and start driving for the new vision, for the new capacity to take us to the next step?

We heard the discussion recently about what would be happening here if La Perouse and the French rather than the English had colonised Australia. I put it to the chamber that, if other countries had colonised us, the things that we are discussing and finding so difficult to do now would have already happened, whether we liked it or not. But now we have to take the next step. Our population is growing more quickly than we ever suspected. We are now up to 25 million people. We didn't think we were going to get there until 2032, I believe. It is not going to slow down. It is going to keep on growing. Yet we seem to be sitting on the same infrastructure stock as before, thinking that it will do. So I say to this chamber that, in the midst of this drought, we have the capacity right now to not only deal with the drought but also start laying down the firm foundation blocks of what we are going to do next. It means that we have to have the epiphany: that the further and greater future of the Australian people resides not in our capacity to revel in the bureaucratic but in our ability to drive the vision for the dams, the inland rail, the Outback Way and those things that will deliver real wealth. And by so delivering real wealth to our nation, our nation will once more become a beacon that can shine in our part of the world, delivering our values to all those who wish to see them.

Ross Vasta (Bonner, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The House stands adjourned until 9.30 am tomorrow.

House adjourned at 20 : 00

Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

took the chair at 10:00.