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

It is amazing. The world has gone upside down. I want to tell you about my life as a grazier in the New England area. Every two years, I have to fill out the Livestock Production Assurance form. This is for livestock that could be exposed to sites or sources of unacceptable contamination from persistent chemicals, pathogens, recycled water or physical contamination. Basically, we have to fill this out to keep you safe, so that if we send you food we don't hurt you or harm you. This is one of the questions that we've now got. Question 2.8 is 'Do livestock have access to leaking electrical transformers, capacitators, hydraulic equipment?' I understand all that, but then come the clangers: 'Do they have access to solar panels or wind turbines?'

What else do you want? We've got these photos of frolicking sheep and grazing cattle around what the accreditation form itself says is toxic. That means we can't sell it to you. Here are my answers: 'Yes. No. I'm now aware and making plans to restrict access.' What do we do when a wind turbine, one of these swindle factories, is on our border, blowing particles and microplastics onto our land? What are you going to do about the cadmium and lead—the heavy metals that are in the solar panels? Our own government accreditation processes require us to move the stock off the area. This is an absolute stroke of genius: we are subsidising billionaires, multibillionaires and multinational companies, through the Capacity Investment Scheme—secret agreements—to come onto the land and turn it into a toxic site, so much so that we can't put stock on it.

There's the fact that government doesn't pay for the rehabilitation and decommissioning, so what happens is that they just fall over in the paddock. It costs between $400,000 and $600,000 per tower to pull them down, after they've built them, and if they've got a structural problem it's about $1 million. The value of decommissioning the towers is more than the value of the land. The land has a negative value. There's the fact that it's intermittent, meaning that it goes and stops, goes and stops—how would you like your fridge to go like that? It wouldn't be too good for your health. There's the fact that no other country on earth has been able to run its economy on intermittent power. And now we have the slight problem that they're toxic where they stand. We are subsidising the conversion of a swathe of the countryside into something that you can't graze cattle or sheep on. This is amazing.

Every country has a time where it does something that is just bat-poo crazy, and this is our time. It's the intermittent power swindle time. There was the tulip mania of 1637 in Holland. There was the South Sea Bubble of about 1720 in England, where they started buying and selling debt, actually using their own shares as leverage to buy more shares. There was the sale of the island of Run, in the Banda islands, with the Dutch deciding it would be a great idea to exchange Manhattan Island for it—another stroke of genius. But they won't be alone, because Australia will be able to go forward in the future and say, 'Yes, and we decided that we were going to power Australia with a windmill.' People will look back and go, 'That can't be right.' 'No, no; it's true.'

Why are they doing this? Here's the trick. This means that billionaires get the capacity to provide you with a vital service, electricity, where you can only buy their product, intermittent power, at their price. A lot of people in here have fallen for that. The outcome of this is you get ripped off; you get gypped.

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I remind the member for New England to direct remarks through the chair.