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

To be quite frank, I was given this adjournment slot and was wondering what I'd speak about. Then something came to me. On 29 October 2004 I was elected. That was 20 years ago. It was a funny election. No-one gave what was then the Queensland Nationals a chance. We had lost the Senate seat to One Nation. There were the Australian Democrats who were still at work. No paper gave us a hope. To be quite frank, during the election the Liberal Party campaigned against me.

The first thing I would like to say on this is thank you once more to the people of Queensland who originally elected me and a huge thank you to all those people in any political party who help you on your way, who stand behind you and who never get paid. They are amazing people and I still ring them up and talk to them in western Queensland to find out what's going on. A lot of them, to be quite frank, have now passed away. I'd also like to say sorry to all the people that I hurt along the way; that inevitably happens in a political career. You should always remember those who helped you and those who you hurt.

I also want to briefly reflect on some of the issues that were important then and are still important now. The first is the importance of the family. No-one's perfect but the family is a great structure. If you haven't got the family structure right then trying to create a nation on top of that is incredibly difficult. You have to respect the structure of the family and do what you can to support them.

Even in 2004 there was the issue of the rise of totalitarianism. There was the concern of where Communist China would end up, and that concern has actually grown. What was seen at the time as scaremongering and ridiculous is now seen in its fruition in so many areas. If the trend is to be observed, we've got to be incredibly careful about where this nation is. You can lose it. If you are not diligent, you can lose this nation. That's more important than any other issue, because that's the one that will lose you your house, your mother, your father, your wife, your husband, your daughter, your superannuation—the whole lot. That's one of the paramount issues. I believe it's held on both sides of the House, but we've really got to focus on exactly how we sustain ourselves because the comparative power now between totalitarianism and democracy is vastly more scary and more evident than it was before the Second World War. Nazi Germany did not have the comparative power that the United States of America, England, France and—after Operation Barbarossa—the Soviet Union had. Most definitely, the comparative power of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea is vastly in excess of what fascism was before the Second World War. So we have got to be focused on that.

There's the power of small business to provide freedom for the individual. Big business gives you a job, but small business gives you a career. It gives you that sense of freedom to be master of your own ship, and that is getting lost.

There are the rights of the individual. The individual doesn't have rights unless they have private ownership over property rights. These have been diminished more and more, taken away from people. There's the protection of the individual by law and order. Law and order is a huge thing in some areas. People feel threatened and scared. They feel more threatened and scared than they used to and you can see that, whether it's from Garbutt in Townsville down to northern New South Wales or right down to the western suburbs of Sydney. People should not feel scared.

There's the ability to express views. It's for others to debate your views and not to diminish or denigrate you because of your views. There should be an open discussion and debate of the issues. One of my big issues that brought me into politics, and I have to stand behind it, is that nobody has the right to kill you the day after you were born and nobody had the right to kill you the day before. The right of the individual is to be sanctified and to be held in the highest process. No-one has the right to take my life without my permission. You may have a duty of care but not a right over my life.