Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This whole issue started with the biodiesel industry when we were lobbied by small farming groups coming into the office and saying: ‘We’ve got a major concern that this industry is going to go over. We have an investment in it personally and our towns have an investment in it as well. Socially, obviously, the community has an investment in it.’ Right from the start it was obscurum per obscurius. The Senate inquiry had to come down with a finding that there were things that needed to change in this bill because it just did not have the information. The Treasury’s submission to it was light, to say the least, and the position that you would have to come up with after that Senate inquiry is: ‘We need to look at this a bit closer. We need to deal with this with a bit more critical intent.’

Even tonight the mystery tour goes on. We have now found that, if people want to call it a loophole, it is going to exist at the end, it existed before it and it will exist after. Nothing has changed. There are only two things that are going to change with this—that is, who is producing the biodiesel and where they are producing it. They are the only two things that are going to change. Who is going to be producing it is large-scale producers. Where they are going to be producing it is right next door to the major refining plant. I do not know what their corporate nature or otherwise will be, but that is what will happen. The only result that I can gather out of that is that the developing bio-renewable diesel industry that has actually gained legs, is growing in regional towns and is broadening the economic base of those towns will collapse. That is what we know will happen.

Being a person who is from a regional area, being the senator in this chamber who is the furthest from the coast, being from an area that is involved with grain and being from an area where we have just finished putting in a wheat crop right now, and knowing our diesel requirements, this was a great industry. Finally, there was something that could actually pick those small towns up, and without a huge amount of capital investment it could have a strong connection into that whole community environment. There was a bit of a sense of hope with it. It was just a little glimmer of something that actually might work. They knew that in the long term it had to become viable, like everything else, but they just were not prepared for the lights to be turned off halfway through the show. That is what has happened. Halfway through the show—click—it is all over. The only justification people can give is: ‘We never intended that baby to grow; we never intended to have that child, and therefore we are going to shut it off now.’ That is just unfair.