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

It is the obscurum per obscurius—‘to get myself out of here’—type argument. That is an interesting way of doing it. Let us make life so complicated that we cannot possibly do anything but throw up our hands and commit harakiri. The same argument is going to be quoted back to you on the cross-media ownership laws. Are you suggesting that the major oil companies will try to take over all the independents? Are you suggesting that all the independents are going to disappear and that oil companies would devise such a plan? Pray tell, where would you get ideas like that from? That cannot be right. The Labor Party cannot believe the sentiment that all the independents are going to disappear. Are you suggesting that the oil companies would be so clandestine as to devise ways of pushing the independents out of business?