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

I do not know what the Labor Party are on today, but if they had tested them for it at the door they would not have let them in! Something has really got to Senator Conroy. He was coughing, he was spluttering and he was drinking water. He pivoted, he turned, he frothed at the mouth, and he walked out. Then he was followed by Senator Sterle. Senator Sterle has just informed us that Perth is his home state. That is very interesting. I thought it was a town in his home state, but it is actually his home state. They are under pressure. The pressure is getting to them.

And then we have this Labor pluck-a-duck technology and the Labor pluck-a-duck policy—‘We’re just going to try and morph some policy, completely uncosted; we’re going to foist it out there’—because they have to come up with something. This is ‘Captain Kevin’. Captain Kevin has given them something to talk about. Right now, Senator Conroy is back with Captain Kevin saying, ‘I can smell burning flesh, and I think it’s the Labor Party’s.’ He will be talking to Captain Kevin, saying: ‘Look, Kev, I don’t know what’s going on. It’s coming unstuck.’ And Kevin will be saying to him: ‘Mate, this is your baby. If it doesn’t float, you go down with it.’

I sympathise with Senator Conroy because he is not a bad bloke, but he has just blown this one. It has blown up in his face, and he does not know what to do with it. He came up and said, ‘It’s the Beta option,’ but I think he meant to say, ‘It’s the better option.’ It is those notes—they are letting him down again.

This $8 billion to 98 per cent of Australians is fascinating. The Labor Party policy is based on the premise of your having a node, a post in the ground from which the fibre gets to you. They must believe that these nodes are interspersed through the countryside like tree stumps—that you just wander around and up pops a node. Here’s a gnome; there’s a node! It is the Labor Party pluck-a-duck policy. The trouble is that there are not nodes just randomly associated around the countryside. That is why you have to go to a wireless technology. If you do not use the wireless technology, you do not get delivery.

Look at some of the comparatives. They talk about 98 per cent of the population. I do not know why they did not say 100 per cent. It is the premise of the attitude. It is the reasoning behind their logic. There is no reasoning, just their pluck-a-duck policy: pluck a figure out the air, jot it on a piece of paper, walk it into the chamber and start praying. And then, when it comes unstuck, pivot, drink water, cough, splutter, acknowledge that the pressure is on you, then spin, pivot and walk out the door, like Senator Conroy has done.

It is going to be interesting. I am looking forward to the Labor Party actually tabling the statistical analysis, the costings and the relevance of their policy. It is going to be interesting to see whether anybody on that side of the house has actually done the homework. Or is this what we are looking for as we walk towards the election: these sorts of random assertions about general directions, about possible outcomes that might happen if certain things all line up? It is just rubbish.

The government has delivered an outcome that will get to more people. That is what we want to do: get to more people—as opposed to Labor’s outcome, which gets at more people! So this is the position. They always talk about 98 per cent. The Labor Party, the party that want to close down the Regional Partnerships program, then use this sense of concern. They always talk about the 98 per cent. Well, I am one of those people who live in the other two per cent. I am the senator in this chamber who lives furthest from the coast. They always seem to want to leave us out. Whenever you get a minority, the Labor Party’s approach is to marginalise it even further.

The position is that we are actually delivering something that can assist people in the remotest corners of our country. The other thing is that the Labor Party believe that this is just a line in the sand, that it all just stops here, that there will never, ever be another—  (Time expired)