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

None of them do it. These are the people of conviction who cannot tell you, who cannot tell their own people, who they would like to run the country. That is the sort of conviction you get, which is no conviction whatsoever. It is actually buttering only one slice of bread, and that is your own piece. It is not so much looking after your community, being a partisan representative of your community, but a parochial representative of yourself.

Because we are on Churchillian quotes I think one of the better ones is: ‘However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.’ That is another Churchill one. So I want to give a few results. With the Labor Party we have Fuelwatch, which is now a complete fiasco, and we have grocery watch and school watch. Under the coalition, the conservatives, we have the paying off of $96 billion in debt. Under Labor we now have the highest inflation on record, the highest interest rates on record and the lowest business confidence on record. The only thing that is growing is unemployment. Under the conservatives we had what they call the ‘wonder down under economy’. I think these are the sorts of results you have to look at. These are the sorts of results that you are going to be held to account for. There is a complete lack of detail. There is a vacuum waiting for detail to come into it. That is why we will not be able to fix health under this government, that is why we will not be able to fix the roads under this government and that is why this economy will struggle under this government—because they lack the acumen to provide the detail. It is all glitz and glamour but it lacks detail, and sooner rather than later the Australian people are going to start asking for that detail and we will assist them in the process.

The next one will be your environmental trading scheme. We are waiting for that one. That will be a complete dog and cat show. You wait for that to turn up. Yet all we have at the moment is this propaganda in place of detail. They are terrified of actually tabling something of consequence. But one day soon, after the Australian people have paid off your ads on television, we might actually get the chance to see something and be able to tell people how this is going to affect them. (Time expired)