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

Mr Rudd is Rudolph Nureyev. This is the man who has more pirouettes, more turns on this issue than one could ever display. I watched him last night. Maybe he was giving us a display of it last night with his little jink in front of the camera. ‘Rudd’ is short for Rudolph Nureyev. He is the archetypal policy dancer on the ETS. Do you know why he is doing it? He is doing it because he wants to jump the consequences over an election. He wants to jump the consequences over the possibility of a double dissolution in going to the people. The reason he wants to do that is that he knows full well that the workers in Labor Party seats will be the ones that lose their jobs over this. It will be the people of Mackay, it will be the people of Gladstone, it will be the people of Illawarra and it will be the people of the Hunter Valley. It will be the people that the Labor Party has deserted. The working families of Australia are being deserted by the Labor Party. That is what it is all about. You can go to Copenhagen, to Disneyland—wherever you like—but the position of the National Party on this will be quite clear: to understand the word ‘no’.

Those opposite talk about certainty. I will give you certainty. How is ‘no’ for certainty? ‘No’ is a very certain word; it is very easy to understand. You talk about arguing for a position. It is an amorphous, nebulous concept of this bumper sticker morality which has become the ETS scheme. The answer is no. We cannot put this up at the expense of Australian working families. We cannot start on this banal attempt to sole-handedly lead the world into some sunny, environmental upland, which is what Mr Rudd wants to do. It is all a part of the self-glorification of our Prime Minister as he attempts to become—I don’t know—president of the UN or whatever his grander ambitions are after he leaves this place. His own party have pulled him into gear.

I have never seen a more uncomfortable person than Minister Wong. She looked more uncomfortable than Mr Rudd after he lost his hair dryer. She was hung out to dry by her own Prime Minister. After all the wonderful, glorious statements about saving the world, he marched her out to the front of the building to say what we have already said—only they say no now; we say no, full stop. The reason we need an extension for this inquiry is so that we can drag this mangy cat back out again and all have another look at it, so that we can pull out the entrails of this chicken and divine from them over the table of the Senate, so that we can look into it and say, ‘What exactly are we trying to do here?’ Apparently, Australia is going to cool the planet—single-handedly. The Knights Templar are led by Prime Minister Rudd, only he is not really leading; he is just hanging people out to dry, including the minister.

We have had the Senate Economics Committee inquiry, we have had the fuel and energy inquiry and we have another inquiry going on now. We have 11 pieces of legislation coming back in here and they are going to try to push it on through. They want to do that because they do not want proper examination. The period that we have to look at something that could turn the economy of our nation upside down is contemporaneous with budget estimates. And they are saying that that is respect for the Senate! I acknowledge that the Greens will have an entirely different view. But I imagine that they too want the capacity to really drill down into this legislation. The Labor Party are trying to be sneaky and tricky as they walk over the future prosperity of regional Australia and of the working families of Australia—for what? It is an attempt to go forward with some bumper sticker morality for inner suburbia. But don’t worry about the people of Mackay, don’t worry about the people in Gladstone—