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

Don’t worry about your workers in the Illawarra and your workers in the Hunter Valley. No, don’t worry about them. You put on your Giorgio Armani suit and go and do the light fandango at a coffee shop near wherever you live, Senator Cameron, as you morph into this new type of Senator Cameron—this new type of environmentally sensitive, soft, wonderful, marshmallow Senator Cameron. Where has the steel from your spine gone? You have changed, Senator Cameron. You have changed since you have been here. You have changed into something else. And Mr Rudd has changed too.

So we have here the Rudolf Nureyev school of political pirouettes. We see this exercise from Mr Rudd as he pushes Minister Wong out the front door to hang herself out to dry on a piece of legislation that is an absolute debacle. Now they are trying to say, ‘Well, it’s a debacle now, so if we let it mature for 12 months then it will somehow get better.’ A silly idea now is a silly idea in 12 months time—it is just a silly idea that is one year old. We in the National Party are as one. We will be making sure that the entrails of this festering chicken are brought out on the table so we can once more take it apart piece by piece—through Labor seat, by Labor seat, by Labor seat, by Labor seat, by Labor seat. Then we will see what the political Rudolf Nureyev of policy pirouettes does next—the illustrious, the formidable and the ever-changing Mr Kevin Rudd.