Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

What a complete display of utter hypocrisy. We had the capacity to deliver fairness and equality but they voted for hypocrisy and platitudes. We had Senator Hanson-Young talking about a patch-up job. I am afraid, Senator Hanson-Young, I would prefer a patch-up to a flat tyre—that is what you have delivered to the people of regional Australia. Then we had Senator Brown, so help me, railing against queue jumping. This is almost like Brave New World. A couple of weeks ago he was telling us, ‘It is the “don’t ask, don’t question policy” on leadership,’ and today we have the Greens railing against queue jumping. It is a very interesting paradigm that we live in.

What is it about? Senator Brown and the Labor Party are also proffering their advice on how we have to save money by not educating people in regional Australia! How pathetic is that? The money we have wasted on ceiling insulation could have been used to educate kids in regional Australia and given them a tertiary education. We could have used even a portion of the money you wasted on the BER to fix up this problem. We could have used the money you just threw out the door with your $900 cheques in a better way—that is, educating people. The greatest nexus with your aim of social advancement is education. You voted against it today and so did Senator Xenophon and the Greens. They voted against social advancement for those who live in disadvantaged areas! You can go through all the platitudes and histrionics, but the fact is that you had the opportunity to vote for justice but you voted against it. That is as simple as it gets.

This is who you voted against: Dalby; Kingaroy; Rockhampton, which is Labor town, both state and federal; Hamley Bridge; Angaston; Riverton; Ballina, another Labor town; Gympie; Nambour; Warwick; Gladstone; Bundaberg; Orange; Dubbo; Northam; Bunbury; Busselton; Tamworth; Lismore; Shepparton; Wagga Wagga; Nowra; Lithgow; Mount Gambier; Byron Bay; Singleton; Branxton; and Dungog—yes, you also voted against your people down in the Hunter Valley. You voted against those people because of the urbane society that you are trying to create—this urbane Green-Labor clique. They believe that they have the right to go into a tertiary institution but nobody else does. It is not there for other people. This is part of the bumper-sticker morality that now pervades this place.

It is quite clear and simple: you could have voted for fairness, you could have voted for equality—you could have voted for the capacity of people in inner regional areas to go to university after a gap year—but you voted against it. I can assure you that after two years in the workforce—which is what they will have to do with their, on average, 30 hours a week in 13-week blocks over 18 months—people will peel off. People will make their decision: ‘Bother it. I’ll stick to doing what I’ve been doing.’ They will have a new social network, a new girlfriend or boyfriend and a new job, and they will not go. So you have compromised their capacity for social advancement in life—if you believe, as I thought Mr Whitlam did, in a tertiary education.

It is so obscene for a party that spent in excess of $81 million on an ETS that never went anywhere, which even they themselves denied. That amount of money could have been used to educate people. Education is right at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. There are people who will go without food to educate their kids. There are people who will go without a better house, without new clothes and without a car. One people’s principal desires is the education of their children. But you voted against that and now we have to put up with this absolute and utter hypocrisy that is being blurted out by all and sundry around the chamber, these amazing platitudes. In this new, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, they have found it in their souls to leave people behind. And what do they offer? ‘Oh well, we’ll send it to an inquiry.’ We only have days till the end of the year. You know that. There are time constraints. To say that this is a surprise is a load of rubbish. This has been fought and people knew that it was coming, that the time was coming. The coalition had to act. Senator Nash, Senator Williams and Senator Mason acted to try and bring a resolution on this.

I do not know what is going to happen to the whales; I really don’t. I do not know whether they are going to be saved or whether they are going to be slaughtered; I just do not know. What I do know is what is going to happen to those kids in regional Australia. I do know what is going to happen there. They will not get the chance for the same standard of education and of life as is delivered to people in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. I do not know what precedence in the scheme of things the gay marriage bill should take. But apparently Senator Brown believes that the gay marriage bill, whales and everything else are more important than delivering equality, in its most seminal form—the capacity to deliver to people the ability to advance their lives via education.

Then they talked about being out of time. That made complete sense when, last night, I watched as they started going back into the address-in-reply to the Governor-General’s speech! No, you are not out of time—you are just completely and utterly disorganised. This whole parliament has turned into a farce and a joke. You have nothing that you are going forward with and you just leave the crucial issues behind.

So what are we going to say to the regional people who you so earnestly told you were going to look after when you attained the government benches? What are you going to say to the people of Ballina? What are you going to say to the people of Rockhampton? How does this one actually work? ‘We believe in you, but we don’t believe you should go to university’? ‘We believe in you, but we believe that you’re a second-rate citizen compared to someone in Sydney or Melbourne’? ‘We believe in you, but’—wink-wink, nod-nod—‘we believe in you just a little bit less than we believe in the whales’?

That is apparently where Senator Brown is: he has more concern about things in the South Seas that he has no power—none whatsoever—to affect. And he puts that up as an excuse to leave regional people out. Today, he, Senator Xenophon and the Labor Party could have put up a change that would have made people’s lives better. They could have made people’s lives better. They could have done something constructive that would have actually taken people ahead. They could have been decisive. They could have been compassionate. They could have shown foresight. They could have stuck to their vision of who they were as a party when Gough Whitlam brought in greater access to tertiary education. But, no—they descended into hypocrisy, they descended into the murk and they turned away from regional Australia. (Time expired)