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

Senator Conroy’s final point was: how quickly can you do my town? Well, how quickly can he do the country? How quickly can he absolutely make a complete and utter stuff-up of this? This is like groundhog day. It is like the groundhog day we got with the Henry tax review, where they refused to launch the report. It is like the groundhog day with the guide to the basin plan of the Murray -Darling Basin Authority, another report they refused to release. Now we have a further groundhog day. This plan is uncosted and has no acumen behind it. What we are going to get is the same result we got in the ceiling insulation debacle, the same result we got in the Building the Education Revolution program, the same result we got when we sent out $900 cheques aimlessly around the countryside, and the same result we got when they went on their war against obesity. I never knew quite what happened to the fat people after that—whether it was a win, a draw or a loss—but this time it is serious money and it is borrowed money, and it goes on our nation’s credit card. How on earth are we going to pay it back when these people refuse to shine a light, as Ms Gillard said? The government will not table the business plan and they will not send it to the Productivity Commission. They go through the nefarious process where after everybody has gone, in many moons’ time, they will release the business plan.

That is very similar to how they dealt with the Murray-Darling Basin Authority when they locked one group, the fourth estate, in one room and the other group, the politicians, in another. That is how this crowd shines the light. But let us just make sure right at the start that we debunk one thing. Senator Conroy says it is not going to bring about a price increase, and about the only bit of information we can get is from the McKinsey report. The McKinsey report says that there will be a price increase of 450 per cent in real terms. If you take into account inflation, that is still in excess of 60 per cent over the next 50 years. That is in real terms, so let us get it out of our minds that this is somehow going to save us money. This is not going to save us money; this is going to cost us money.

Senator Conroy accused Senator Abetz of running out of content. The problem we have here is that we just do not have any content; we just do not have any information. To be sprung by Conroy, as he is called, is like being hit in the back by a rainbow. It is beyond belief.