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

Yes, Gough sacked ministers for lying to the public. This is really a statement of the character and the temperament of the people who are leading our nation. That question has not been answered by Ms Gillard. It has not been answered by any of the people on the front bench. We heard Minister Evans today in question time giving the ‘er, um’ answer. The ‘er, um’ answer is what you give when you know the answer but do not quite know how to say it because it will just get you into more strife than you are already in. The ‘er, um’ answer was the one given to the question of whether the tax will be on fuel. The ‘er’ is obviously coming from the Labor Party, but the ‘um’ is coming from the Greens: ‘Um, it’s going to be in.’ ‘Er, we don’t know what to do about it.’

This is yet another assault on the fundamental fabric, the standard of living of the Australian people. This is why for the life of me, even as an outsider, I cannot figure out who was doing the tactics in the Labor Party the day they announced this. What on earth was going on? Without a shadow of a doubt your own backbench never knew about this. It was one of those things that just popped out. You can forget about all Rudd’s sins. They pale into insignificance compared with this one. This is the whopper of all time.

What are you going to do? Is this hypocritical stance going to permeate? Is that what we will see? Is your polling, which has been going down to 32 per cent, going to continue to go down? Are you going to continue to lose the respect of the Australian people? Are you going to continue to have this contemptuous approach? And who are the people you are affecting most? Let us go to the nub of the issue. Is this how you say ‘thank you’ to the people of Mackay, the people of Wollongong, the people of the Hunter Valley and the people of Tasmania, where you have every seat? Are you so unaware of the predicament of the people who can hardly afford to get by at the moment that this is what you wish to do to them? Is this it? Is this your grand new vision? And for what—a gesture that will do nought for the temperature of the globe and nought for international politics? It is just one of these frolics to which you have been inspired because you have to kowtow to the new political masters in this place, Senator Bob Brown and his cohort.

Now we also have this obscure repeat rendition by the Independents. We have Mr Windsor turning up at the press conference telling us not to construe—that was his word: ‘construe’—anything from his appearance at a press conference. But what can we construe when someone turns up at a press conference to announce a carbon tax? What can we take away from that—that the poor fellow was lost and was asking directions or that he was wandering aimlessly back through the corridors and was filling some time by standing next to the Prime Minister as she announced the carbon tax? What he has come up against is that his own electorate is in meltdown because of what he has done. It is like the final damnation, the final insult to people who have supported him throughout his political career. He has become so detached that he is taking them through this arduous teeth-pulling exercise: ‘Will I or won’t I? What am I doing at the front of the political church in this big fluffy white dress? How did I get here? What will happen to me next? This is all just too fantastic.’

But the Australian people have woken up to it. They have called the Labor Party on it, and they are going to punish the Labor Party for it. This has framed it. When things are in a flux there are certain things that crystallise people’s perceptions of them, and this has done it. The Labor Party are so foolish, because it was such an arduous fight in which there was no redeeming feature and nothing to offer the Australian people. Yet the conceit of the Labor Party has taken them back there.

It is going to be a very interesting time. I am waiting with bated breath to see Paul Howes, in his next Mussolini impersonation, standing behind the podium, banging the table, ranting and raving about the Australian workers and how he is going to support them. Where is Mr Howes these days? What has happened to that man? Where has his ticker gone? Where did it all go—Mr Howes gesticulating as he holds up the Australian and points to it, talking about the working man? Now, when they are really under assault, when they are really under attack, where is the brave Mr Howes? Where has he gone? This is the hypocrisy of it. If ever there was a time for this man to stand up it is now, but you will not get sight nor sound of him. It is one thing for one audience, but when the heat is on he is out of the kitchen; he is gone. And what about the monastic silence of Mr Shorten? He is such a peaceful chap. He does not want to cause a ruckus. He does not want to go out there and support his leader—not yet; not when he sees the sunny uplands of his own career racing towards him.

This is the flux that the Australian people have been put in. Who are the people who are going to cool the planet? Who are these wondrous sages who are going to do it? They are none less than the people who brought you the ceiling insulation debacle, who could not for $2½ billion get fluffy stuff into the ceiling for the rats and the mice to sleep on without burning down 190 houses. These are the wondrous sages who brought you the Building the Education Revolution—a building in every backyard whether you wanted one or not, sometimes at three times the price—16.8 billion cold, hard dollars gone west.

These are the same people who have got you in excess of $181 billion in debt. Do not believe me; go to the Australian Office of Financial Management. Take it right from the horse’s mouth. Go to their website and read and weep about exactly where they have placed this nation. These are the same wise sages who gave us the draft guide to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, who have almost started riots in regional Australia. These are the people who have given us basically a whole submarine fleet, and we do not know whether one of them is operating. These are the same wondrous sages who have a lot of our naval ships in dock because they are rusting. These are the same wondrous sages who gave us Indigenous housing but they cannot actually build a house. These are the people, apparently, who are going to cool the planet from a room in Canberra. What credentials do they take to it? Not one success but a whole litany of attacks on the fundamental fabric—the cost of living.

My suggestion to you is you try to work out how to reduce the cost of living, how to reduce the cost of power. Try to work out how, as your famous previous leader Mr Latham said, to ease the squeeze. You remember Mr Latham, don’t you? He was supported by one Ms Gillard. That is what you should be concentrating on. Now you are coming up once more with these weasel words: 34,000 green jobs. Why not 34 million? Why not 34 billion? Why stop at 34,000? Why not double the carbon tax and double the number of jobs? Why not triple the carbon tax and triple the number of jobs? Who wants a job at BlueScope Steel when you can be making footpaths around a duck pond? Who wants a job in the manufacturing industry when you can be creating wind chimes at Nimbin? There is a great future for this! What are those boats doing off Newcastle? ‘Out, damned spot!’; get off my horizon! We do not need those boats. We can replace them with something else, maybe Paul Howes’s books—build them up with them and send them over to China. How is this economy going to work under you guys? How is it actually going to stick together? How are we going to pay our bills? What do we say to the people of Mackay? What do we say to the people of Newcastle? What about the Hunter Valley—do they deserve this? Does the home of Les Darcy deserve this? Have they descended that much that they have to put up with these Greens frolics, these Independents?

Labor are completely out of tune with their own electorate. Why do you think your polling went down to 32 per cent and is falling through the floor? Does it ever resonate with you? You listen to the wondrous illuminati who listen to themselves but you do not go out and listen to the people—listen to them talk, listen to what they are saying. It is all very well for white-collar upper middle-class suburbia to make a proclamation that puts the pump on the people who live in the outer suburbs and who live in the regional towns. It is all very well to say to them, ‘Well, it’s not right that you should turn on your heater, it’s not right that you should turn on your air conditioner and it’s not right that you should be able to afford the fundamentals’—which is the power delivered to this nation. It is only just that the people of Korea get their power 30 per cent cheaper than Australians, yet they use Australians’ coal to make it.

They say they want certainty. We in the National Party will give you certainty. There is no more certain word in this place than the word ‘no’—those wondrous two letters, that single syllable. That is a very certain word. It is a word the Australian people thought they could trust from you. When you said no, you would not bring in a carbon tax, they thought they could trust you on that. This is about trust and it is a trust that has been deserted. Now they have to sit back and listen to their Prime Minister using weasel words. They have to deal with the fact that the Prime Minister gave a warrant to the Australian people of a certain outcome. On that warrant they cast their ballot. On that ballot the Labor Party, with the assistance of Mr Oakeshott and Mr Windsor, formed a government. Now it has been deserted. If those people, all of them—the Greens, the Labor Party, Mr Oakeshott and Mr Windsor—believe in honour then it should be honour to stick to your word. If they are not sticking to their word then the dishonour rests on all their heads.

I just want to close in quoting our Prime Minister. This was from her magnum opus, her speech to the Australian people about why she should be elected:

I stand for tax cuts, tax benefits, tax relief for every Australian business.

Those are her words, not mine. Those opposite are trying to weasel their way out of this carbon tax by calling it a carbon price—by tomorrow morning, gosh knows, it will be a geranium. Who knows? We have this morphing lingua franca of the Labor Party as they try to enmesh themselves in some sort of convoluted process so that the Australian people cannot wise up to what they are doing.

How does your standing for tax cuts, tax benefits and tax relief for every Australian business fit in with the new tax? What is your answer? Will you be upfront in telling the Australian people how you are going to basically put a new tax on the fundamentals of their life? We are sitting here in a room with concrete under our floor, concrete that will be taxed. We are sitting here with lights that are on, lights that will be taxed. We are sitting here with steel purlins on trusses that will be taxed. Motor vehicles out there in the street will be taxed.

I said about Mr Rudd that every time you open your fridge a little white light will go on to remind you that Mr Rudd is taxing you. We cannot use that metaphor anymore, so I say to the Australian people: turn to your clock radios and, when you see the red light on your clock radio, think of the big red lady and remind yourself that that red light is there because you are being taxed by this government, which lied to you.