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

I move:

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by Senators Evans, Ludwig and Carr to questions without notice asked in question time today.

It is an interesting day today because, to be honest, very few people are going to be watching us; they have got other things on. But people stopped listening to the Labor Party long ago. I came to parliament this week thinking that maybe things would settle down, and then all of a sudden we had what would have to be one of the most peculiar decisions that has ever been foisted on this nation—the so-called Malaysian deal.

To throw further light on the Malaysian deal today, we had Senator Carr's response to the 'little bomb' issue. They had a little fire and they found a little bomb and they got a little inkling that something was going on. They found a little bomb at one of the detention centres. But don't worry—it was not a big problem; it was only a little problem as it was only a little bomb. There was a little fire going at the same time. There was a much bigger fire earlier on—a really big fire. That was a big problem, but then they had a little problem. Unfortunately, the peptic ulcer inside the government's stomach started to give a bit of a twitch and they realised that they had to do something. So the thought police, the brains trust, of the Labor Party got together and worked out this deal. They got on the blower and started ringing people all around the world to see if they could come up with a deal to cover up for the fact that the budget was going to be a disaster and that they also had a bit of a problem because people keep burning down buildings in the middle of Sydney—burning them down, mind you, when Australians are sleeping on the street merely miles away. That is the more sobering side of the problem that they have.

Apparently we are sending to Malaysia 800 people and then they are sending back to us 4,000 people. There is logic in that somewhere, apparently. It started off as a one-to-one deal, but it has somehow changed while Julia Gillard was negotiating. She cannot say it and she cannot do it, but she decided that she was going to negotiate her way out of the problem and this is how she would do it. Not only are we sending Malaysia 800 people and getting 4,000 in return but we are also sending them about $292 million. This sounds like the deal of the century. This is Labor Party politics. Now we also find that there will be a trail fee, a sort of trail commission, on this and apparently we are going to have to pay them another lazy $200 million to look after the problem. So it is about half a billion dollars and rising for this complete and utter fiasco.

On a deal like this, I expect the phones to be running hot in Julia Gillard's office. We will have Hugo Chavez on the phone saying, 'Mate, I can do a better deal for you. How about you send me 50 and I will send you 10,000. And I'll cut the price: I'll do it for a lazy 100 mill.' President Koroma of Sierra Leone—another country that is not a party to the United Nations refugee convention—will be on the phone: 'Don't worry, Julia; I'll help you out. I've got a few refugees here. How about we park a couple of hundred thousand over there. We could send you a couple of hundred thousand refugees, because we've got them in bulk. We've got a civil war on; we can park them over there.' Maybe we could go to the former Prime Minister of Somalia, Haji Hussein. He has probably got a few refugees. He should be in the market. It could be one of their biggest exports—exporting refugees to Australia. It is just so bizarre. You have become so bizarre. You have become so strange that if you did not laugh you would cry. And we get all this for the lazy sum of $292 million.

It should be noted just before the budget that a good bloke called Kenneth Rogoff from Harvard University has been listing the countries that have had the greatest cumulative increase in real public debt since 2007. I will go through the top three because we do not want to mention every country in the world: No.1, Iceland—we all know about Iceland; No. 2, Ireland; and No. 3, Australia. You get yourself into debt like that when you come up with ludicrous, mind-numbing solutions such as spending half a billion dollars on making your problem of 3,200 people bigger. We pay them half a billion dollars and the net effect in Australia is that we are 3,200 people worse off.

Who thought that up? Who is the plant from the Liberal Party or the National Party in Julia Gillard's office giving her this advice? Own up—who are you? Stop giving her this advice. Stop making it easy for us, please. We do not need any more help. This is what is happening. This is the manic world of the Labor Party. (Time expired)