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

Not beetles, yes, only nuts! But this is the absurd position.

And the damage is done. It has been an absolute blanket insult to a whole nation to say to them that we do not differentiate between those who are doing the wrong thing and those who are doing the right thing; we just think they are all doing the wrong thing. The whole nation is doing the wrong thing.

I stated this at the start: I said this would come unstuck. They have not read five steps ahead on this one, and now it is unstuck. And what do we have? We have a foreign minister who can hardly stay home. He almost needs a passport to get back into Australia. Where is he when we really need him, when we actually need him to go to work? He is here now—it is the only time we do not want him here but he is here. He has been away for 71 days. He was guiding the Arab rise and the Arab Spring. He was over there guiding the process in Libya. He was part of what was happening in Syria. He is everywhere but he is nowhere where he is needed. When something is of real import­ance to our nation, where is he? So help me—he is in the building stacking up numbers for his challenge. This is how disconnected this government has become. Everything is a reflection.

We saw Kevin Rudd go to Buckingham Palace—