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

Mr Deputy President, might I also congratulate you on your appointment to the lofty heights of the chair. It is interesting how the Labor Party is always leading us down these paths of half-truths and half-lies—the quandary of what is the Labor Party. Yesterday, merely a day ago, we heard the Prime Minister of this great nation stroll up and say that she is going to protect fuel from a carbon tax. What she should have been saying is that she is going to protect her own people from her own policy. The Australian people already have no carbon tax on fuel. The Prime Minister is not giving them anything that they have not already got. They are not afflicted with the problems of a carbon tax. Ms Gillard, the Prime Minister of Australia, is saying that she is not going to endow the Australian people with her tax—that she is not going to inflict on the Australian people her tax. That was merely a day ago, and now a day later we find that she is going to put a tax on fuel. She has only been telling us half the story. You see, they are going to be putting a tax on fuel for big business but they have not actually told us yet what big business is. Who are these big businesses who are going to have the tax on fuel? Which ones are they? How big do you have to be before you are big enough for Julia to tax you? That is the question that is on everybody's lips: how big do you have to be before you are big enough for Julia, the Prime Minister, to tax you? We do not know.

Wayne Swan got out there and talked about a 'battler buffer'. It sounded like a toy. I do not know what a battler buffer is—sounds like something you buy in Fyshwick. Apparently the battler buffer is only going to happen in certain areas. It seems that the battler buffer might not be there if you are a bit too big. If you are big, you are going to be exempt from the battler buffer—you are actually going to have to pay the tax.

So which companies are we talking about? Are we going to have the transport com­panies—do they pay the tax? If the transport companies pay the tax, what does that mean? Obviously it means the tax is on fuel. What about the bus companies—are they going to pay the tax? If so, it is going to be on tickets. What about diesel? What about farming? Is it going to be on farming? Are they going to have an amendment on excise so that it is on farming? That is another little unanswered query, a point of pondering: is it going to be on farming?

And how does this actually work, seeing that it is not on fuel? The Prime Minister, nearly a day ago, said that it was not on fuel. Does that mean that it is now exempt for refining? They use a lot of power in refining: are they going to say to the refining companies that they are not going to have to pay the carbon tax? I think that it probably will be on refining. Then, 24 hours later, we find that indirectly it is on fuel. What about those dens of iniquity, the fuel stations—those terrible places? Are they going to be exempt from the carbon tax? Quite obviously not. They are going to be paying the carbon tax, the refiners are going to be paying the carbon tax, the people who transport the fuel are going to be paying the carbon tax and, if you are big enough, it is going to be on the fuel itself. What a marvellous promise! What an endowment the Prime Minister has given us! In fact, it starts to become hard to understand who is not going to be paying the carbon tax on fuel. And the answer, of course, is that everybody in Australia is going to be paying the carbon tax on fuel.

Mr Windsor has done an absolutely superlative job. He has managed to get a carbon tax on fuel. Maybe he was not paying attention or maybe he does know and does not want to tell us. It is always a mystery. Every day Mr Windsor and Mr Oakeshott re-endorse this Labor Party. Every day they say that this is the way to go; this is the way to govern. Every day we see Mr Windsor and Mr Oakeshott doing such things as voting in support of the Labor Party's ban on the live cattle trade, even though the vast majority of the electorate actually have cattle. So it is a wondrous new world we live in.

I was interested today to observe the Greens. As you know, we have seen the corsage in Bob Brown's lapel when he signed the book—when he signed the register with Julia Gillard with all the attendants—the maid of honour and the best man—standing beside them as they signed the register for this new wondrous form of government. Now they pretend that they are separated—living in the same house but separated, sleeping in different rooms. But it is all a farce. If they are not together then let's call it divorce. Let's throw the party. Let's change the government.

But they are together and the Greens, you see, want the tax on fuel. They think fuel is too cheap. They believe that the price of fuel should go up just as the price of power is going to go up. They believe that the Aust­ralian people are doing it too easy at the moment and need to pay more. I never knew carbon was free; I never knew coal was free; I never knew fuel was free. There is already a price on carbon, a massive price, a price that so many people in the Australian community cannot afford right now. What is their answer to that? We see the Greens, we see Senator Rhiannon, saying that in 10 years time Sydney has to be carbon free. I do not know what they are going to do with the wooden furniture; that is going to be hard. I do not know what a carbon-free Sydney looks like—no fuel stations and no cars. Electric trains are run by power and power is made by coal—so no electric trains. What a marvellous world this is going to look like.

How are they going to actually make any money? How do they pay for all this? Do we print the money or do we just borrow it? No-one is going to lend it to us, because there is no way that we can live. We have no real relevance. As Senator Madigan has said, a country that does not make anything or grow anything is a country of nobodies, and that looks like what they are going to try to turn us into—a country of nobodies with massive debts.

So we have a peculiar state of affairs. Before the election Ms Gillard said, 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead,' and, straightaway after she got in, the government she leads has a carbon tax. Nearly 24 hours ago she said that there will be no carbon tax on fuel. She made the announcement. She credited Mr Windsor. He is 'a wonderful man': 'He saved you from me.' Then we found out that even that is not true. There is a carbon tax on fuel. There is a direct one on the big fuel users—and who knows what 'big' is? We are about to find out. It is in that secret multiparty discussion of the Greens and the Labor Party and the Independents. There is a tax on fuel and there is an indirect tax on everybody.

So this is the world we have been led to. This is what is in front of us. What will happen, of course, is that fuel prices will go up. Maybe they will have Fuelwatch on that. We will be able to watch them go up in a voyeuristic expose of what they are doing to the standard of living. And we will be able to ask Mr Swan, the Treasurer of Australia, how the battler buffer is going, how it is making him feel and whether it is making him feel excited. We do not quite know what is happening with the battler buffer, but these issues will be before us. What promises are going to be broken in the next couple of days? How ridiculous does this government have to get? How absurd does our nation have to become? How much more bizarre can it get than it is already? What more could they possibly do to make our nation a complete and utter pythonesque fiasco? It is incredible. Instead of business trying to glean what they can from various incomplete news reports, this is incompetence from the incompetence of this government.

It is going to be an interesting couple of days. We have all come back here to stroke the ego of our new colleagues on the left side of me here, who talk about themselves as being the majority. That means that we must be in the minority and that they must be part of the government. They are part of the government that has closed down the live cattle trade, the government that has engaged in the brick-through-the-window diplomacy with our nearest neighbour and the government that has had oversight of the closure of the Murray-Darling Basin, as they agreed 7,600 gigalitres have to go from the Murray-Darling Basin. Now with the carbon tax they want to close down everything in between. That is the new world we are living in.

I was fascinated to see today the Greens turn up one after the other in their own cars. I thought they would have been riding here on pushbikes, unicycles and horses, but no, they all took a car to the Senate today.