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

I do not want that. But we have to debunk the argument that we can believe in private ownership and commerce but not believe in the rights of farmers to be greater masters of their destiny. We acknowledge the financial predicament Australia has got itself into with debt—both the debt of the states, who are going to be $250 billion in gross debt by 2014-15, and the position we are in federally, with $205 billion in gross debt. We know that means that if we do not have mining we do not have money, and if we do not have money we have a big, big problem. But this cannot come at the expense of the fundamental injustice we are now seeing in so many areas. If we ignore this issue, it will not go away.

The Armstrongs and the Brimblecombes, the people around Cecil Plains and the multigenerational farmers from down in the Lockyer, up into the Downs and out west are an extremely collegiate group. They are and will continue to be on the phone to one another, surveying the horizon and saying, 'Are we going to get a form of justice, and who is going to give us that justice?' They will be having discussions with people in northern New South Wales—with whom, as I have explained, I have some involvement. These people will then be talking to the people on the coast and to people everywhere else. They are our shareholders. The voters are our shareholders. They are the most important people to us. They are the people we are here to serve. We are their servants first and foremost, before allegiances to any other group, party, body or corporation. So there is that expectation. There is a Senate inquiry on foot. My belief is that that Senate inquiry will report and, from that, we will have the capacity to try and start to move this agenda. We must acknowledge that for the vast majority of this issue you must follow the money: who makes the money out of the royalties? It is the states. So the vast majority of the ownership of this problem rests with the states. That is not saying for one moment that we do not also have a role in this, because as far as the shareholder—the individual, the Australian citizen, the farmer—goes we are the closest thing they are ever going to get to an independent party, because the states are the second-biggest earners after the mining companies. But we cannot just quietly walk away from this. Likewise, we cannot have these sundry pieces of legislation that are slipped in prior to the conclusion of a process that is on foot, which is to bring about some sort of resolution, which has moved the agenda from the middle pages to the front pages and which has been at the forefront of keeping pressure on state Labor governments, such as in Queensland, to now bring about a two-kilometre buffer. These are the issues which have been brought about by the actions thus far, but it has not yet finished.

First of all, this issue has been brought up by Senator Waters. I have to say she is doing most of the work on this, although she is not going to get a chance to speak today. If they are consistent, we will see them working in an effective manner towards resolutions at the end of the inquiry. We will also see, in later times, when we bring up other things that may happen—when we reinstall the vegetation rights and so hand back farmers another asset that was stolen from them in the middle of the night without any compensation—we will get the same sort of emphatic support that they apparently have for the coal seam gas issue. And, when they later on tell us that we are going to lose 7,600 gigs from the Murray-Darling Basin, obviously that will change now—because they are worried about farmers now, so they will obviously change their views on that as well; otherwise, someone might just get a sniff of hypocrisy from a party that believes in stealing your trees, shutting down the Murray-Darling Basin, shutting down the live cattle trade, tying up legislation in caveats and imposts—but apparently does believe in coal-seam gas— (Time expired)