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

Thank you, Mr Acting Deputy President. This is why the whole of Australia is so concerned about the carbon tax. This single frolic to change the temperature of the globe from a room in Canberra, issuing to the Australian people a broad based consumption tax delivered by every power point in their house to make every aspect of their cost of living dearer—a tax on all the people of Blacktown, of Ipswich, of Pennant Hills and the people of Rockhampton and of Gladstone, a tax that says you can have cheap wages or cheap power. We have now decided that cheap power is not for us so it is either cheap wages or no jobs.

In the past the party of Curtin and Chifley would never have agreed to something as absurd as that but this is not the party of Curtin and Chifley any more. It is the party of Senator Bob Brown, Mr Tony Windsor and Mr Adam Bandt. That soul that it once possessed was of an incredible party. There are two statues of Curtin and Chifley down near Old Parliament House. What would those men say if they walked into what we have here at the moment? They would say, 'Who are these people? Who's running the show? What happened? What happened to it all? Where did it all go?' The party has been sucked into these nutty positions. It said the right thing before the election when it said they were not going to have a carbon tax. That seems a logical thing to do. No-one else in the world is having it.

Then the real dynamic of who is running the show became present—the political vandals, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths turned up and they started to run the show. The result is the carbon tax, the mining tax—a mining tax which even as we speak shows we do not know where we are. We do not know whether Bob Brown is supporting it or not. It is lunacy. You should have kept your dignity and said, 'No, enough of this farce. Enough of it. No, it stops and it should have stopped yesterday.' After that press conference, the Prime Minister should have said, 'No, this is where the lunacy stops. No more being run by courtyard press conferences. We are taking back the reins and we are going to run the show.'

Of course, we did not get that. The lunacy still rolls on. We will go to Christmas with this Pythonesque form of lunacy. What has the mining tax done for us lately? Nothing except kept us out of recession; developed as our major export.

We need a Parliamentary Budget Office. We need it on fair terms. We have not got it on fair terms in this current bill. There is obviously a distinct strategic advantage for the position of the Greens-Labor Party-Independents alliance. They have their parliamentary budget office but we do not have a fair parliamentary budget office. It is very important for the Australian people to know that we believe in a parliamentary budget office. We believe in one that is fair, that we can work with. We believe in one which does not compromise our negotiations and our capacity to work with that organisation.

We acknowledge that the Greens-Labor Party-Independents alliance has an immense strategic advantage. The glee club has an immense strategic advantage because they have the Treasury at their disposal. We have to make sure that what we get is something that we can show to the Australian people so that we can dispense with these fallacious statements like the $70 billion black hole. We need it so that we can do it.