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

It is obvious that we have to have this discussion and it will go on. The Labor Party, and the Greens to support them, have said that we are going into a period of stability. I have been fascinated by this announcement, this epiphany of stability. It is only in recent memory that we have had the free character assessments given by Wayne Swan about his state colleague and person from his alumni at Nambour high, Kevin Rudd, and the free character assessments dished out by Senator Conroy and Minister Burke, and there were the return serves by Mr Cameron and Mr Ferguson, and then we had Mr Albanese, who just did not know what to say. He did not know what the story was, so he said something about fighting Tories—it made no sense at all—but it was obviously a highly emotional event for him.

It is fascinating that when we are talking about stability, we are referring to a crowd that said that their government was chaotic and that it lacked discipline, method and purpose. The grand architect of this chaotic, ill-disciplined, methodless, purposeless government was the Hon. Mr Kevin Rudd. What did they do with this person? They made him the foreign minister. Of course, those are the greatest credentials for that office. What you do when you are looking for stability, when you are doing the right job for Australia, is give that person the representation of our nation in every way, shape or form in the highest meetings throughout Australia. Of course, it makes so much sense! That is obviously the reflection of a government that has the capacity of stability!

I had a week away during the floods. Before I left, I remember looking across the chamber and, correct me if I am wrong, Senator Ludwig was there—he was the Leader of Government Business in the Senate—and Senator Arbib was there. When I came back, Senator Arbib was there and Senator Ludwig was there. I do not know what happened. In the middle of the night, there was a change—a bit of a promotion. Obviously, Senator Arbib had been lobbying for a job and he got one. He bumped off Joe. But now Senator Ludwig is there and Senator Arbib is there, but Senator Arbib is going out there—he is leaving. What will we have then? We could have Senator Ludwig going there, but we have Senator Carr there, but he is going back there. We have Senator Conroy there and he is generally around at Senator Cameron's throat, but he will be there and talking to the person there. It is going to make so much sense! Senator Penny Wong is there and there. She has been all around the place. She has been in the Finance ministry. So, of course we have stability! In the other place, we have Minister McClelland. He is there, but he is going back there. Then we have Mr Ferguson. He is there. He might stay there, but he will probably go back down this way a fair bit, I would say. It is obviously stable! It is like the Rock of Gibraltar! It is completely under control! There is nothing to see here, nothing to worry about—everything is under control! All the deck chairs are arranged on the Titanic and it is going straight ahead.

It is all going to come unstuck. We know that, because this is just a purposeless, methodless, ill-disciplined government. Last week we had an absolutely perfect character assessment of the Labor Party by Kevin Rudd. Then we had a perfect assessment of Kevin Rudd by Julia Gillard and about 15 other people.

What else is in this stable ship? What have we got? We have the carbon tax—because of course the people who cannot even get their own ship together are going to cool the planet. That would make sense! That is obviously on the cards! In fact I could feel the chill as I came down here. It was decidedly cold—cold and nasty. It was very cold and very nasty. And it is getting chillier by the moment. There are some rooms here where it is virtually freezing and there are some where it is red hot. There are a lot of climatic themes happening around this building at the moment and they are going to keep happening for quite a while. The carbon tax is on and the Australian people are sitting back, scratching their heads, saying: 'Is this what should be running my nation or is this some extension of John Cleese's latest tour of Australia? Has he created a whole retinue of comic characters acting as the Australian government, giving us Monty Python's flying parliament?' It is beyond belief.

Then we have the debt. While this complete soap opera is happening in the foreground, in the background our debt is just racing through the roof. You should go to the Australian Office of Financial Management website and go to the front page—it is on the front page because you have to be completely transparent to the people overseas who are buying our bonds. There you will find that last week we extended our debt by $2.3 billion—enough to buy around 5,000 houses in regional towns or the outer suburbs. There is nothing to worry about there! The week before, we extended our debt by $3.3 billion—enough to buy close to 7,000 houses, or you could buy a couple of towns. That was how much we extended our debt in one week. The week before that, they extended our debt by in excess of $2 billion. We are now $229.7 billion in debt and we are heading towards our limit. We have a limit at $250 billion. The way we are going, we will get there very soon. They will be able to tick that box. They will have actually reached a target: our debt ceiling. What are we going to do? If they do not extend the limit, the public service will shut down. This is the chaos which is absolutely manifest in the government.

Obviously the person who is completely, totally and utterly incompetent is our current Treasurer. He is completely and utterly out of his depth—