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

I remember hearing the Prime Minister say this:

We are the people who share and stick together.

You would have to have been living under a rock in the last month to have seen that, because at the moment they might be the people who share and hit people with sticks or hit each other in the head with sticks but they hardly stick together. It has been an absolute debacle as we see one attack the other, as we see deliberations, as we see changes—even today, in the next manifestation of it, over there we have the new Senator Bob Carr. The trouble with Senator Bob Carr is that he has taken Mr Stephen Smith's job, but Mr Stephen Smith is a bit unhappy about that. He thought he was lined up to be the Minister for Defence but it did not actually happen. They talk about mateship and having a fair go. We have never, ever seen that. But the most peculiar thing was this statement made by Prime Minister Julia Gillard:

We follow it simply because we are us.

'We are us.' What on earth does that mean? Who else could you be? 'We are somebody else'? 'Somebody else is us'? It is a very strange thing to say. It is a job for Inspector Clouseau. 'We are us.' What could this possibly mean?

I will tell you one thing for sure: we are not them. We are definitely not them. We are not them, because what they are in the ALP both in Queensland and at a federal level is just a complete and utter fiasco. I should start at the first one. In the last four weeks the Labor Party have borrowed—and you can see this on the AOFM, Australian Office of Financial Management, website under Australian government securities outstanding—an extra $10 billion. That is just in the last four weeks. Let us paint a picture of what that is. Ten billion dollars would buy about 20,000 houses in Brisbane or, if you were out in the country, I suppose you would buy close to 35,000 houses. Each house has about two and a bit people in it, so it is equivalent to about a regional town of 70,000 people, just in the last four weeks. This shows what a disaster they are. In the last four weeks it is like they have bought all the houses in Roma, St George, Goondiwindi, Dalby, Kingaroy, Charters Towers and probably a few others thrown in—just in the last four weeks. But no, it is not a problem; everything is under control. Wayne Swan, the Treasurer, is the Treasurer of the millennium. He is a stroke of genius. We are so lucky to be blessed with him, to be endowed with his presence, even though we are currently about $18 billion away from bouncing our cheques and hitting our next limit of a quarter of a trillion dollars.

It does not matter where you go. Wherever the Labor Party go they have this Midas touch backwards. I do not know—what is a Midas touch backwards? Sadim, I suppose—a very peculiar way of sending the show upside down. In Queensland they have lost their credit rating, even though, when you think about it, that is the state that gave us Joh Bjelke-Petersen, whose government built all the highways and built the dams—which the Labor Party complained about. They said the dams were too big; Wivenhoe was too big; it was profligate. It put aside the country for Wolffdene. It built the universities. It got the universities up and running. It got the international airports up and running. It built the motorways, sealed the roads and electrified Central Queensland before they had even finished electrifying the suburban network in Sydney. And the amazing thing about Joh Bjelke-Petersen is that, when he left, the Treasury was absolutely overflowing with money.

The people are the same. They are the same Queenslanders who were there before. The minerals are still there. They did not disappear. In fact, they went into a minerals boom. The Great Barrier Reef is just basically where we left it, still off the coast of North Queensland. The bauxite is still there. The copper is still there. We have developed the cotton areas—there is actually more of that—but we did that with private money. We could not rely on the government; we did that with private money.

So what changed? How could the government go out the back door? How could they find themselves $62.3 billion in debt, heading towards $85.4 billion in gross debt? What is different between then and now?

It is quite simple: it is them; it is the Australian Labor Party; it is the management of the Labor Party. That is what has taken people out the back door. That is the only thing we have to worry about. The Labor Party says, 'We are us,' whatever that means. Our mantra is simple: 'We are not them'. We are definitely not them.

These are the people who also built the Tugun desalination plant. That is incredible; it is like a work of art. It sits down there at Tugun but it does not work. It is a $1 billion piece of modern art on the Gold Coast. Nothing has ever worked—the seals have never worked; they could never get it up and running. But that is the Labor Party; that is the 'We are us' people. But we are not them. We do not send the place broke. We do not build things that just do not work.

Then we had the Mary River dam. It was going to cost about $1.7 billion in construction costs, and then they had to move all the people, and then move the highway, and then move the railway line. The trouble was that the dam was going to be less than five metres deep at its maximum, with a yield of around 150,000 megalitres. The all-up cost was around $4 billion—the most expensive swamp on the planet. Maybe they were creating a Ramsar site. How could it be such a fiasco? It is their mantra—'We are us'. But we, on this side, are not them. The LNP is not them.

Then we had the Tahitian prince. Where would a health department be without a Tahitian prince? Where did the Tahitian prince come from? A man strolls into the health building and says, 'Aloha'—or whatever they say in Tahiti—'here I am, I am a Tahitian prince.' The health department was so fortunate to have a Tahitian prince working for it. Anyway, he managed to walk out the door with the princely sum of $15 million. That is what happens under Labor. What is a department without a little Tahitian prince in it? Of course that is believable, of course Wayne Swan is on top of the books and of course there are no fractious relationships in the Labor Party. It is all so believable. Why is it believable? Because, they say, 'We are us.' They are obviously Tahitian princes.

The thing for people to remember is that we are not them. When they go to this election they will be asking themselves what it is all about. As they walk up the path and into the ballot box, they will be thinking about the Labor Party saying, 'We are us,' and they will be thinking about the Labor Party saying, 'We are broke,' and they will be thinking about the Labor Party saying, 'We believe in Tahitian princes,' and they will be thinking about the Labor Party saying, 'We believe in the Tugun desalination plant'—a new piece of modern art on the Gold Coast. They will be thinking about, 'We believe in the Mary River dam,' and they will be thinking about, 'We believe in tree-clearing guidelines'—the guidelines that took away the property rights of so many Queenslanders—and they will be thinking about, 'We believe in coal seam gas licences,' when the Labor Party ran out of money and so sold the licences for everything they could possibly conjure up out from underneath the rights of so many farmers. The people will be thinking about those things as they walk up the path, and will be saying, 'That's right, they are them—they are a complete and utter disaster.' The Labor Party up there at the moment are trying to dive away from their policies, because now it is not about the Labor Party; it is about keeping Kate and keeping Bill and keeping Pam—about keeping everything, but do not say anything about the Labor Party because if you mention the fact that they are actually in the Australian Labor Party people will not vote for them. People just think they are completely shoddy.

We have to think about a party that has taken a powerhouse state to the point where it has one of the highest unemployment rates—5.7 per cent is the unemployment rate in Queensland today. How do they manage to go broke and put everybody out of a job with all that was left to them at the start? It is simple. Whenever you want to know the answer, you just have to listen to Julia Gillard's speech and hear her say, 'We are us'—whatever that means. It is a fantastic statement. This is going to be an interesting election in a couple of weeks time. The people of Queensland are not fools. They understand that, if they keep Kate, they keep the Labor government. If they keep Kerry Shine, they keep the Labor government. If they keep Mr Fraser—they would almost have to be committed for that—they keep the Labor government. We cannot keep the people who have caused the problems. We have to get rid of those people to get Queensland back on the rails and doing what it did before, which was being the powerhouse of our nation.