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

Let us go to the next issue. The next issue is the small business tax deduction. But that is not the truth. What do you call something that is a deliberate untruth? This time the discount factor is 70 per cent, because 70 per cent of small businesses will not get the tax deduction because 70 per cent of small businesses are not incorporated. Maybe we will give the 70 per cent discount factor to Mr Swan. We have the 400 per cent acceleration factor on bad news that we can attribute to Minister Wong. We also have the 70 per cent discount factor on the truth that we can attribute to Mr Swan. This is what is happening to our nation as we go piece by piece through the back door.

These people are so incompetent that they have done something that I did not think was possible: they have come up with a tax that costs us money. How do you come up with revenue that becomes a cost? They have rewritten the book on accountancy 101. They now have an income that is an expense. It is easy: all you have to do is have the competency of the imbeciles that currently occupy the Treasury benches and these things become possible. We are going out the back door.

In trying to redeem themselves—in trying to extract themselves from this situation—they have attacked Australian agriculture, no better exemplified than in the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. In that plan, we are borrowing money from overseas to remove productive capacity. We are borrowing money in order to make our capacity to pay that debt back worse. Why? I do not know. It is just one of those things. They do not believe in infrastructure—infrastructure is too hard. They just want to buy things back, send people broke and send them out the back door. They just want to turn everything into carbon credits and send them to Rwanda. That is the Labor Party policy: they are going to send the whole nation off as a carbon credit to Equatorial Africa and that is where it will all end.