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

I was actually enjoying Senator Feeney's speech. It was quite well written. It had good wordcraft in it. It had proper pitch. All around, it was almost Shakespearean. It is a shame he is leaving the chamber because I was hoping he would go for longer. The trouble is it was a load of rubbish. That is the problem—it was a complete load of rubbish. It was going so well that I was waiting for the punchline and then it came to the part where they are decarbonising the planet. That is the part that always throws you. Once they talk about decarbonising the planet, you know, 'They're back; it's the Labor Party.' This is the height of lunacy. There is one group in Australia who will benefit from the carbon tax—they will absolutely reap the rewards from the carbon tax—and that group is the coalition. We are going to use it as a mechanism to kick those opposite out. It is so obvious—it is as obvious as the nose on your face. The Australian people hate it and those opposite know they hate it. I do not know why they pursue it. They should have some gumption and stand up about it. Even if they believe in a lot of the tripe, they should have the gumption to stand up in their party room and say: 'This tax is going to destroy our party. If we go forward with it, it is going to destroy us. Unfortunately, policy is never bigger than a party and the policy has to go.' But they have not done that. They are carting themselves to oblivion.

Let us deal with the budget issues. The NBN is going out of the back door. It is absurd. The NBN is now just racking up major cost overruns. It does not have the customer base it was supposed to have. In accountancy there is a thing called impairment that you have to place on assets when you realise they are not making money, that what you paid is not what you would get if you had to sell it. Believe you me, after you spend all your money on the NBN, if you go to sell it you are not going to get your $50 billion back. You are going to have to book an impairment and that loss is going to be massive for the Australian people. It is a crazy idea. You have to look at where your overdraft is right now. You have applied for an extension of your overdraft to $300 billion. You do not have the capacity to go on frolics—it is not there. If you do, it is completely and utterly criminal because you are lumbering your mistakes onto other generations to come after you.

Another one is this schoolkiddie's bonus, or whatever you call it. Why? It is $1.3 billion, but it is $1.3 billion that we do not have. It is another $1.3 billion that we have to borrow. It is not our money. It is the good people of China's money and the good people of the Middle East's money; it is not our money. We are going to borrow $1.3 billion just to basically throw it and hope it lands in the appropriate spot. There is no logic behind it, no committee behind it, no peak industry body behind it. There is nothing behind it but a desire of the Treasurer—though probably it was a desire of the Prime Minister—to try to buy favour. That never works. It is the last refuge of a scoundrel, even after patriotism. It just never works. You cannot buy love. Even Mr Thomson could probably tell you that. It is a case where you will get an outcome, but you will not get the affection of the Australian people. Of course they will take the money. People will always take your money, but it does not mean they are going to respect you for it. The question everyone is asking of course is: why didn't you put it into the National Disability Insurance Scheme? That is something that is supported. It is a logical outcome. It is probably a far more appropriate place than to just throw it out the door.

The next one is defence. You are throwing out the insurance policy. Looking through the figures with defence, the cut to it against GDP takes us to levels that we have experienced in Australia before. From what we can see, prima facie, it is starting to look like levels we had around 1938. I am not suggesting for one moment that there is something, but it is just foolish. It is foolish for you to let that crucial portfolio go to such a low level. It is reprehensible that you have taken your eye off the ball, because with all this fiasco with Mr Slipper and Mr Thomson happening in the foreground, with Mr Rudd being absolutely carpeted by his colleagues and with the undignified way in which the Prime Minister of Australia carpeted the former Prime Minister, we in the opposition did not need to be an opposition—you do it to yourselves, every day. It is just absurd. It started to reflect that the dignity of office was lost. We knew as soon as the polling started to come out that the Australian people would switch off you, and they have.

While that absurdity was happening in the foreground, the absurdity in the background was our finances and the issue that I have always been concerned about, which is debt. It is not a case of just the level of debt but the trajectory of debt and the year-in, year-out, week-in, week-out, structural deficit that was becoming clearly apparent in your cash flows. It continues to this day. You cannot pull wool over people's eyes, borrow week after week $1½ billion, $2 billion, $3 billion and say, 'This is not a problem.' Of course it is a problem; it is a major problem.

I remember one week when you borrowed $3 billion. I was trying to think about that with housing. It is 6,000 houses at $500,000 a pop. You have about two-and-a-bit people in a house and that is a count of 13,000 or 14,000 people who you just purchased for the week. This is not logical and you cannot go on. Of course, it is not going to go on. Every promise you make on a financial footing, you break. It is all right giving people bad news—as an accountant, I can tell you that—but you must hit your target. You have to hit your target and when you are out, not slightly out but miles out, that sense of confidence in what you are saying goes.

Two years ago you told us that this year we would have a $13 billion deficit. Okay, that is a bad outcome. Then, a year later, you said, 'No, no, we've got it wrong. It's going to be a $22 billion deficit'—just slightly less—and then the year after that you go, 'No, we got it wrong again'. It was a $44 billion deficit. So there is a trend. Each year you are about 100 per cent wrong. Then you say, 'Even though we have got it so drastically wrong, you now must believe us.' Senator Feeney said, 'We have delivered a surplus'. You have not delivered a surplus. That is also another untruth. You have made a promise of a surplus—a promise that will not be able to be ascertained until 30 June 2013, for which the final figures will come in around about September. Between now and then we have to believe your promise.

Let us work on that. What other promises has this government made that we can therefore say makes it believable?