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

I will take opposition wherever I can find it! However, Sucrogen believe this is made more difficult because of the bill. They say:

It might be that from time to time depending on the market situation the business needs to only move one cargo. It may be that it needs to move four and this cannot be predicted over a 12 month period.

That applies to the businesses beholden to this bill. This shows the impediments that happen when we have to, in some way, predict the next 12-month period. As I said in my speech in the second reading debate this morning, it is very hard to predict with market based things precisely what product you are going to be moving and when.

In summary, what we are trying to do with these amendments is remove some of the cumbersome items that are so obvious in this legislation. We have got to try and get the wheels of commerce turning in some form that deals with the issues that are before us in this nation. It is absurd to think that this is happening at a time when Europe is going through the obvious dilemmas that we see on the television every hour of every day, in every news brief. When we see the issues that have been brought up lately in Queensland—with its debt about to go past $1 billion, thanks to the Labor government and the parlous financial state it left its Treasury in; when places such as South Australia are losing their credit rating; when we find the debt of New South Wales going through the roof; and when we find that our own nation’s debt is at $231 billion and heading north, we have to try and do everything we can to make sure that we can export product at a rate which makes it competitive on the global market so that we can basically pay our way in the future. We always seem to be coming up with impediments in this chamber. In the next couple of weeks, we will have the lunacy of the carbon tax coming in. Everyone is going to have to pick up the tab for that. Why? Who knows why. It is because we do not like having people employed in Australia, apparently. This legislation is yet another addendum to that. It is another mechanism that basically makes it harder for our industry to compete. On the back of this, we have to try and do something to streamline this legislation in such a way that it keeps Australia in the ballpark, that keeps Australia competitive. This amendment is part of a process of trying to deal with the legislation and in some form to streamline it.