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

Certainly, Madam Acting Deputy President. At level 7, 147 Pirie Street, it is rather hard to understand what happens at Dirranbandi when the town shuts down. It is rather difficult to understand how you go to the people of Collarenebri and leave them in destitution. It is rather difficult to understand and comprehend what happens at Coleambally.

No, at level 7, 147 Pirie Street, you can say some wonderful things and make some marvellous gestures—the faux empathy, the grimace and the emotive pause—but they are not fair dinkum. It just goes to show you how absolutely lacking real empathy is, because people who believe in things actually go and place themselves exactly where those things are.

I have lived, and have always lived, in the basin—we live with the people. There is this assertion that it is all about—as Senator Hanson-Young said before—multibillion-dollar irrigators. I will tell you about the houses where some of these multibillion-dollar irrigators live. If you go to the town of Dirranbandi you can pick up a house for 50 grand, hardly the sort of opulence that I think you could understand at level 7, 147 Pirie Street.

We have heard that, of course, it is about the community. What community? If you are going to look after the community come and live in the communities. Come and think that there is more to this: it is about, and has always been about, a triple bottom line—an environmental outcome, which the coalition put the money on the table for. But there is also the social outcome and there is also the economic outcome, and that goes beyond, as has rightly been said, just a play by the Greens to divide and destroy, and to talk in these riddles that they never, ever have to deliver on. They never, ever have to live with the consequences of their decisions.

We have worked with the government because we understand exactly how incredibly important this is. It would have been absolutely incredibly easy to mount a demonstration—gosh knows, I have done them before—up and down through the basin. It would have been easy. The trouble is that it would also have been pyrrhic because it will not actually have brought a result.

And I apologise for wanting to look after people. I apologise for wanting to put people on the same level as frogs and newts and swamps. I apologise that when you walk into a town people actually talk about their futures. I am sorry that I do not have the Green ethos where we can just flush them all down the toilet. I am sorry that I do not have that! I have never actually managed to be able to do that.

And the talk in all those metaphors—'greedily taking'! Who is 'greedily taking'? The paper shop in Moree? Are they 'greedy takers'? Or maybe it is the person who is a teacher in Goondiwindi? Are they another 'greedy taker'? Or maybe it is the person who is trying to start a motel in Forbes—are they another 'greedy taker'? Is that who these people are? The 2.2 million people who live in the basin, are they just all greedy? They are all greedy because they want a future!

We talk about wanting to be the food bowl of South-East Asia. Well, the first thing we actually have to be is the food bowl of Australia. That is a good start. But there is this sort of nihilist philosophy that the Greens revel in; this nihilist idealism where success is destruction, where success is Smithton in Northern Tasmania, with 30 per cent unemployment. And the Greens are cock-a-hoop—they have kicked a goal. They have kicked a goal when people are poor and they can revel in the benefaction of the welfare state. They are from a community that is completely removed from the disaster that they cast on the people around them. And that is supposed to be some sort of beneficial outcome.

The coalition has worked with the Labor Party. We have worked not just at a federal level but at a state level over a long period of time, and we have tried our very best. To be honest, we have stayed out of the media, we have trusted one another and we have worked for an outcome because we know that the ramifications for the people who we represent of not coming to that outcome would be disastrous. They would then be at the behest of the whims of the Greens, represented by Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who said at the start that she wanted 7,600 gigalitres to be taken from the basin. That was her kick-off point—7,600 gigalitres—which would absolutely and utterly send people up and down the river destitute, and their final cause—the issue du jour—to return us all to eating beetles and nuts on the forest floor would be one step closer.

I can assure you that there are people who are not happy with this plan in towns. I can assure you that we are quelling resentments as they ring up our offices, saying, 'We feel uncertain. We are unsure. We are taking you, the Australian government and the responsible parties'— who actually have to live by the decision and even though they have had their differences—'in this chamber on trust'. We are responsible for it. They are taking us on this incredible thing called trust. They are trusting us not to be perverse in the outcomes that we bring into their lives. Gosh knows, that is what we hope to do.

The reality is that whether it is the coalition or the Labor Party we have to live with the decisions as well. It actually has to go beyond the spruiking; you actually have to pay for them. You have to live with them, you have to deliver them and you have to go back to the people and be responsible for them. It is all very well to be the marginal party with the nihilist ideals that appeases a constituency with the sweat, the blood and the reality that someone else has to live with.

They want 3,200.

By the end of this, through the course of state actions and the Living Murray agreement, there will be more than 3,200. There will be 3,700. There has already been 950 delivered. We have got 2,750 here. We will have 3,700 gigalitres that, over the course of a range of programs, will have been delivered back to the river. There is still the capacity for a five per cent movement of total extractions, a capacity of 710, that is still there. We are still in the process, within that upside, of allowing extra money to go towards 450 gigs of that five per cent limit. There has been an immense amount of movement.

All that this is really about is that the Greens have said, 'The Labor Party are there and the coalition are there, so we'll sit over here and throw rocks.' That is their process. Senator Hanson-Young has had a range of numbers. She started with 7,600, then it was 4,000, now it is 3,200—and then she accuses us about numbers. We have got a number: 2,750. It is there—2,750, with the potential of five per cent up or five per cent down, and with 450 gigs going towards the upside to actually finance it.

The other issue that has to be dealt with from the person from level 7, 147 Pirie Street, Adelaide—Senator Sarah Hanson-Young—is about when the drought was on. The millennium drought did not just happen in Adelaide or the Lower Lakes, it happened across the whole basin. The reason there was no water at the lower end of the system is because there was no water at the upper end of the system. I can prove that because people in my area went broke—that is, the banks came in and kicked them off their place. I am not going to name those people here but I could go through quite a list of them. They went through humiliation for trying to do something for this nation. They did what this nation asked of them: they went west, they scratched out a living in the dirt, they borrowed in some instances tens of millions of dollars, it did not rain because the drought happened and they went broke. They are now live with the humiliation of not having a house, of living with sons and daughters. What does Senator Sarah Hanson-Young call them? Greedy. They are greedy people. Greedy for trying to do the right thing by our country; terrible, shocking people trying to feed people, trying to clothe people, going without, going through the privations of trying to start a business. And what do they get accosted with? They are greedy. A nation of people who—if that is what they call them—are greedy like that, who make the sacrifice for our nation, will make our nation a great place and will actually build our nation.

It is such an absolute insult from someone who, good luck to them, lives with the benefaction of the taxpayers' dollar in the job we have here, in an office in the middle of a town, where the closest they will ever get to the basin on a day-to-day basis is when they turn on the tap—possibly. That is about as close as they get. For them it is a philosophy, it is an ideal, it is over the hill—but it makes sense when you get down to the manic monkey cafe to bang on about this. If you can just create a bit of resentment, create a bit of hate, create a bit of division and then build on that, you can be the real destroyer, the total nihilist for which, if our nation followed that path, it would be completely and utterly led to a social and economic oblivion.

We are working to try to come to a resolution because it is the responsible thing to do. And it is an absurdity to think that there has not been a movement that hurts us in what we do. I will explain to you some of the hurt that we have had so far. When they purchased the water from Twynam's, from John Kahlbetzer, they basically made the town of Collarenebri defunct. It has no water licence. There is no reason for there to be a cotton gin anymore. What do we say to those people? What is Senator Sarah Hanson-Young's message to those people? What is it? Can they move down to level 7, 147 Pirie Street and get a job? Maybe we can send the whole town down there.

We have got to realise that when the drought was on it was not just a drought for one corner of the basin, it was a drought for the whole basin. It was privation for the whole basin. I know that because I live there. My office is there. My office is on the river. My business is on the river. My property is in the basin. Our family are not irrigators. In fact, we are below irrigators, but we acknowledge that that is part of the economy because above us is a town called Cunnamulla and they have got a little bit of irrigation. Good luck to the people of Cunnamulla—they have a bit of irrigation so the standard of living has slowly advanced.

This is what terrible people we are in my own town of St George. In the town of St George, with about 4,000 people, agricultural output on a yearly basis is between three-quarters of a billion and a billion dollars every year that they put towards our nation—these terrible greedy people. Year in, year out, they are putting it towards our nation. It is actually how we make money. These people make money and then they pay taxes, and they go without and they live out in the sticks, and with their taxes they pay for a whole range of things that this nation needs. One is level 7, 147 Pirie Street—that is one of the things they pay for. What they get for that is the prophet from over the horizon preaching to them about how evil they are, how greedy they are.

The approach of the Greens, after the nihilist destruction, is now to destroy the plan. It is their form of 'burn the plan'. It is their little day of destroying things: come out, wreck the joint. I suppose then we can all cop it. As they say, we will 'just have to cop it'. And we have ridiculous things like the metaphor they draw: 'We have to take our full course of antibiotics.' As prescribed by who? As prescribed for what purpose?