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

The full course of antibiotics from these people? Not one of them is prepared to live in the area they are talking about. What total and utter hypocrites.

With their ideas, not only would we have social and economic destruction but also in some areas a complete compromise of the economic infrastructure—of bridges, of roads, of easements. In some areas it is not even possible to move the water that they require. It just does not have that capacity because of natural choke points, or choke points put in by man such as those other terrible things of civilisation, bridges—we cannot have bridges anymore.

And what is the final goal? What do they want? Why don't we just remove every piece of infrastructure? This is the peculiar thing: the water that is going to provide the environmental outcome in many instances is going to come from man-made structures and, if those man-made structures were not there, wouldn't it be hard to deliver the water? If we deliver water in a drought, the water will probably come from man-made structures—those evil man-made structures. They will be delivering the water in order to deliver an environmental outcome. Surely a purist could not possibly take water from those man-made structures that are actually going to have the capacity to deliver an outcome that sustains the environment!

People who live in the basin, and that goes beyond people who are irrigators—the townspeople, the people who live in the weatherboard and iron, the brick and tile, who put their rubbish out on a Monday or Tuesday night, who live in streets like mine—are put at risk because of a nihilist philosophy that wants no more than to destroy things, and then has the hide, basically, to not have to live with their decisions. They foist on other people their philosophy and outcomes. They are not prepared to pay the price, but they are prepared to take the cheque. They are prepared to live by the benefaction of a taxpayer's dollar whilst they destroy the economy that actually provides it.

It would be interesting to know exactly what their purpose is. Maybe the real frustration about this is that through the Christmas period—because this issue after many years of work is coming to a conclusion—one of those final things that the Greens are out there to destroy will not be there. They will have to find some other thing to destroy. They have destroyed the timber industry, they have destroyed the fishing industry, and they want to destroy the irrigation industry. They want to destroy our capacity to feed ourselves, and with their ideas surrounding the excesses of the carbon tax, maybe they just want to destroy the economy, full stop. They are running out of things to destroy. What other things can they get rid of? What is the next stage of nihilism for them? When will we hear that they are actually trying to create something that is a reasonable expression of something with a sustainable economic base? Do we just have to put up with the position that every time Senator Sarah Hanson-Young turns up it is about something that people in the Murray-Darling Basin live in fear and trepidation of? They know that the only utterances that will come from the Australian Greens are ones that are going to make their lives—the lives of people whose socio-economic condition is vastly inferior to that of so many people in capital cities—more difficult, and that the delivery of the Greens will take them from poor to destitute.