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

How sweet! So what of the people who signed off on this brilliant piece of work? There were three very clever people in the room and three other people. I will give you a hint. The three very clever people was a bloke called Marius Kloppers—he was the head of BHP Billiton—a bloke called David Peever, who is head of Rio Tinto, and a bloke called Peter Freyberg, from Xstrata Coal. They were the clever people. Then there were three other people in the room. We will not give it away totally; we will just say that their first names were Julia, Wayne and Martin. And what happened?

These three people came in and said, 'Oh, you are trying to design a tax—just hand it to us, we will design it for you.' They gave Julia, Wayne and Martin some crayons and told them to go outside and draw some pictures of flowers, or whatever, and when they came back they were told, 'Here is your tax; that will work—for us!' And we got the tax.

The one thing the Greens have got right is that they said it was a dud of a tax—and it is. But it is not a dud for Marius—it is a brilliant tax for Marius—and it is not a dud for David Peever from Rio Tinto; he thought it was a great tax. He thought it was one of the best pieces of work he had ever done. Marius had never had a better day in the office than the day he had in Julia Gillard's office. It was the best day in an office Marius had had in his life. How do you get your company out of billions of dollars of tax? You go for a cup of tea with the Prime Minister of Australia, Ms Gillard, and you will never have to pay a cent. They said that, no matter what, they would have a tax—and they got the 'no matter what' tax. It would all be hilarious except that they are running the country.

Right back to 2010 the Labor Party has been spending the money. They spent $480 million on one road around Perth—the Perth ring road. It was going to be financed by the tax. It was a regional road, by the way. Whenever they are in a corner and they are trying to get something, they put 'regional' in front of it—like the regional parliament house, the regional opera house or the regional Sydney Harbour Bridge. This was the regional ring road around Perth airport. So $480 million was to come from the mining tax for that. But the mining tax has only brought in $126 million, so there is a problem. Where do they get the money from? They borrow it. Now they are up to $262 billion in gross debt. They have crashed through the $75 billion limit, they have crashed through the $200 billion limit and they have gone through the quarter of a trillion dollar limit and now we are on our way to the $300 billion limit—all because the mining tax is a dud. But don't worry, because today the Greens will vote for the tax—they will vote for it again. Yesterday they said they did not like it but today they will vote for it. It all makes complete sense—and they are running the country; we should all remember that.

What else have we spent this mining tax on? Apparently we are going to do the Gateway upgrade with the mining tax, and the Blacksoil Interchange. There are so many things we are going to do with the mining tax. It will be interesting to see how we do them. I remember Minister Crean telling us in an interview on ABC Darwin with Julia Christensen, though he could have said it to someone else:

But for regional Australia as a whole Julia there is significant new resources available. Obviously there's the money from the mining tax …

So it is obvious—we can do these things with the money from the mining tax. The problem is, there is no money from the mining tax. There is just a massive hole and a big growing debt and a really stupid look on the face of the Treasurer and a very awkward Prime Minister and a Leader of the Government in the Senate with a funny little smile on his face—and a very nervous man he is too—and a very happy looking Senator Douglas Cameron. And there is massive confusion.

I know I am only a little old bush accountant, but I kind of like the details. On 1 May 2010, when the mining tax came in, the price of coal was about $100 a tonne; it is now $93. The price of iron ore was around $161 a tonne; it is now about $150. The global financial crisis was almost up there with them trying to cool the planet, and they were curing us of it with ceiling insulation and $900 cheques and school halls. That was how they were going to reboot the global economy. But isn't it funny that the prices of these commodities were higher then than they are now? Surely in the middle of a crisis the prices would be low, but the prices were high. How could that be? Where did that crisis go? Where is that crisis when you need it? What happened to that crisis? We seem to be in more of a crisis now than we were back at the time of the crisis. It is rather unusual. The crisis now is worse than it was then—but, apparently, we are not in a crisis now; now we are just in a state of complete and utter anarchy.

The people who knew this included Marius Kloppers, for a start. There is that famous quote by Kerry Packer about Alan Bond. He said, 'Alan Bond turns up once in your life, and when he turns up you just have to make the most of him.' I think that was ringing loud in Marius's ears when he went in to see the Prime Minister. He said to himself, 'This lady turns up once in your life, and when she turns up you just have to make the most of it.' And they did. I would love to have been a fly on the wall as they left. They would have said, 'Let's go down the boozer and have a couple of pots and talk about what just happened then; let's talk about how much we ripped off the Australian Treasury; let's talk about how we just left them in the aisles.' They must have walked out the door and said, 'You must have gone to mass last week—how did we manage to get out of that? It was so simple.' But now we are stuck with it.

My old audit boss, Philip Charles Travers Maltby, would look at these ridiculous scenarios that people would get themselves into and would sit there quietly in the smoko room and talk about how someone got themselves into this invidious financial position, and he would say that if you did not laugh you would cry. They are the only options you have. It is like that now with this client, called the Australian Labor Party. If you do not laugh, you cry—it is just so pathetic. It is a tragedy, it is a travesty, it is a joke, it is ridiculous and it cannot go on like this.

Senator Thorp interjecting—

Honestly, Senator Thorp, when you are ahead you should just be quiet. Now you have said something and I am going to quote you. In the midst of all this, when I talk about a surplus, Senator Thorp says it does not matter. That is the attitude that obviously permeates the Labor caucus—it does not matter if you cannot pay back your debts; it does not matter if you are hocked up to the eyeballs; it does not matter if you max out your credit card; it does not matter if you are going out the back door. It just does not matter. You just borrow more money. You go out and find people who will lend you more money and you borrow more money off them.

This cannot go on. This country cannot go on like this. This has to come to a conclusion. It is absolutely outrageous. Our nation cannot go on like this. It is hopeless; it is ridiculous. I say to Mr Kevin Rudd, the member for Griffith, 'If you are fair dinkum, stand up and do something for goodness sake; do not let it go on like this.' Or I say to Martin Ferguson, 'If you think you have got it, do something.' Somebody do something, because we cannot go on like this.

In the midst of this, in a few moments you are going to see one of the greatest corralling of hypocrites in the world as they stand up and vote for the tax that they, a week ago, said they were splitting the sheets over. It is just so absurd. It is just so patently absurd. It makes a farce of everything and it treats the whole of the Australian people like fools—as though they do not know what is going on. They do know what is going on. They have read this book; it is a horror story. Unfortunately, it is a horror story which we are all in.

In conclusion, the mining tax is just a manifestation of this government. It was a farce; it was premised, basically, on a lie. It was bred from the destruction of a prime minister who was voted in by the Australian people. It was manipulated by people who were, obviously, completely and utterly shrewder than those leading our government. It was done in dark corners; they did not even allow the proper Treasury representatives in to try and make sure the thing worked. Now it is going to have the imprimatur re-endorsed by the Australian Greens in a moment from now when they once more vote for the thing that they said was the biggest problem they had.