John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Governing for all Australians—Senator Nash, where will we start? Let us start with the Independent Youth Allowance. Look at the disgraceful decision the government made on Independent Youth Allowance to stop people from rural and regional areas getting a tertiary education. If it had not been for the persistence and the fight by Senator Nash and others on this side, those changes would not have happened to bring some sort of fairness to the government's ridiculous Independent Youth Allowance changes. They would have been here earlier if some members of parliament, such as Mr Windsor and Mr Oakeshott, had shown some courage and had stood up for their electorates.

The national parks—look at the fires we just had at Coonabarabran. My pet hate: locking up country and leaving it. The Greens are ruling the Labor Party at a state level and a federal level simply to cause bushfires.

At the Warrumbungle National Park a few weeks ago, close to 50,000 hectares of national park and surrounds, including the visitors centre, and 33 homes were lost.

Let's look at your carbon tax. We still have more to come. We have the carbon tax, but we have the death tax to come. What is a death tax? That is how Tony Sheldon, the boss of the Transport Workers Union, described the extra $515 million of diesel tax to be placed on our truckies come 1 July 2014—if you are still in government. I give a message to all the truckies listening: if you want an extra $515 million in tax slammed on your diesel—in other words, your rebates removed—vote for the Labor Party or the Greens at the next election. Vote to put the cost of your fuel up.

What does that do for regional Australia, which relies heavily on transport? In the lovely town I live in, Inverell, we do not have a train. Everything comes in by road—including a thousand head of cattle for slaughter at the abattoirs each weekday—and everything goes out by road. The food, the supplies, the clothing, the fuel—you name it—all go by road. But you are going to put another $515 million of diesel tax on our truckies—'the death tax', as Mr Sheldon called it. You are going to introduce a death tax if you stay in government, but hopefully you won't. If you do, rural and regional Australia will suffer more.

Senator Polley interjecting—

Senator Bilyk interjecting—

I would love to chat about the NBN—the program for which we do not have a cost-benefit analysis. People like Senator Polley and Senator Bilyk were not willing to vote for a cost-benefit analysis on the biggest public expenditure in the history of our nation. What did you have to hide? It is all coming out now. A headline in the Armidale Express, on Wednesday, 20 February, read: 'NBN rollout farce'. They called it a farce and a farce it is. I put questions on notice for Senate estimates. I asked how many premises had been passed in Armidale, how many had hooked onto it and what the cost was. We did not get any answers. They were questions from last October's estimates. For the estimates just a couple of weeks ago, I gave notice that I wanted answers to those questions. What did I get? Nothing. What are they hiding? People in Armidale can see the waste—the contractors digging up trenches, filling them in and going nowhere.

Senator Nash, you would be interested in this. A business estate at Armidale cannot get the NBN unless they cough up $225,000.