Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

My colleague tells me I'm out by hundreds of thousands of dollars. You people are hypocrites. You need to concentrate on the terms of some indictment that you imagine in your mind has been done here, because you behave like that in this place every day. You pull down jobs while Barnaby Joyce builds them. You pull down the bush and all the developments that occur in rural Australia while Barnaby Joyce builds them. He, on his worst day, would contribute more to this nation than your whole mob would in your best month—every time. Barnaby Joyce has done a phenomenal job and there's nothing, nothing, in the indictment that you have so loosely laid down that would in any way compromise him in doing the great job that he has done. He remains the leader of our party with absolute confidence. He will be there for as long as he chooses to be. You will not see our party move on it. You suggest that we are the ones with their career and their reputation at stake here. We will stand with this man. He's a fine leader of our party. He's a fine member of parliament. He's a fine Deputy Prime Minister.

You come in here and attack him through this hypocrisy. You have been silent on so many other matters. I will bet you London to a brick that not one single lick came out of your mouth in relation to the Dastyari matter. You want to talk about conflict and seriousness? You want to talk about that? Let's talk about that. If you want to talk about interoffice relationships and its impact on people's performance, I could start today, go alphabetically and get to about 50 or 60 people here and right across the community. You people need to take a breath and think about what you're saying. It is grubby. It is below the point. The only reason you have brought yourself in here today is that you know that the Australian people have moved past this. The media have run out of any opportunity to put one more word in the paper. They've run out of pictures. So what you're trying to do is add a bit of water and turn a cup of soup into enough for the whole eight of you. I'm telling you now, you'll fail at this, just as it's failed at the moment. The reason it's failed is that there's been no weight in the indictment. There is nothing to see here. These things are tickety-top. There are movements of staff in the hundreds around this building every week. You do it yourself. You share resources. You sit your resources in the one room over there with the Greens. They're attached to you, but you sit them in a common office. You come in here and try to lecture us because you've found some sliver of a thing, some lightweight sliver of a thing, and you think we're going to fold. I will tell you that biting into us is like biting into a stone fish. It won't end with your story. (Time expired)