Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It was with some interest tonight that we heard the Leader of the Opposition’s reply to the budget. There are a couple of issues that need to be brought up, given that people spoke today on child-care facilities. We heard tonight about Mr Beazley’s child-care plan. He is going to put 260 child-care facilities in 150 electorates. I am trying to work that out. That is about one and two-thirds of a child-care centre per electorate. For the electorate I live in, Maranoa, I am trying to work out where he is going to put them—maybe one in Dalby and two-thirds of one in Longreach.

After giving some good advertising to The Nationals—and I acknowledge that The Nationals are the reason why a lot of money gets spent on infrastructure in this nation, and I proudly stand behind that and thank Mr Beazley for his endorsement of National Party efforts in that area—he made a very interesting statement about his telecommunications plan. It is apparent that Mr Beazley intends to spend the $757 million of the Broadband Connect program that The Nationals carved out as well as draw down the total trust fund of $2 billion which was put aside to protect future telecommunications. However, he never mentioned—and I find this perplexing—that he was not going to sell Telstra. He never mentioned that.

Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

He was going to roll out broadband with Telstra—

Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

But he never mentioned that a big consideration of his budget in the future was that there would be no revenue from the sale of Telstra. In fact, he explicitly avoided the whole mention of Telstra.

It is amazing how quickly things change around here. It was only a matter of months ago that we heard the tirades at the door when we stood here and said that Mr Beazley had intended to sell Telstra right from the start. It did not take very long before he became fair dinkum, as he likes to say, and was truthful with the Australian people and announced implicitly to them in his speech tonight that he is going to sell Telstra. That is something we should get on the record straightaway and, because he is talking about his contract with middle Australia, he has to be completely upfront with them.

All the way through his speech tonight he gave us a whole heap of ‘imagine’ statements. He had more imagining than John Lennon; there were ‘imagine’ statements through the whole lot of it. But not once did we get a costing; not once did he say that he was going to balance the books. That leads us back to the old conundrum of where a Labor government will take us: a Labor government will take us into fiscal irresponsibility, higher interest rates and burgeoning government debt. Very importantly, Mr Beazley also never mentioned his position on superannuation. We do not know whether or not he agrees with the government’s position on superannuation. He ridiculed the tax cuts as $10 worth of poker machine fun or in like terms, but he never said what he intends to do.

In the National Party, we have a strong interest in biorenewable fuels. Mr Beazley also made a statement on that. He is a strong advocate for biorenewable fuels, which leaves a bit of concern about the former position of Bob McMullan, who did his best to kick the life out of the ethanol industry and also about the position of one of the former leaders, Simon Crean. He was another one who, unfortunately for the ethanol industry, managed to kick it to pieces. We would be interested to hear from Mr Beazley what his intentions are in that context, rather than just a generic statement that he is interested in the biorenewable fuel industry. The Labor leader of Queensland says that his own federal colleagues are off the game on this one and that they are dragging the chain. Mr Beazley, apart from a generic statement, has done the same.

It is very important before I go home tonight after listening to that speech that I mention the thing that sticks in my mind and which will stick in everybody’s mind: Mr Beazley is going to sell Telstra, and always was. What we heard over the last six months was a charade and the opposition were completely insincere in the arguments they proffered to us. They were never once honest with us.