Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) | Hansard source

I rise today to, first of all, spell out that it doesn't matter whether you now have to reconcile yourself to why a promise can be broken; the fact is you broke it. That means that, when people go to an election, they look for honesty and authenticity in what is described to them as to what's going to happen if a certain government is elected. If you then subsequently decide to change, for whatever reason it is, you've broken your promise. One would suggest that what you should do, if you're so moved by wanting to make a change, is honour your promise and then, in addition, take a further legislative change. You can't just go up to any person on the street and say, 'I owed you $1,000, but I met another person and now I'm deciding only to pay you $450 because I've been moved to decide to pay you less.' What you should say is, 'Here's your $1,000 and now I have to address the person down the street who is also in need.' That is generally how promises work.

But it is such a great trick; it's such a great parlour game. Once you've taken the money away and spent it somewhere else, you can't go back and take it off people. That is logical. Yes, it's a great parlour game and, yes, it's so clever, but, ultimately, that's all that people remember—they never thank you for the tax cut, but they remember that you broke your promise. That's precisely what's happened here. Of course you can say to people: 'You've got more money than you had before. What do you think about that?' They'll say, 'That's a great idea!' Find any one person who's cognisant of what's happening in their wallet and say to them, 'How do you feel about having more money in your wallet?' and it'll be a no-brainer, but that does not give you an excuse to break your promise.

In National Party seats, we have other issues that are at the forefront. We have a lot of people who are poor. The breakdown of where people are is that the teal seats are the wealthiest, then the Greens seats, then the Liberal seats and then the Labor seats. We look after the poorest. We look after the people who are really doing it tough in the weatherboard and iron. That's who we look after. Yes, there are people who are very comfortable, and good luck and God bless them, but the highest proportion of poor people are in our seats. If they're earning less than $40,000, what is proposed here will make no difference at all because they hardly pay any tax. We increased, in stage 1, the low-income offset so that basically they're tax-free.

How do you help those people? And, by gosh, they're really doing it tough. How do you help them? They have second-hand cars. In some villages out in these areas there are no police, there are no doctors, the houses are falling to pieces and there's no public sewerage. This is the life they live in. And they're living that life around me. There are people who are 100 per cent—100 per cent!—zero emission. Do you know why? They have no power. That is why they have zero emissions. There is no power. Why? Because they can't afford it. I remember taking people into the back streets of some of the villages around me. They'd say, 'No-one could possibly live in that house,' and I'd say, 'Well, explain to me why there's smoke coming out of the chimney in the middle of winter.' It's why we have a strong view on certain issues, on policy. One of the biggest issues for them is power prices. If you take away their power, you drive them into absolute hard poverty.

The other day, in a reconfiguration which is so well-meaning but so physically, by reason of physics, crazy, we had Loy Yang go offline. Yes, they had a storm, but storms happen all the time. We haven't had storms by reason of the differentiation in what's happening in the actual power grid that knocked out a major power station, or a large part of a major power station. The price of power per megawatt went up to more than $16,000. It used to be around $35 or $40. It doesn't matter what we think, that then flows through all the way back to the weatherboard and iron. What happens to them is they cannot pay their power bill. Now we have record numbers of people who are no longer on the grid, and this has to be addressed. If you really want to look after people who are doing it tough, you go to one of the core issues in their lives—their power bill, their grocery bill, their capacity to pay for a dentist and the fact that they've got a second-hand car. If you start changing fuel standards and saying, 'This and that will happen,' that's all well and good where people have money. But, where they don't have money, they can't afford the car they've got. Every time they go to get groceries, they can't go to a corner store, because there is no corner store. If there is, it's incredibly expensive. Their trip to the major supermarket takes fuel, and everything they do is more expensive. You've got to go to the fundamentals of their lives and address those.

That's the role of the Nationals and the members around here who live it—and I know that includes the member for Cowper, because his electorate is right up against mine. We had a road between us. It just disappeared. It just went. Imagine that in an urban environment. Imagine that one of your major connecting roads just goes after a flood. It's years later, and it hasn't been put back. This is the sort of life that we've got. What happens to the people on that road? There are people who live there. How does it work for them? Just to give you an example, we had a bridge in our area, and it went out for three years. That's three years without a bridge on the major connecting road. These are the realities that we deal with.

Each one of these is a decision you've got to really focus on. How do you help people who earn below $40,000 a year? I might just note that, if you are earning over $135,000 a year—or about $139,000 with increments, but I won't go into the nuances of it—you are actually getting less money after these tax changes. On the other side, there'll be a lot of people on $139,000 who would say, 'I'm going alright, but I'm not super rich.' For my part, I'm looking after people under $40,000. This became accentuated yesterday at two o'clock, when Loy Yang went out. Hazelwood is gone, and they said it wouldn't have an effect. It had a massive effect. Liddell is gone, and they said it wouldn't have an effect. It had a massive effect. Now Loy Yang is under threat, and they're talking about closing down other baseload power generators. We've seen that intermittent power in the form that is rolling out now does not do the job. It's alright if power is a little bit of your life and expense, but it's absolutely devastating if it's major.

On the other side are groceries. For politicians in regional areas, it's said that a lot of your politics is done in the pub. That's romanticising it a bit. But I'll tell you that talking to people is done in the supermarket. Sidle up beside someone who's trying to pay for their grocery bills, and just have a look. Do you know what the humiliation is like when the card says, 'Declined; see issuer for details'? Do you know how humiliating that is for people? Do you know all the statements that are made? 'There must be a mistake' or 'A payment must have come out.' These are true stories. In my area, I was talking to one of my constituents, and she said she was vegetarian. I thought, 'Well, that's good.' Then she put the addendum on it: 'It's not because I want to be. It's because I can't afford meat.'

People think this is not happening in Australia. It is happening in Australia. I'm glad we've got an ACCC inquiry. That's important, but I'll tell you something that we've sort of been aware of for years. Big supermarkets are supported by big unions so they can make big profits. Because of big unions that work with big supermarkets, the supermarkets have big political power. They come close to us on our side too. Make no mistake about that. I'm not saying that we are without fault on this one. It absolutely exists on our side as well. These people are mercenary. They don't care how they do it, as long as, at the end of the day, they're looked after. They will feign virtue so that you keep your eye off them, and they will do what they've got to do. We've got to ask a serious question: how many years have we been dealing with this, and how far have we progressed? How far have we managed to get a sword of Damocles so that these people act fairly? What have we actually done? Is it time we think about it, look at other countries, such as the United States, Canada and England, and ask: 'What do those countries do? How do they go about it? What are we missing here?' I pose that question because, to the people in the big supermarkets: I know you're watching, and I know you know exactly what I am talking about. This is another issue that has to be looked at.

So we've got power prices and grocery prices, and then we've got fuel. Fuel is another one. Without fuel, you're going nowhere. In a regional area, if someone in your house has a stroke or a heart attack and you haven't got fuel in the car, they're dead. You just can't get to the hospital. Remember, we don't have hospitals. In fact, we do have some hospitals but—I kid you not—they've got no doctors into them. If the nurse falls over, you have to find another hospital, because the hospital hasn't got a doctor. The problem we've got in Australia is that we're not building new refineries; we're closing them down. And the jobs for people in blue-collar work, like jobs at aluminium smelters—not in my area—are closing down. The blue-collar manufacturing jobs that these people do, because they haven't been to university, are just being taken away. What we have now in our area is contractors on farms—fencing contractors, mustering contractors, people trying to make sure that they can make a buck. But, in terms of substantive jobs, because power prices have gone up we have become uncompetitive with overseas countries.

The best way to deal with the cost of living is to have more cash. That really helps with the cost of living. But we can't propose a strategic advantage by saying we're going to have the wages of India or Bangladesh. That would be outrageous. Commodities are at a global price, so there is no strategic advantage there. So you've got to look for other areas where you have a strategic advantage. The one we had in the past was power prices. Now that's gone. Of course, because that has gone your manufacturing capacity is lost.

The government have to be able to address—it's especially pertinent today because of Loy Yang—exactly what they intend to do, not their mythical desires and what they believe, in a sort of Peter Pan economics, will happen in the future. They have to actually address what they're going to do about fixing the power crisis—and we now have a power crisis. If you can't fix the power crisis, you've got no hope of fixing the cost of living. What you do to tax rates—whether you turn the dial backwards or forwards—will make absolutely no difference to what's happening in the lives of people who are in the $0- to $40,000-a-year bracket.

See this speech in context