Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's a great pleasure to come to the microphone and to discuss the election in New England. We were very blessed. We went against the tide and got a swing to us in New England in both primary and two-party preferred, and it's a great team effort that did it. It's never one person. No one person ever wins their seat. It takes a team, and the team in New England went against the tide. Whether it was north, south, east or west, there was a swing against the coalition, but we were lucky enough to go the other way. I put that down to the great team members. I can't mention them all, because that would be the whole speech, but I'll mention some.

Obviously, there are the branch chairs, who did an incredible job. There are my staff, who are ever patient. Any staff who have to put up with a person standing for an election almost deserve a medal and should walk on Anzac Day, because you're a bit beside yourself! You're always trying to get perfection where, of course, you've just got to do the best job you can. To Heidi and Dave; to Daniel Gillette; to Lizzie and Anne Coxhead, who have been doing such an incredible job for such a long period of time; to the Burke family for all the work that that whole family has put in for so long in supporting the people of New England—and, if you go up to the north of the electorate, there are people such as Peter Petty or Toby Smith, and you can't go past Armidale without talking about Matt Lynch. I don't know a larger character that's ever handed out than Matt Lynch. He seems to know everybody and, as an ex-policeman, I suppose he knows them for all the wrong reasons! These are the sort of teams—Phil Hobson, down at Muswellbrook, who came into it. All these people—Adrian Spencer, Pam Cobell; you could go on all night. But just know that I thank you all for that incredible effort that you put in. The win in New England is your win, for which I am a small cog in a very big gearbox. We did a great job together and we have backed up the work we've done for so long. I remember the first poll when we all started in New England. The first poll had us at 36 per cent. We had to try and achieve the biggest win against an incumbent in Australian history, and we did it. From that point on, we've just built and built the strength to continue on with that.

I want to go through some other things. I am also now blessed with, I think, the strongest booths in Australia. I'm very lucky. Some booths were at 93 and 94 per cent. To the people of Yarrowitch and people of North Star: if we can just find those three people, that would be great! But it's not even that. It's also in other areas where big towns were voting for us. Manilla was over 70 per cent voting for us. That's an incredible thing. I'm always so humbled when you're handing out, even at working-class areas like South Tamworth—as people walk in, you really don't know how you're going to go, and then you see the result at the end of the night—by the idea that most of those people who walked past voted for you, so you never want to let them down. You want to make sure that, however you do it, you look after them. I'm very lucky. Our office do a survey, and for four terms in a row we've been the most responsive office in Australia. I think it's a Greens office that comes second. This sort of service is really important in making sure that people feel that, if they contact you, you will follow things up and you will follow things through.

There were some interesting issues that I believe need to be discussed. We took over some of the Hunter seat, which of course was a Labor seat, and we got a massive swing to us, 10 per cent in some of the booths. One of the most substantial swings to us was in the Muswellbrook area. I have to be honest: it was because we promised them a nuclear power plant. That was the big thing that won the votes there, and I put that to my colleagues on the other side. I don't think that nuclear power is so disliked. People who are power literate could see the jobs: fitters and turners, sparkies, boilermakers. They just know that, if their lives have been making black rocks boil water and you're going to go to a different coloured rock and boil water again, then they've got the jobs. As they explained, if you go to a power plant car park, it's chock-a-block full of people on good wages. The car park is packed. But if you go to an intermittent power precinct, the swindle factories, there is no car park, because no-one works there., We were straight with the people of Muswellbrook and said, 'If we win, we're going to build a nuclear power plant here,' and we got a massive swing to us.

I want to relay an interesting story. A lot of guys that come into work—predominantly guys—at change of shift in the mine, one would say, as a lot of people I know, probably grew up Labor. Everybody in their family always voted Labor. I just remember this guy walking down in his 'don't kill me' shirt, the big reflecto-shirt, and this lady—she was an independent—said, 'Vote against Barnaby and stop the nuclear power plant.' He'd picked up her how-to-vote card, and he stopped, pivoted and said, 'In that case, Madam, you can have this one back.' I think it's interesting to just repeat. It's funny: I think the fear of nuclear power was strongest where there was no prospect of ever building a nuclear power plant, but where we were actually going to build them, we actually got a swing to us. You could also see that in places like the seat of Flynn, where I know there was a swing to us. People who work in the power industry are not dopey; they are pretty well read. As we say, they're very power literate.

A big issue for us, something I'm still banging on about, is the pathological dislike of intermittent power for what it's doing to our communities, what it's doing to our landscape, what it's doing to the poor and how it's putting such pressure on their cost of living that it's driving them out of the house. They see the proponents, the people who are actually making money out of it, are not the farmers, by the way. That's what's created the division in the communities. The people making the money—they all know about it; they're not dopey and they look them all up—are overseas companies and domestic billionaires, and somehow they have a right to come into our lives and turn our lives upside down. A slightly egotistical statement, but I did make myself a champion of that issue, and it paid political dividends because that's what people are thinking. That's where they are. They want you to go and fight the battles that they can't fight. They expect you to stand up against the powerful on behalf of the powerless, and if you do that and stay humble, then you end up with one of the safest seats in Australia. But I don't take that for granted one little bit. I acknowledge that in a heartbeat the seat of New England could change in a different direction. It's done it before and it could do it again. You've got to stay humble, keep focused, make sure you push a shopping trolley around the Coles supermarket, talk to people, find out what's going on and always make sure your office has an open door.

At a macro level, what went wrong? It was a trainwreck for the coalition. Obviously the Liberal Party had an incredibly bad day in the office. At the previous election, we had 22 seats; the Nats went down to 19. It's not as bad, but it was all round not a good thing. I think it's really important we don't say, 'It's all their fault, none of our fault.' It was just not a good day in the office for the whole lot of us. But the Labor Party shouldn't be too cock-a-hoop, because their primary vote is only like 34 per cent, which means it's really febrile. The big winners in this were the third parties. Their vote is building up and building up and building up, which means that it's tenuous. It means you can have a massive swing in the right circumstances at the next election. Any person who holds a seat with a three in front of it is only just there, and that's the government. Of course, it would have been us as well, but that's the government or the opposition. So the elections are going to become a very febrile thing.

Why is that? It's because more and more people are not grazing through the broadsheets of newspapers or watching the news. They're on their tablets and they're in echo chambers. They're on Instagram. They're on TikTok. The ones who read a little bit more are probably on Facebook. They're reinforcing the messages they already know, and that's going to make politicking different. It creates a great avenue for third parties to get into those echo chambers, be heard and collect a vote, and I'm seeing that more and more. One side is seeing it. The Greens probably didn't have a very good day in the office either, but they hold a constituency. One Nation on the other side is building up their vote. And we see other Independents and other shapes and forms in other areas.

I think this place works well when you've got people understanding that someone has got to run the government and act responsibly to try and make sure that we look after all of Australia and there's a clear understanding that governments at times have to make very hard decisions and they have to make hard decisions for the betterment of all. If it's too febrile and becomes too populist, then no hard decision will ever be made, and our nation will suffer the consequences because of it. But that's up to us to try and make sure we get the trust of the people back, because we are losing it, and we are losing it on both sides of the chamber.

If we had the election again—and I remember having this discussion with Mr Dutton at the time—elections have got to be fought on binary issues where people have a clear understanding of them and they are defined to them, and then you are either all for it or all against it with the opposition or the government or against it or all for it, alternatively, and make sure that you pick that so there's a clear understanding of what differentiates you. You can't be an amelioration and a permutation and some sort of segmentation of what is already the policy, or people won't follow you.

What would have done it for us? We should have gone into the election against net zero. We should have said, 'We're against net zero; they're for Paris. We're for pensioners; they're for billionaires lining their pockets. We're for getting you the most affordable power we possibly can,' because people understood that. We should have stood there and fought on that. Nuclear power, even though it worked well for me—and it worked well for me because I was promising people jobs; that's why it worked well for me—wasn't perfect. Trying to explain to people nuclear physics is difficult. It's over now, but that is difficult. It's not that nuclear is wrong. We will end up there. It's just a matter of time; we'll get there. We're just being left behind by the rest of the world. We're going to get there. But it's a hard thing to define during a campaign.

The other thing I think we let the government off the hook on was unrealised capital gains. We should have been smashing that every day. That is just probate back. It's death duties back, only this time you don't have to die. The idea that you're going to tax somebody for something that they've never sold, by reason of a book value, and you make them pay for the valuer—there's no prospect of them finding the money to pay it off. Once you crack the egg and say you can do it on a certain group, within superannuation, you've cracked the egg. And that means everybody should be aware that it is now acceptable that you can do that. I think that if we'd prosecuted that argument better, then we would have done better. You only need three or four issues in an election and you're there.

Back to New England, there are a couple of things that we have to do, not just for the betterment of New England but for our nation. We have to get more baseload power into our nation. We don't have it. It's not going to work on wind and solar. They are intermittents; they are not even renewables. If you want genuine renewables, build dams. There's hydroelectricity or nuclear, but I think the smartest thing is to get more efficient and effective at coal-fired power. People in the Hunter Valley want coal and power plants. That's good for them, good for the Upper Hunter and New England and good for our nation.

Further up, Tamworth is growing flat out. Just one investment in the town, $600 million for poultry, for killing chooks, is going to grow that industry to something like three million chooks a year. It's massive, and there are the attendant facilities as well. They can't work without water. There's the abattoir. About 80 per cent of the protein at Woolies has been killed in Tamworth, which is a massive producer of protein for our nation. That industry is bigger than country music. Poultry, beef, mutton and high-protein grains are vastly more important, to be quite frank. Country music is incredibly important—don't get me wrong—but what Tamworth does to feed our nation is even more important. It is a factory producing protein, and it needs water. That's why we need Dungowan Dam. We can't do it on recycled water because recycled water, by its very nature, does not produce an outcome of 100 per cent; 60 per cent is recycled water and 40 per cent is highly saline brine. You can't put that back in the Peel River. It has to be put in brine ponds. It's just not environmentally possible, so we've got to have storage. High on the hills, where it's deep and cold, is where you have the most effective storage. That plumbs Tamworth. People are flowing into Tamworth now from Sydney, because the houses are more affordable and there are good employment opportunities, but the food industry in Tamworth uses vastly more water than the people do. That's going to continue to rise because the industry is growing, and that's where we make a buck. We're going to have to build water storages there. It's the same with Armidale. They said Malpas Dam would always be too big for the requirements of Armidale, but it's now too small.

To be quite frank, I don't know how you're going to find the water for the concrete for wind towers. It's just not possible. You can't take it out of the domestic supply, so I don't know where it will come from. No matter which way you cut or dice it, you're going to have to have more water infrastructure.

I want to acknowledge Mark Coulton; I've taken over some of his turf. Mark, we got a swing to us in North Star. The votes for us at that booth were over 90 per cent, which is great.

We've got to continue inland rail, which is so important to our nation. It goes through North Star and the north-west of my electorate. It is ridiculous having a railway line that goes from Melbourne to Parkes to Narromine then stops. There's another railway line that goes from Newcastle up to North Star. It's supposed to go from Melbourne to Brisbane. If you've been to the metropolis of North Star you'll probably realise that we've got a multibillion dollar investment that stops at a town of around 200 to 300 people. We've got to go all the way, and that requires the government to be less parochial and to have vision for the nation. If you have trains that are up to three kilometres long travelling at 110 kilometres an hour, that's a vastly more efficient way to move produce than by trucks. If you want to talk about carbon reduction, you're reducing an awful lot of carbon by putting produce on steel. Then the truck drivers do have a job but it's short haul. They go out and come back and are home at night for dinner. So let's get back into the Inland Rail. Let's really grasp that as a nation-building thing. Stop these excuses about what you've got. What you've got now is ridiculous—two railway lines that don't really go anywhere. They start at a big city, in Melbourne, and then stop at Narromine or start in Newcastle and stop at North Star. We need to see this thing through to completion.

So across the electorate on telecommunications and mobile phones, break the ice. Learn how to put a genset next to your mobile phone towers so when the power goes out, like in the recent snow issue we had, you have the capacity for the generator to kick in and keep communications going. We had up the road from me—this is a true story—an Aboriginal lady, Pam, die during the snowstorm. She died. People don't see this as serious. They go out and their car breaks down. They get out of the car and they can't get home and that's it. She actually did get home. She died in bed. We have a coronial inquiry into that at the moment. This is why I get so passionate about this stuff. It really works on me. These are my people. I grew up with them. I went to Woolbrook Public School. Some of these things are so simple to fix, but we have to get our minds over that horizon and get the small things right.

Anyway, thank you very much to the people of New England and Upper Hunter. I will do my very best to serve you for as long as I have that great honour.

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