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

Both 2GB and the Sydney Morning Herald have reported about a substantial amount of money that was put on the table to try to get me to shut up about my fight against net zero. I think it's important to, for the record, give my best recollection of exactly how this happened. It would have been about two years ago. It was in my office. It was a very respected lobbyist. There were other people present. It was not an offer that was made to me personally; it was relaying an offer that the lobbyist was going to be paid if they could get me to shut up. I thought it was in the vicinity of $600,000. I was talking to another person who was at that meeting who said it was more like $400,000. Obviously the person knew I was never going to be a part of that—and, to be quite frank, I don't think they were either. They were just saying how amazing it was that this is the sort of money that is flushing around in the system for people to change their views.

I think it's really important that people understand that with capacity investment schemes, with these sorts of issues, there are billions and billions of dollars at play. And because this money is at play it is not a perfectly transparent and honest field. I call on the government to give us more transparency on who exactly is getting these capacity investment schemes, which I think we can sort of get close to—how much, in toto, is now at play by reason of these capacity investment schemes?—while redacting the actual clients but giving us groups of how much in returns these groups are getting, because it is not the pure and the undefiled in this process. This is has huge question marks over it. If my family were going to get money out of this swindle industry, we would have just accepted their offer to put wind towers on our place, which we rejected. We rejected it on the premise that our job is to produce food and fibre, not to rip off poor people. Ultimately that is where this lands. During the last snow event in Woolbrook, where we were, we had people in my district who were sleeping with their pets to keep warm. One Aboriginal lady died—not because of this—when her car got bogged and she couldn't get out. When you live in that environment, you become absolutely, 100 per cent driven to stop the loss of their standard of living. This rubbish that we are doing to hurt them must stop with it.

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