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

I think I should start by talking about the debt. Australian government securities outstanding as we speak right now are $961.4 billion. I watch it very closely. That's $100 billion higher than it was when the coalition left government. One of the greatest myths is a trillion dollars in debt. You don't have it yet, but you're heading there at a rate of knots. It's an interesting place to start, because how do you pay back debt? In my former life as an accountant and my current life as a cattle producer in business, you've got two choices. You're going to cut your expenses, and for a lot of people that's politically unpalatable. You have to find out where you're spending way too much money. NDIS is a classic one. The money you're putting up against the wall on intermittent power, the money you're paying to billionaires domestically and foreign multinationals, is another huge saving if you want to have an epiphany and go back to what it was. If you want to cut money, they're the two you have to try and work out how to fix up. One you should get rid of, the intermittent power sector; the other you should rationalise, and you're trying to do that.

I might just segue into that. I remember when a couple of years ago, before we lost government, I contacted the member for Maribyrnong, Mr Shorten, and said, 'Look, we're going to have to straighten out the NDIS. If we work out some non-contro amendments, can you just let them through?' I get along well with Bill, but he said no; he wanted to play politics with it, and that was what happened. Later on—I remember where I was—I was outside Goonoo Goonoo station on the New England Highway driving south, and I got a call from one Mr Bill Shorten saying, 'Is that offer still open where we can have non-contro amendments?' We actually did it. We came to an agreement. We touched up one thing and let a couple of others through, because we've got to get the NDIS back under control, otherwise the whole thing is going to collapse; it's not going to be there any more, and that would be a tragedy. It was only supposed to cost $13 billion at the start; I think it's heading towards $42 billion.

The other way you can try and pay back your debt, and this goes to New England, is to try and build up your asset base. The strength of your asset base, if they're prudent assets, will drive your P and L, and if you've got an effective P and L you can repay debt. In some instances in my time as an accountant and also in banking, if you thought people's business plan was right, you did the oddest thing: you actually lent them more on the prospect that they would drive prudent assets to generate income. I'm not going to give away names, but I can think of a classic example where, against the will of the credit bureau, I did precisely that. This person got themselves out of debt and became very successful. You've got to have prudent assets. Prudent assets on your balance sheet are the ones seminal in the creation of wealth and driving tax incomes forward. I'm not being parochial or bucolic when I say one of the biggest assets you need to do that is effective internodal capacity, effective rail and effective roads. Remember, roads build cities; cities don't build roads. The wealth driven by that transport corridor drives the economy.

The other thing that's seminal is seed infrastructure such as dams. Find me one place in the world that has an economy that's effectively gone ahead without water. Dams are absolutely essential. In a place like the city of Tamworth, vastly more water is used by business than is used for domestic purposes, but if you don't have the water, the businesses can't grow. Tamworth is one of the biggest protein providers in Australia. In fact if you eat beef from Woolworths, about 60 or 70 per cent of it is killed in Tamworth, and they use huge amounts of water. The latest investment in poultry must be three million chooks a year. That's with the Camilleri boys, Baiada, but that's $600 million for the plant and another about $500 million for surrounding infrastructure in sheds, so about a $1.1 billion investment in that form of protein coming from Tamworth. Then you've got high-protein grains and mutton, sheep, from Thomas Foods. These people are expanding their operations, but we've got to have water infrastructure there.

So I'll start with this. One of the saddest things was when the current government came up with its bogus number of $1.3 billion to build Dungowan Dam, and neither Minister Rose Jackson from New South Wales nor anybody else could ever in a substantive way tabulate how they come up with that $1.3 billion. It was plucked out of thin air for the sake of saying, 'Look at that terrifying number; we can't build it.' In audit, you have to stand behind your numbers. They have a very derogatory term, which Madam Deputy Speaker would pull me up on, and it's called a 'packet of something tickets' if you walk in with rubbish. They say: 'T's garbage. Go away.' We don't have diligent numbers from the government about why they came up with the number they did on Dungowan Dam. We know it's rubbish. It's a garbage number, and it's been proven as such.

Another big disappointment is this. You've got to spread the wealth a little bit around, and there's got to be a form of decentralisation, especially in public service jobs. Now, Canberra is a beautiful city and has done exceptionally well at public service jobs. I won't tell you something you probably already know. Not many public servants vote for me, so this is not a pitch to get votes. But we need sections of departments in regional areas. You need to be effective. We started it with a section of fisheries going to Coffs Harbour and a section of the Murray Darling Basin going to Goondiwindi. We moved APVMA to Armadale because the University of New England was there, as was the rural science school and the CSIRO. It was near everything. Cotton, cattle, sheep, grain and sugarcane—it was in a good area for it. Now we've got this stupid game they're playing. 'We believe in the APVMA in Armadale.' That's a strong Labor town in a lot of areas. And they're moving it all back to Canberra. That says to regional people—and I use this against the Labor Party. I always say to Labor voters in Armadale: 'I don't know why you vote them, because all they ever do is kick you. Even when I try to get you something, they kick you. If you don't want to vote for me, I can understand that, but don't vote for them until they want to look after you.' It would be great if the Labor Party had that same vision and said: 'That's fair enough. Let's do a little bit of decentralisation.' It might just go back to one of the doyennes of the Labor Party who did have a crack at that, and his name was Edward Gough Whitlam. He did it with Albury; that was one of his plans. Things should be borrowed from that for the next step. Labor are slowly throttling the APVMA in Armadale, and what a disappointment that is, because it just goes to show that they don't even look after their own people, let alone regional people. These are the people who actually voted for you.

On inland rail—this is idiotic. We have a multibillion dollar asset. Rail is incredibly important because you have the vastly more efficient movement of produce. Trains will ultimately be up to three kilometres long travelling at 110 kilometres an hour. If you want carbon reduction, how many trucks is that taking off the road? It's massively more efficient, and it gives a huge impetus for growth to places in my electorate, like Parkes and Narrabri, right up past Inverell. It will be huge for these areas. Now it is funded and built from Melbourne. I don't know if they've finished the Stockinbingal section—it's a small section. It goes to Narromine, and then it stops. You're able to move containers from Melbourne to Narromine. I don't know what they'll do when they get to Narromine. They'll just park them on the side of the scrub. Narromine is not where it's supposed to go. It's supposed to go to Brisbane. Then we've got another one that starts in Newcastle, in Madam Deputy Speaker's area, and goes to a place called North Star. North Star has 240 people. I don't know what produce from Newcastle needs to go to North Star, but that's where the railway line stops. We've got to connect Narromine to Narrabri and North Star to at least Toowoomba. Brisbane would be better, or we could go down the hill to Gladstone. Once more, Labor came up with another fantastic number. They just plucked it out of the air. It was going to cost $30 billion or $20 billion. They just used it as an excuse to not build it. Just be frank. Just say you've got no interest in building it, because it's in regional Australia. This is definitely an asset that strengthens your balance sheet to try to deal with the $961.4 billion of Australian government securities that are outstanding tonight. It's almost a trillion dollars—not there, but getting close. These are the assets that will actually make it politically easier for any government to try to service their debt, because, if the economy's humming, then the money flows in, and, if the money flows in, you've got the tax revenue to start on an effective path of getting on top of your financial predicament.

The big one, something I've been banging on and driving people crazy about—and I apologise to my colleagues, but I can't stop—is that you've got to get your power right. If you haven't got affordable power, no industry is going to be here. We have created this catastrophe in this nation. We've lost our plastics industry. Our urea industry, which underpins our agriculture, is gone. Manufacturing glass is gone. You're down to two oil refineries, and even Ampol said the other day that the cost of energy is out of control, so they're asking whether they should stay there. Steel industries are all on their knees, saying, 'If we don't get cheaper energy, we're basically out,' or, 'Pay us subsidies.' Tomago Aluminium, your aluminium industry, is screaming for money. You've got all these heavy manufacturing industries that basically, as a whole, are going broke, clawing for subsidies or not staying. The thing is that the US is multiple times cheaper than us in energy prices, as are India and China. If you lose these heavy industries, you'll never get them back. They're just gone. It all sits on the fact that our energy prices are absurd, and we're making them worse.

If you keep on with this lemming-like, perverse desire to single-handedly—because, no, the majority of the globe's not there—go to net zero, shut down the last of our coal-fired power stations and look for no reasonable alternative in base-load power, then you're going to go out the back door. You will not have the assets to pay off your $961.4 billion worth of debt. If you do, I pose the questions: where? what industry? Where's it going to come from? The service industry does not sustain exports. The service industry is merely something that increases the GDP by churning money through the economy. I grant you that. But you'll see that money has to come in from overseas because we're a trading economy. Therefore, you have to have substantive industries to prop up your currency, to keep inflation down and to drive the efficacy of businesses to produce profits that are taxed to pay back your debt.

That then takes you to roads. We've got so many roads, whether it's the Tenterfield bypass or even small roads. The upgrade to Goonoo Goonoo Road, the Wingen realignment—these roads have got to be looked after. You've got to keep your average speed over 80 kilometres an hour for an effective transport corridor. I compliment the government; they're driving ahead now on the Singleton Bypass. That's good. That's a good thing. You've got to get cracking on the Muswellbrook Bypass. We haven't built the rail line, so the trucks have got to move at a better-than-average 80 kilometres an hour.

Australia has to realise that, on the electricity debate—I don't know who's going to win, but I'll tell you who wins in the end: physics. Physics is going to win that debate, because you get to a point where the grid doesn't work. And economics, the brutality of debt, will win the other debate, unfortunately, on what is an appropriate policy in regard to energy and other things. When economics wins it, we are in such a bad position. My father, who was pretty successful in business, had a lot of adages, but certain ones that work stick in your head, and this was one of his: as poverty walks in the door, love flies out the window, and all your great ideas disappear if you can't make a buck. In closing, I would say we have got to focus on how this nation makes a dollar.

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