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

I have to stand and speak on the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill 2025 because back in 2015, as the Minister for Agriculture, I moved one of the biggest pieces of legislation that we'd seen, which was the Biosecurity Act, and this intertwines with the Biosecurity Act, on the information I've received. Unfortunately, I need more information about exactly how that is fleshed out. I haven't seen that. That was a crucial piece of legislation. I've brought it to the attention of people who say that it has nothing to do with it. I just got back the information from the Library, which says, 'The bill amends a wide range of existing legislation, including the Freedom of Information Act 1982 and the Biosecurity Act 2015.' That was incredibly hard to get through. It was a very precarious day when we finally got it passed through the Senate. I hope, if the Australian Centre for Disease Control Bill goes to Senate inquiry, we can get a greater understanding of exactly what the interconnection is, because we know that it is there.

I remember, after the passage of the biosecurity bill, at that time, it was the biggest piece of legislation that parliament had seen. I was really chuffed. I thought: 'That's pretty good! How did that happen? I hope I get a big rap.' Nothing seemed to happen; no-one seemed to care about my moment of glory. So I was trying to work out how to throw a bit of light on my magnum opus, and then this gentleman called Johnny Depp turned up with a couple of dogs, and all my dreams came true!

This is so important because the biosecurity of our nation is imperative, especially on the ag side. We would be decimated if we had an outbreak of foot-and-mouth. There would be an immediate shutdown of the movement of everything—the movement of soils and earthworks. Everything would stops. The whole place would shut down. You've got to understand the process of that and how it intertwines with this. If we had foot-and-mouth, the consequences to the Australian economy would be billions and billions of dollars. The consequences to regional towns would be massive. We would lose major exports. We would have the decimation of herds. As they say, when you get a foot-and-mouth outbreak, you can basically see it coming towards you, and anything that is in that area has to be destroyed; it has to be killed.

The problem that we've got in Australia is that it's not only in its bovine form but also in its porcine form—porcine, of course, is pigs. Wild pigs are endemic everywhere, and our capacity to actually control that disease would be near impossible.

I have good knowledge of this. My father was a vet for the department of agriculture when they did the impossible and got rid of bovine tuberculosis and bovine brucellosis. They thought we could never do it. Other countries—even New Zealand—couldn't do it. Australia did it. Although, we never prosecuted one person, I might say. But I do remember the heat that was involved in trying to make sure that Australia arrived at that place.

I'll never forget the time when my father, a vet and former serviceman, came charging out the door of the department of agriculture office on Griffin Avenue, Tamworth, with a farmer behind him. They were both taking off their ties and their coats to fight each other under the ginkgo tree, which was rather remarkable for me to see as an eight-year-old boy. I suppose that's a reflection of the heat.

We need to know what the interconnection is between those issues, as have been shown to me by the Parliamentary Library. I really want to know because there is so much on the line. There are other diseases, such as screwworm fly and rabies—of course, if that broke into Australia, because of our wild dog population, we'd never control it. It would completely change what happens to Australians when they go to a national park. In this instance, your safety would be called into question in certain areas. There are wild dogs, most certainly, in our area. If you go bushwalking, there are, most definitely, wild dogs there. Generally, they see you and run away. But, of course, if they are rabid, they don't; they run towards you and bite you. There is no cure for rabies; if you get it, you die and in a pretty horrific way. So these issues are incredibly important because there is a crossover between human health and animal health. I ask the minister and I ask others to dig deeper into exactly what that interconnection is.

I can't help, then, but to also go to the issue of how this was involved with COVID. Yes, people died from COVID, without a shadow of a doubt. Yes, people became critically ill under COVID. Yes, it was something that there needed to be a sense of caution around in terms of how people managed it. But I believe we way overreacted. What happened then was the state had primacy over the individual. You've always got to be cautious when the state becomes more powerful than the individual.

Right now, everywhere you go, there are going to be people with COVID. You're going to see them down the street. You're going to walk past them. You're going to be at functions with them. It hasn't disappeared—it's still there; it's all around. The issue now is—imagine if I said to you now: 'I'm going to lock you up in your house or your flat for 14 days. You're not allowed to go to the park.' We had people locked down, we had people locked out and, in some instances, we had people locked up. There was an excess to it in how it transpired, and a lot of people became—it also, in some instances, became a fan to the flame for conspiracy theories.

We have to be really careful when the state comes in and has this manifest power that completely consumes the right of the individual. I remember having COVID and people in hazmat suits bring the only ones allowed to come to my door. I felt fine. I started to call it all into question.

The other thing that happened during COVID is our national debt went through the roof. They—and it was our side!—just started borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars like it didn't matter. Well, it does matter. We still owe the money; we still have to pay it back. It's a large part of that section. When people talk about debt heading towards a trillion dollars, there is a section that the coalition is responsible for. A big section of that was the so-called stimulus payments and everything that came with COVID. I believe that was an overreaction, a massive overreaction.

There were other issues attached to it. We gave $2 billion to Qantas, and then Mr Joyce paid himself a $10 million bonus. That was your money! This didn't seem to add up. There was a lot of money flushing around. That was part of COVID. It was all the same. You get this sense of the government saying, 'This is the excuse,' and you say, 'I think you have to be careful about spending all this money.' Then they say: 'COVID! Can't talk about it. It's all COVID.' And it's like now in that, every time they can't think of an answer, they say 'climate change'. 'My horse didn't come in.' 'Climate change!' 'I stubbed my toe.' 'Climate change!' Back then it was COVID. There wasn't that sense of temperance and balance, of understanding the risk and not completely throwing out people's rights on the way through.

And everything was apparently unchangeable. You couldn't do anything about it. I will tell you what did change it: people started to protest. They started to get very angry. First of all, they'd say: 'They're just ratbags. They're conspiracy theorists. They're crazy people.' But then you started seeing people who reminded you of your aunty or mum, and they'd be saying things like: 'I can't tolerate this anymore. I'm not going to be locked up anymore. This has to stop.' And one day, in this building—this is a very interesting thing to know. There's a mall out the front. I don't know where the front is; it's probably in one of these directions. It's called Federation Mall. If you have a protest out there and it's just a few people out the front, don't worry about it too much. If a crowd turns up and it starts to go down Federation Mall a little bit, maybe have a glance at it. If they fill up Federation Mall, be really careful. But then the protest against the impositions on people's private freedom, which had been imposed on people by reason of COVID, turned up. It went down Federation Mall, around Old Parliament House, down Commonwealth Avenue, I think, over the bridge and into the park on the other side. And immediately—this is surprising—laws started changing. All these incredible laws that could never change started changing pronto because that protest said: 'You are out of government. It's all over. It's finished.' And we're lucky they turned up. We did need that change.

So the cautionary thing about this is: never lose sight—there will always be reasons to make incredible decisions during a calamity. But be really careful when the calamity reasoning is an imposition on your private rights as an Australian, your rights as an Australian citizen. You get the sense that, once the state gets those rights, they're just hesitant—people love power, and, when they get those rights, they're very hesitant to hand them back.

If you don't follow this sort of legislation closely—there are people that are not terribly interested in this—you won't find out what is happening in the chamber. During debate on that legislation there was a potential loss of your rights. The government started to have the capacity to control more of your life. You've got to be careful about it. So, when I watching this in my room, I thought, 'I'd better get in the chamber and worry about this,' because we've seen the consequences of this.

What we have to do now is go to the Australian people with all of this and say: 'We understood the risks. We understood that action was required. But the excesses of the proscribing of rights'—not 'prescribing' but 'proscribing', which means 'removal'—'that happened in association with COVID will not happen to the Australian people again.' It was not a war. It was a disease and it's still there. If you believe that what happened to the Australian people was not excessive, then why did we stop? Why did we stop? We should be swabbing everybody as they come into this building, we should be swabbing every parliamentarian, we should be not allowing people to go to church, we should be shutting down sporting fixtures and shutting down shopping malls, we should be not allowing people to fly anywhere, we should be shutting down planes—because it's still there; COVID's still there.

Now, to be quite frank, there are a lot of people who probably don't get the vaccinations—and it didn't turn out the way we thought we were told it was going to, because you can test yourself. If that had been the case, all those restrictions would still be here. But they're not, and thank God they're not. But, if you look back, we have to ask ourselves: Why did we all get caught in that, 'It's A-okay to do this'? Why wasn't there more temperance? Why wasn't there more of a debate where people said: 'Just slow down. Let's have a closer look at this. Let's get another opinion. Let's ask ourselves some serious questions. Let's have a proper debate before we start borrowing multiple hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus packages. Let's ask serious questions before we start giving billions and billions of dollars to one organisation, a private organisation, Qantas'? When they paid themselves bonuses later on, why didn't we ask for the money back? It would have been taxpayers' money—why didn't we ask for it back? That didn't happen. With everything, you've got to be really careful of this place at times. It goes into calamity-cult mode, and all of a sudden it just charges down, and you're apparently beneath contempt if you raise a question. You've just got to be so careful of that.

They are doing it again. That time it was COVID. The next one is the big C—climate change. You're not allowed to ask any questions or you're a denier; you're not a believer. Therefore, we have to accept everything, chapter and verse, that is said, and a lot of it is bunkum and crazy. This time, we're going to spend over a trillion dollars trying to change the climate—from this room, from here! It is nuts! It is completely and utterly off its head! But, if you talk about it, no, you're an evil person; you're contemptuous. On this one, I hope when it goes to a Senate inquiry there is a very hard look at this piece of legislation.

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