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

More than us, I grant you that. But I'll tell you what: I would be really careful of that vote! I'd be careful of standing behind that vote.

Here's another example. We were going to run out of water for the city of Tamworth. We had only 40,000 megs in the storage, and, when we applied to increase the storage—which I got—we had to break the offset laws, because of the Booroolong frog. I thought that frogs lived in water; I thought the frogs would be happy. But apparently they weren't. And it was serious. People got terribly upset, because their investment in the Booroolong frog was more important than 70,000 people in the city of Tamworth having water to drink. It is almost a sort of Kafkaesque and alternative universe that we have created—this mad type of philosophy which works at complete odds to not only the regional areas but to the rights of the farmer, to the prosperity of small regional towns and villages, to the strength of our nation and to the maintenance of what is fundamental. We talk about a housing crisis, and you shut down the timber industry. We talk about the cost-of-living crisis, and you shut down the coal-fired power stations and say you've got to use the most expensive form of electricity in the world, as shown—which is intermittent power. We say we believe in pensioners—yet you make them pay multiple millions of dollars in the small country towns for environmental offsets. Then you go to some sort of branch members' meeting and everyone's bleeding all over the place about how important this is for the environment. Go up to Denman and explain to the aged-care facility why you are taking $3.5 million dollars off them for a paddock. Why would we do this? Why do we do this?

This brings us to the question of where we go from here. Once more: the timber industry is very important. It's very important for the member of Lyne's seat. It's not so important for mine, but it definitely has a role. We somehow have to get sane people to cut a deal that helps industries such as timber and allows more of a streamlining so that we are not completely tied up in red tape. But we also have to, in that process, start putting some ring-roads around the intrusion into our private property rights that you have dealt us. The member for Hunter says it's the state governments; the state governments do it to us because they don't have to pay just and fair compensation. But the Commonwealth government is the source of the primary legislation and the primary targets, with all the international targets they want to meet. They're the beneficiaries. The state governments are the implementers, and we are the poor bunnies who pay the price.

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