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

Well, it shows how ignorant you are. That's the problem we've got. You're completely ignorant of the facts, and that's why you stand so boldly behind this legislation. You really don't understand the effect of it. On this side, we can't just stop this ratcheting to the left and then say, 'Well, it won't go any further to the left under us.' No. It's got to go back. You've got to reinstall property rights. Who ultimately becomes the beneficiary of this? It's the bureaucracy that polices it.

In the past, my father worked for the department of agriculture. He worked for the government. His job was to assist people to get a better outcome from their land, to get a better outcome from their animal husbandry, to deal with viruses and to deal with pathogens. He was a clever man, dealing with microdoses and strain 19s. Bodies like that one have gone from assisting farmers to policing farmers. The only time they turn up—and it is a major fine—is for criminal convictions for doing what we've always done for generations on our property.

I shouldn't have to say this. From the aerial maps, you can see there are vastly more trees on our place than there were in 1969. We've got no problems with that, but we don't like being looked at by satellites and by AI. There's a fear all the time: 'Maybe I've done something wrong to my own land—my own property.' What we see with this is a dilemma in this legislation. I've been speaking to workers from the timber industry in electorate of Lyne, and they've been saying: 'You've got to cut a deal, because this affects our area. Please do not force them to the Greens.' I said, 'But hang on—then we've got to comply with this form of socialism that's coming in.'

Socialism, ultimately, is the primacy of the state over the rights of the individual. Every time we do this, we reinvest in the primacy of the state over the rights of the individual. On our side, we believe in the primacy of the individual over the state. The state is there for very important requirements—for health, for education and for defence—but it's not supposed to have excessive stewardship or ownership of my private asset, and that is what has been happening with this. All these incremental caveats that are placed on our assets always come with some apparently quasi-benevolent form. It's climate change. It's biodiversity. It's this. It's that. It's salinity. They're all plausible in their first iteration, but the solution is always a loss of property rights, another caveat on what we can do.

I know little about lots, but I know lots about politics, and I sense in the public a dynamic pushback against this. I see it even in issues which identify a catalyst of where issues are. In the Rockhampton Morning Bulletin this morning, there was a poll on coal fired power. It found 9,300 people in support and 142 against. I think that's reflective of an overall cynicism that people have about the whole process, and it's being expressed in that issue. People are saying: I think I'm going to call rubbish on a lot of this stuff because all I can see is the government getting bigger, the nation getting broker, industry leaving, farmers being dispossessed of their assets, people becoming poor and pensioners becoming poorer.

And for the benefit of whom? Cui bono? Who benefits? Bureaucrats? I know it's some sort of Zeitgeist that I really don't know the numbers of. Is it billionaires—people who are smart, who put themselves up as the white knights of the environmental movement, from their corporate jet? You'd probably find that their tax affairs were based in Singapore and they were resident in Monaco. The beneficiaries of the wealth of all of these caveats on things such as your electricity—your swindle factories—don't reside in Australia; a lot of them reside overseas. So, in some of these things, I just wanted to show you how perverse some of these offsets are.

You talk about a housing crisis—and the member for Parkes did a brilliant speech before, and I recommend it to those who want to see some of the examples of how ridiculous this is. At Denman, I'm trying to help with an aged-care facility. They are going to extend it into a paddock. It is rubbish country, with a couple of dead trees—a rubbish country paddock. They had to spend—

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