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

On Cooplacurripa, in the seat of Lyne, they used to have 8,000 head of cattle. Eight thousand head of cattle—they're gone. That means there's pressure coming on the jobs of the meat workers who used to cut up the 8,000 head of cattle. That means the trucks that used to transport those 8,000 head of cattle are losing out. That means those shops that used to make money out of the people who had cattle on Cooplacurripa will lose out—the hairdresser; the tyre business. And for whom? For the Zeitgeist. And do you offer anything back? No. You give nothing.

Unless we are going to evolve into a higher form of termite, this is not much use to us. And that is happening to place after place after place. This is perverse! We are actually putting up a policy to reduce the production of food, so that, after we've absolutely butchered the electricity market, we're going to butcher the food market. Why would we do that?

Hand in glove with that, we're always seeing that they no longer believe in coal-fired power stations—they're evil—and they're always, with a wink and a nod, having a shot at the coalmining industry and coalminers. It's always the case that they're running down the blue-collar workers that the Labor Party was born to look after. That is who you were supposed to look after—blue-collar workers. But you've given up on them. There's only a handful—two or three—blue-collar workers left in the Labor Party. Mostly they're bureaucrats or staffers or whatever, but they're not people who've worked with their hands; they're not people who've worked outside. They just don't exist anymore. That's an item of history—that that section of the Labor Party was there.

You say you got a lot of votes. You got about 34 or 35 per cent of the primary.

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