Barnaby Joyce (New England, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, 'queen of the desert'. Yet we are doing our very best to try and put them out of business, and we will successfully put them out of business, even in my area such as Urbenville or Drake. In Drake there's a hotel called the Lunatic Hotel. They're always trying to get me to have my photo taken underneath it, but I'm not game. But these places just won't exist as that centre of a community, where you organise everything from your camp drafts to your bushfire rosters. But, most importantly, what are you going to do on the weekend? You've got to do something. You can go have a beer, have a 'countery', get away from the property for a bit and just relax.

If we lose our hotels in Australia, if we lose our little regional pubs, then we will be diminished as a nation. We are not going to maintain these hotels unless we remove the excise completely. Now, I believe the cost of removing the excise from hospitality venues is around about $2 billion. I can understand when people say, 'Well, where are you going to get the money from?' We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on intermittent power, the so-called renewables, the euphemism for basically butchering our power grid, so you can find the money. The money is there. They say that intermittent power renewables are going to look after regional Australia. Well, they're doing a fine job of it. They're wrecking our roads. They're destroying our communities. They're putting pensioners out of their houses. Even for construction in a lot of areas, we can't find the water for the mixing of the concrete. They're a disaster. We believe that it's not that you should slow them down. We believe the construction of them should stop. That's enough. We've got enough. If you want them on your roofs, in your cities, knock yourself out. We have no problems with that. It's none of our business. But, if you want them in our areas, it is. This goes to show you the juxtaposition of things that are relevant to us in regional areas and what actually happens now.

My office had a bit of a discussion with a few of the publicans around this area, and they say a slight reduction in the excise is not going to help them. If you freeze it—it's already too high. We've got to go beyond freezing it. We've got to get rid of the excise completely. Whether it's Donny and Tina from the top pub at Stanthorpe or the Bernhards at Walcha Road Hotel—but Stephen Ferguson, the CEO of the Australian Hotels Association, quite properly says that every drink poured into a glass in the pub creates a job. The most sociable and safest place to have a drink is in a licensed premises. We need to make sure that excise does not force people to stay at home, away from their communities. And isn't that correct? How many people in country areas have had a period of their life where they worked at a hotel? I know I worked there for a couple of years. That's part of growing up. It's part of the socialisation. It also gets you a job. It's a job that's in a local community. It's a job that's proximate. You're paid at the award rates. But that opportunity also goes.

We have to do something substantial, if we are going to stand behind the iconography of the local Australian hotel. We have to do something substantial, if we truly believe that, in a country and remote regional areas, they have a right to the most minimal form of social infrastructure. In cities, you have so much taxpayer sponsored social infrastructure. It's immense. The classic ones you can see, like the opera house or parks—sponsored by the state or basically subsidised by the state. We don't have that. What we do have—one focal point—is our local hotel, and we are not going to have those. They are closing down. I can go to places such as Warialda Rail. There used to be a pub there. It's no longer there. As you drive along, you can go through areas where there were pubs and now there's just a ramshackle building that's falling over. Why would that happen? If they were commercially viable, of course, they wouldn't close. But they're not commercially viable. People are making the best attempts to try and turn the hotels into restaurants and stuff like that. It works on a form, but, of course, if you turn it into a restaurant, you're going to have to employ chefs. You've got to find chefs. You've got to pay them all rates that are probably beyond the scope of the hotel to manage. And, obviously, you're finding a much higher price per patron, and a lot of families can't afford that.

I'm going to move an amendment that we get rid of the excise on beer completely. The amendment as proposed has been circulated, so I move:

That all words after "House" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"calls on the Government to support hospitality venues struggling under the growing burden of government regulation and growth in overheads by eliminating alcohol excise duty on any alcoholic product sold for consumption on-premises in a hospitality venue".

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