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

This is a fuel crisis. We've been told there's more fuel here, but it must be fuel from the 'mystery' fuel company because we can't actually see it. I'm absolutely astounded by the lack of comprehension of exactly what is rippling through our economy. It is not going to stop; it is going to get worse.

I just want to enlighten people about the sorts of areas this is now going into, areas you've probably never considered. I have here correspondence from the funeral industry, from one of the major funeral homes in my area. The funeral industry are running out of fuel; they're running short. They can't basically, once people are deceased, move a body from where it is, out in the country, back to where it can be stored. The soul's gone; it's just the body. And we're told there's not a crisis, that apparently there's more fuel out there.

We now have cotton pickers sitting in paddocks, in million dollar crops, that can't move. If the crop can't be stripped, it's gone. This is happening right now. Sports carnivals, for young people at school, have to be cancelled because people can't get to them. We have people who just have to drive a small distance to get to a depot to get to work, but they're doing it tough. They're saying, 'Our budget just doesn't allow us to do this anymore.' And every dollar they spend on fuel is a dollar they can't spend on food.

We have the building industry in my area talking about PVC—we use it during a drought, and we're heading into a massive drought with El Nino—having a 27 to 36 per cent increase just in April. Of course, people are saying this is untenable. They need glues for the construction of certain composite timber beams, but they're going to be running out of glue.

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