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

I'd like to go back a little bit. I'm going to go all the way back to the Peloponnesian War, 431 to 404 BCE. During the Peloponnesian War, there was an Athenian general of the Delian League, Thucydides. Thucydides was up against the Peloponnesian League. Athens was on the rise and Sparta was on the fall. Why would I quote that? Now I want to go to today. Today there is a meeting between President Xi and President Trump. The person who quoted Thucydides and the Thucydides Trap was President Xi. Why? It's because he sees that China is on the rise and the United States is on the fall. The concern is that the falling power pushes back and there's a war. Why is that important to us? We have to become as powerful as possible as quickly as possible. I've been saying that now in this place for well over a decade.

To become powerful, we must strengthen the natural assets on our balance sheet. These are the assets that actually underpin wealth and underpin growth, and they are in regional Australia. If you want to understand where our wealth is, then consider our terms of trade. Everything about you—your shirt, your watch, your car, your fuel, your underpants, your television set—is coming on a boat from overseas. Somebody somewhere must be sending something in the other direction to pay for it. What goes on a boat in the other direction so that thing in your pocket is not just a piece of polymer but has value? It's coal from regional areas. It's iron ore from regional areas. It's gas, overwhelmingly from regional areas. It's cotton. It's beef. It's grain. It's wool. This is what underpins the wealth of Australia. If you do not realise that, if you do not comprehend that, then you have no idea about the economics of Australia.

I want to go to the budget. In the budget I looked for a thing called the Tomago smelter. I really did. It's about to close. There's no money to prop up the Tomago smelter—none. That's going to be a big issue for about 12,000 people whose jobs are associated with the Tomago smelter. So I'm just going to say to the members for Paterson, Newcastle, Hunter and Shortland: there is a party called One Nation, and we are going to be playing incredibly hard in that space. We are coming to eat your lunch.

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