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

There are a lot of scandals that have happened in our time that we should be fully aware of. One of the big ones I've always loved is the tulip mania, where, back in Europe, they decided they could run an economy on tulips. It made splendid sense. They found these tulips. I think they'd discovered them in the salt in Istanbul. They were very rare and very precious, and they decided they could run the Dutch economy on them—right up until they worked out they could propagate them and the economy almost collapsed. Then, of course, we had the South Sea bubble. They were trying to move slaves into South America. The Portuguese and the Spanish went to war against each other and they couldn't move slaves, so they thought that they'd sell shares in themselves instead—they would buy and sell themselves. That worked out very well. It was a Ponzi scheme, and it almost collapsed the British economy.

A more relevant one is the Australian version, of course. They had this football team called the South Queensland Crushers. They had three seasons and came dead last in two of them. It was also an incredible failure, but you can go round and still find people who are nostalgic about it, sitting around with warm beers, cold pies and lukewarm savs. They've dug up old jerseys of the South Queensland Crushers and fascinate themselves with stories about themselves. You'll still find, residing in some dark cave, those moments of illuminating a faux glory.

I think the most important one was the Enron debacle. Enron had this incredible idea that, through a form of dodgy accounting, they would pump up their share price and pump up the value of the company. After it was discovered that they were just ripping the show off, their share price went from about $95 down to $1 and 4,000 people lost their job. The only good thing about Enron was that it could be encompassed within a company, but we're doing the Enron scam to the whole of Australia. It's called intermittent power.

The trouble with the intermittent power scandal is that, unlike Enron, which could be ring fenced, this is going to bring devastation to the whole of the Australian economy in the most incredible form that you've never seen before. We're already seeing it. People say, 'We've got the plans for how power prices are going to go down,' and we're supposed to believe them because the modelling says so. There's more modelling that Milan. The issue is, of course, that those who really have their heads screwed on—such as Rio Tinto, who have billions of dollars at stake and really put the effort into assessing whether we've got a good power policy or not—are leaving Australia. They're going. They're giving up on us, like the Kwinana refinery, like the oil refineries, like the plastics industry and like the urea industry. When this hits the deck—and it will—more than 4,000 people are going to lose their job.

We've had royal commissions into all manner of things, but the day will come when there will be a royal commission into this, and I call for that to happen as quickly as possible. I say that as a precursor, as a warning, to all those people doing slippery little deals in the background—sneaky deals with the capacity investment schemes, secret things that they think no-one will ever find out about. There are people with mates in certain areas talking to other mates in certain areas, bringing them a great return which you can never get to the bottom of. You can never get to the bottom of what people are earning in the capacity investment schemes. It's commercial in confidence, and, even when you go to the budget papers, they're not for publication.

The day will come when there will be a royal commission into these things, and I say to those people now: I hope you're enjoying your time, because the time will come when you will be called before an inquiry. You'll be made to swear on the Bible or make an oath of affirmation, and you will have to tell the truth about exactly who you knew, how you came about the windfall gain you got and what the process was behind it. That will be an interesting day, I assure you. Before robodebt no-one thought there would be a royal commission. Before the pink batts no-one thought there would be a royal commission. There have been so many things where no-one ever thought the royal commission was coming. I'm giving you a little bit of forewarning: it is coming. You will be called, and you'd better have the answers.