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

We all saw it the other day—they blew up Liddell, blew up the stacks. It was absolutely, incredibly stupid. Why didn't they refurbish them? Why didn't they use all that ingenuity that they have? Apparently they can change the climate, but they can't refurbish a power station. There was a 2000-megawatt power station, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. But we are spending $42 billion on Snowy Hydro 2.0, which is 2000 megawatts for three days.

While we're on Liddell, they were supposed to get $5 million from the Regional Precincts and Partnerships Program. Mayor Jeff Drayton is actually the chair of the Labor branch there, and he said that you've squibbed on the deal, just forgot about it. Once more, it's just completely unbelievable. You say things, you never do them and people are let down. They're going to build a big precinct there to make solar panels—that's just another load of rubbish. It's never going to happen. We're just being told not the truth.

Then we go to other things—the inland rail, we got rid of that. You came up with a fantastic figure, $31 billion, it's just that no-one can put any meat on the bone. They can't tell us how that adds up to $31 billion. Just say it! They say, 'Go to the axle report.' I did—it's one line, '$31 billion', no details. It's completely unbelievable. There's nothing that substantiates the validity of the Labor Party's capacity to get themselves around the numbers. It's all just a load of garbage. Blow your nose on the budget. It's just not worth it.

If we go to other things in our electorate, apparently you can't find $5 million for Mayor Jeff Drayton, but you can find $18.2 billion for the swindle factories, for the intermittent power precincts, your solar panels, your wind towers. And we're building the transmission lines all across the place. You're turning New England into an industrial dump for an intermittent product that's unreliable and hellishly expensive.

If you want to do something smart it would be confirming Chiswick CSIRO's funding, but you're not. At this point in time, they believe their funding has been pulled. Everything about this has no vision for the regions. Everything about this is misinformation. Everything about this opaque or not the truth.

And, of course, let's remember what we're doing with capital gains tax. We had record insolvencies in small business—there was a more than 34 per cent increase in small business insolvencies in the last 12 months. So ASIC says. That's because people take risks and sometimes they lose. They lose their shirt. And that's why we reward them when they win. But no, we don't believe in reward! We believe in creating a stupid nation, a lack of entrepreneurship, a lack of hope and a lack of vision!