Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to support this motion. I will start with a justification, possibly a moral justification, for why these projects are relied upon. If we took any person who lived in a metropolitan centre and asked them to stand on their roof and look at the 10 square kilometres that surrounded their house and add up the amount of public spending in infrastructure they could see—the public hospitals, the roads, the bridges, the childcare centres, the ports and the airports; all that is manifest in those metropolitan environments—then we would find that there would be multiple billions of dollars invested over hundreds of years. That is why people have a tendency to live in those areas: because the public dollar has been spent there and has improved the standard and quality of life. It becomes an impetus and a reason for people to move to those areas.

My friend Senator Sandy Macdonald mentioned Mungindi. If you went and stood on a roof in Mungindi and looked around at 10 square kilometres then I think you would be quite surprised at what was not there. You would probably be looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars of public infrastructure spending. So there is a manifest inequity between the two areas—between the quality and the access that one person in the urban area has to the public dollar and the quality and access the other person has in the regional area to the public dollar. Therefore it is the responsibility of the government to address that inequity—not necessarily in a grand way but at least in a way that reaches out to them in some manner or fashion and says, ‘We recognise this inequity and we will try to deal with it in any way that we can.’ It is, as Senator Macdonald stated quite well, rather churlish, given the reflective dividend that has been presented to the incoming government of approximately $18 billion, that we make this statement of about $400 million to $600 million in cuts. To put it in a way that can be understood by the people of Australia, the Australian government spends approximately $700 million a day on public spending. So in essence regional Australia is worth less than a day’s spending for the incoming Labor government. To be completely frank, these cuts are tokenistic but nasty. They make a clear statement about what this incoming arrangement is.

We can look at these cuts as a metaphor for what the Labor Party say they stand for. The Labor Party say they stand for infrastructure. They talk about bottlenecks. They talk about the things that affect productivity. But it is absolutely fascinating to see that they are cutting the money for the AusLink inland rail. So once more we will see the coastal roads clogged up. You cannot deal with the bottlenecks at the ports by cutting the mechanism that is actually going to alleviate the problem. This Labor government say that they are about water, but they are about to axe $45 million from the Murray-Darling Basin area. This government say that they are about communications, but they are going to axe broadband now. They say they are about the worker, but they are going to get rid of the Rugby League Hall of Fame. I am someone who played rugby league in the past. I know this is not a major issue, but there are a lot of people around this nation who do have a sense of connection to the game of rugby league and who would like to see things like that maintained. I remember the allegation that this was a program for National and Liberal Party seats. I remember clearly taking on Senator O’Brien in estimates. They wanted to question, and I suppose they will axe money from, dental clinics in areas such as the Tweed.

This is a statement about Labor’s belief in the preservation of the family farm. We know that out in the regional areas you can get rid of all the packages. You can let the family farm disappear. You can incite and bring on corporate agriculture in Australia so that it is harder and more difficult for Australians to actually have their feet on the ground and own the country that they live on. The way you do it is to start to take away the services provided for those people in those regional areas. You start to make it such that it becomes difficult, some would say near impossible, for any person to contemplate going back onto the land. If you take away the access to a package that can deliver better health outcomes and better public service outcomes—even, as we were talking about, for example, the re-stumping of a community hall—you are saying, ‘I do not want you to live in the country. I do not want you to live in regional areas.’ You obviously give people the only option of moving to where the public infrastructure spending is.

There are so many packages—for example, in Brisbane. We never heard the National Party or the Liberal Party complain about convention centres being built or art galleries or multimillion-dollar investments in paintings. I imagine that these things will go on. But we need an ability to deliver some form of largesse from the nation back to those who in a lot of cases are the most afflicted and the most marginalised. One of the biggest areas of expenditure is in Indigenous areas. What are you going to say to them: ‘Oh well, we were sorry yesterday but today we’re going to take the capacity for you to get access to that money away from you.’ There are so many other ways that you could go about it if you wanted to make a statement on budgetary measures. There are so many other ways you could make it. There is no real reason to make it, because you have been left with a surplus. So what is the purpose of this? We are talking about less than a day’s worth of public expenditure that is directly targeted to the most regional, the marginalised and the most disaffected already in our nation. What is the metaphor here? What is the message that you are trying to send—except for a message of unnecessary nastiness from Mr Tanner.

We can go through some of the areas affected such as the drought package. The drought package is still essential. I acknowledge that there has been extremely good rain in the country and the country has been blessed with good rain but it does not rain fat steers. It does not rain wheat crops. It does not rain dollars and cents for the bank manager to collect. These people are still out of cash and they need to be supported into a cash flow. Unless they get a cash flow, the dynamics of their farm and the business success of their farm will collapse. If it collapses, it gets sold up; if it gets sold up, it gets gobbled up by bigger organisations, and you start to get the centralisation of wealth in regional areas—all in all, a bad outcome for our nation.

One of the primary things that our nation always has done, from right back when we had soldier settler blocks to where we are now, is to try to make sure that the Australian citizen has the right to own and live on the land and to prosper. It is not something that was invented by the National Party, as is claimed in the derogatory barbs that have been sent from the other side of the chamber; it is not something that was invented by the National Party or the Liberal Party. It has been spoken about by people such as Jefferson: the belief in trying to keep the right of your citizen to be an owner and to profit from their participation in the land. One of the first philosophical statements you make is that you disregard that and that you are moving the nation to a position of centralisation—centralisation in geographical areas; centralisation in wealth—and that is an inherently unhealthy place for us as a nation to go. I am too humble to counsel anybody, but I would love to draw your attention to the questions of why this position has been made with these cuts, what message it is sending, where it leads us as a nation and what the outcome is if this is the path that you intend to wander down.

There are so many things that can be dealt with in an effective manner. These people out in the rural lands already have to deal with problems such as the overcentralisation of retail markets, the drought and the problems that have been brought on them by the financial overhang from trying to deal with the fact that they have been in a drought and a period of privation for a number of years. Why was it necessary to do this to them? Why was it necessary to make this statement? What is the real outcome? To be completely frank, with the budget that the government has and the money that it has spent, this will not make three-fifths of five-eighths of very little of a difference to the outcome of the nation.

I implore you to return to Mr Tanner and to try and counsel him in some way so as to mitigate these effects. Look at some of the other things. We talk about trying to reduce the carbon footprint, yet you are removing the ethanol production subsidy—there is $10.8 million going there. We are trying as a nation to alleviate the cost to motorists from the ever-increasing cost of fuel, to try and bring competition into the market, to bring about an alternative product that puts some downward pressure on fuel prices and to alleviate the cost to all those people now driving home and possibly listening to this so that they can get a better deal at the pump and a better outcome for our nation. Yet one of the first things you say is that we are going to try and destroy any mechanism to produce an alternative product. Why? Why the malicious barb about the ethanol plant at Gunnedah? Surely it is a good outcome to have an alternative source of fuel, at 85c a litre, delivered to the pump. If you can get the proportion of ethanol in the fuel put into every car up to 10 per cent, that means that 10 per cent of every person’s fuel budget goes down to 85c a litre. Surely that is a good outcome, not just for regional Australia but for Australia in general. So why target it?

I know that the Labor Party has gone on about apprenticeships and the lack of investment in apprenticeships. One of the first statements they make is that they are going to cut apprenticeships. They are cutting apprenticeship incentives for agriculture and horticulture. This is a parody: the juxtaposition between rhetoric and the reality of where this Labor Party is. It is a shame. It is unnecessary. I know that conceit and pride will mean that no-one will review these policies. They will go through because they will become core Labor business.

In closing, I am perturbed by the statement that this is all about conservative members of this parliament—whatever you want to call them and whatever words you use—stacking the seats or however you want to put it. I want to give you a quote in relation to Mr Crean’s promises during the last election:

On a recent election campaign trip to Central Queensland, Mr Crean also promised $1 million for the Blackwater aquatic centre, $1.7 million for the Hegvold Stadium in Rockhampton, $160,000 for a softball ground at Kele Park, $1.5 million for the Dysart Sports Complex and $1 million for the Winton Dinosaur project and $2.6 million for the Tree of Knowledge centre.

That was just a little trip out in the country for Mr Crean. The reason is that he was targeting seats such as Flynn, Leichhardt and Capricornia. Let us not be too removed from saying that everybody does not have, at times, a motive in trying to look after their people. I would be quite happy for Mr Crean to continue to do that, but we have already got the program in place for him to utilise. So why destroy it unless you want to destroy the aspirations and the dynamics of this nation and you want to destroy and take away that final little candle of some sense of benevolence delivered from this capital, by this nation, to those who are most disaffected and marginalised?