Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

It was interesting to see that Greens Senator Bob Brown was channelling Oscar Wilde. What always comes to my mind when I think about Oscar Wilde is:

Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.

The motion before the Senate is about the cessation and guillotining of debate. It forms part of the sense I have of the absolute hypocrisy of where the Greens are. I have to be honest. Ever since the Greens voted against an inquiry into the rape of an Aboriginal girl in 1988 by youths from the John Oxley Youth Detention Centre, one Annette Harding, I have not taken them seriously. They lost their moral compass at that moment. At that moment they just became like everybody else. So now we see the continuation of this duplicitous type of arrangement of the feigned and faux nobility that they try to exude and then the reality of actually what they are given the dirty little tricks that they are starting to play, whether it is the anti-Semitic edge that they have now got with the boycott of certain shops that they stand behind without even blinking, whether it is voting against the inquiry into the rape of an Aboriginal girl in 1988 at the John Oxley Detention Centre, a rape that nobody denies and that we have been trying to purge and trying to clear for so long—and they were part of that cover-up—and whether we are now we seeing the guillotine of a debate, something that in the past they continually said that they would not be a part of. We have seen the metamorphosis of the Greens and they are now just another party. So let us dispense with this allure of some sort of nobility, some sort of an edge and maybe some sort of a sense of righteousness and of purity, because that is lost; it is gone. Of course, the other issue as to that is this $1.6 million donation from Wotif and then the question is asked by Senator Bob Brown on that proprietor's behalf. It is absurd how it is done with this stupid little smile that they get on their face when we talk about this. Why do they do it? How does this happen?

Now, apparently, we have to get this through because they want to go surfing at Durban. It is all about Durban. It is time to go to Durban: Durban is nice this time of year, the Greens have to get there—so we have to get this through. There is the whole metamorphosis of this debate. It started as being about global warming and then it became about climate change and now it is about clean energy. It just changes like the days and as one thing is stated as being absolutely ridiculous they just move the debate on. As we know, the reality is that this tax is not going to change the temperature one iota. What I will give the Greens credit for is that they are about to bring about a new creed that it is immoral to be provident and now we have this new gospel, and the gospel needs a creed and the creed is this piece of policy. That is what it is: it is the structure around it; all new religions need a creed to stand by and this is it. The purpose is not so much to do with the environment, because it does nothing for the environment; the purpose is about a form of social re-engineering and a form of change. I do not know how the Labor Party got themselves sucked into this. I honestly believe, and I fervently believe this, there are people on the other side in the Labor Party who know that this is an absolute crock but they are doing it to curry favour with a group that are going to destroy them and you can see that in the polls at the moment. It is not smart for the party of Curtin, Chifley and—dare I say it—Whitlam to be sucked in by this. So it is not about changing the climate and I can understand the sense of unease that certain members such as Senator Conroy have about this—and they are justified in feeling that unease because—