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

Joel Fitzgibbon MP, Sharon Grierson MP and Kirsten Livermore MP have misrepresented their position. So why does this need oversight? Because this is the Green-Labor Party-Independent alliance—the glee club—who are the same people that gave us the ceiling insulation debacle where we spent $1½ billion putting fluffy stuff in the ceiling for the rats and mice to sleep on and then spent another billion dollars pulling it all back out again after we had set fire to 194 houses and had, tragically, killed four people. It is that type of acumen that is now, at pace, bringing in this carbon tax. They are the same people who brought us the Building Education Revolution where transportable dongas were landed in yards and places such as Manila in northern New South Wales for—whatever it was—$1.8 million for a transportable, bolted together modular bit of gear. People have been absolutely ripped off and touched.

The people who brought us the Building Education Revolution are going to redesign the economy on a colourless, odourless gas. We look at what is happening overseas right now in Spain, Italy, Greece and the United States of America, and, in the middle of that, it is culpable that our nation should even contemplate going down this insane path whilst we are sitting with $205 billion in gross debt at a time when we are in a boom and we should be collecting money and putting it in the bank. We are remarkable. We reach the absolute pinnacle of our times as far as our resource prices go and this buffoon, who may or may not be the Treasurer for much longer, has managed to rack up $205 billion in gross debt.