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

Thank you very much. It is all about an inquiry that we need. We must extend the time. We need an inquiry to tell people that 18,500 people in Hunter Valley, 7,000 people in the Illawarra and 1,000 people on the Central Coast are going to lose their jobs. They are going to lose their jobs because of the carbon tax, because of this nutty, stupid policy. But they do not get the grace of an inquiry. The government is going to guillotine time. We are trying to get an extension of time, but you do not want to give us an extension of time. You do not want to tell these people that they are going to lose their jobs.

Then we go to Queensland. This is Labor Party modelling. This is from the Labor Party. In the Rockhampton and Gladstone area the economic activity will fall by 8.2 per cent. So I say to the people of Rockhampton, in the seat of Kirsten Livermore MP, that she should be encouraging an extension of time. Maybe we should have an inquiry in Rockhampton where we tell the people of Rockhampton what is going to happen to their lives if they vote for this. In the Mackay area economic activity will go down by 5.7 per cent. Who cares? Who cares about regional Australia when you can pander to the Manic Monkey Cafe of inner-urban Nirvanaville? Who cares about them? They are only the people who put the money on the table. Don't worry about them—we will somehow live without them in this new mad form of economics, with a Treasurer who has an award from the same place that awarded Bear Stearns. It also awarded Lehman Brothers as the bank of the year. It never gave Peter Costello anything but it did give Paul Keating the Treasurer of the year award before we had 'the recession we had to have'. Why not?

'This is all going to make sense. It is going to work. The Greens are going to look after you!' Why are we doing this to people? How did we get sucked into this? The Australian people will wake up to it. They hate it—absolutely hate it. Except on Twitter, I just do not find people who want a carbon tax. Everybody hates it. You will literally get chased down the street by people who were formerly supporters of the Australian Labor Party. They are blue-collar conservative workers who have bailed on the Australian Labor Party because the Labor Party no longer believes in labour. They have dropped the 'u' out of 'labour'. For the Labor Party, it is not about human labour; it is about the Greens. It is about these manic, nutty policies that are going to take us to hades in a hand basket.