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

It is a pleasure to rise here in support of the sentiment of Senator Xenophon's bill—who by reason of health is not able to be here today—though acknowledging that we will not be supporting it. But it is clear to state that we have heard a tirade—well, not a tirade, sort of a wet sponge from the Labor Party, about how the National Party has not been doing anything, but they spend their whole time complaining about the National Party and what it has done, which is fair enough.

What I can look at is the Labor Party's record. You do not have to go too far from this town to see the effects of the Labor Party's record on anything to do with biosecurity or anything to do with real and effective dealing with environmental issues—such things as African lovegrass, which is not that far from here, and serrated tussock. You have just given up on all these things. You do not care about them anymore. You apparently can cool the planet, but you cannot deal with African lovegrass. You can rejig the whole of the Australian economy on a colourless odourless gas, but you cannot deal with Asian honeybees. Apparently you are going to lead the world on changing an economy based on carbon dioxide, but you cannot deal with myrtle rust in your own country. It just goes to show how absurd the Labor Party have become.

I remember as a kid going in to see my dad when he was involved in the BTEC scheme—he was a vet—and spending days going out with him bleeding cattle. At a later stage he was in charge of that brucellosis and tuberculosis eradication scheme in northern New South Wales, out of Tamworth office. That was a great success. Australia got rid of brucellosis and tuberculosis. New Zealand still has it. It goes to show what a country can do when it is motivated.

But we are going to get nowhere with the Labor Party and the Greens. They are not really worried about the environment in the proper sense. What they are really worried about is the philosophy and the theatrics. They are really worried about social re-engineering; that is what they really want to do. I was listening Senator Milne's discussion here today about quarantine and we started hearing about floods and fires and famines and all the incredible things that are apparently going to happen. But even their grand architect, Professor Flannery, says there can be seen to be 'no discernible correlation' between changes in the extent of fires, floods and famines and global warming. It is one of these total absurdities that is trotted out here. What I did not hear Senator Milne or the Labor Party talk about is how they are dealing with biosecurity as it is at the moment. And of course we have no confidence in them.

You can bet your life that under this government, the Green-Labor-Independent government, fire blight will come in. It is just a matter of when. It is going to come. We have already heard today about the evidence that a quarter of the shipments have had issues pertaining to them. They are failing before they have even started. If someone said that in a quarter of your cars the brakes are going to fail then you would probably recall the cars. But they are going forward with the process under the current arrangements because they do not really care about the environment. They do not really care whether we wipe out the pear industry in Australia. They do not really care whether fire blight comes into this nation. It is absurd. With all the trash of leaves and litter that is going to be coming in from farms, which will have fire blight, sure enough we are going to get fire blight.

What will the Labor Party do then? They will deal with it the same way they are dealing with African lovegrass, with Chilean needle grass, with St John's wort, with the Asian honey bee and with myrtle rust. They will not deal with it because they do not really care. What they do care about are the theatrics. They care about people dressing up as koalas and parading out the front of this building. That is the Greens and the environmental movement—dress up as a koala and wave a placard. But when it comes down to dealing with the issue, when you really need the competency to grasp the issue and deal with it, they do not have it and they do not care about it. True environmentalism is actually looking after the environment in a hands-on and real way. Whatever happened to the production of an effective rust to deal with blackberries? That has gone nowhere.

I had the privilege the other day to visit the farm where Farrer developed a variety of wheat that took Australia into the 20th century. He developed it from a small plot down on the river. I saw at that point in time the sorts of competencies our nation had, the sorts of desires and the thrill that the government had to get behind people who were giants in this nation. But this government is not investing in them. This government is taking the resources out. This government is incompetent even when it comes to the health of our own people. What about the Indigenous people of Northern Australia? What happened to the tuberculosis clinics in the Torres Strait Islands? You care about the environment but you do not care about that part of the environment. That is another little thing you have moved out of the way. Let us not worry about tuberculosis coming. Let us not worry about the infection of the Australian people. If we get drug resistance in tuberculosis, we have no hope of treating it.

All you care about is the hugging and kissathons at the end of the vote. You do care about completely redesigning our nation's economy, even though we see on television Europe falling over. The global financial markets are falling over and there is complete and utter culpability of what we did the other day. You just do not care and you step back from it. As I said the other day, it is part of the Vandals who have overtaken Rome. The philosophy is over; the Labor Party has finally been subdued. What we have in the Prime Minister is basically a manifestation of Romulus Augustus. It is all over and it is merely a figurehead. The philosophy is now occupied by somebody else. It is a sad day. The party that was once the party of Curtin and Chifley is now, what? What have you become? You are a vacuous type of shell.