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

Thank you, Acting Deputy President Boyce. I was in my room happily listening to Senator Milne talking about fire, flood, famine, fear and loathing. This is what it always comes to, to make you feel guilty. It is what they always do. After they have made you feel guilty they say you should become righteous. The prospect of righteousness is always an amazing path to get there. The path to righteousness via the Greens and the Labor Party is a new tax. If you pay the new tax you are righteous and you are a wonderful person. Coal becomes righteous once it crosses the sea, apparently. If you burn it in China it is righteous. For uranium it is the same deal. It is righteous once it passes over water. It is an incredible position. I was wondering about this, so I found what Tim Flannery said:

Australia naturally has a high degree of variability in rainfall,—

I agree with him—

with long periods of intense droughts—

I agree with him—

punctuated by heavy rainfall and flooding,—

I agree with him on that too—

so it is difficult from observations alone to unequivocally identify anything that is distinctly unusual about the post-1950 pattern …

But that is apparently not what Senator Milne believes in. She believes in devastation. You have to make people feel scared before they bung a new tax on you. You have to make people scared before, via every power point in the house, you turn into a collection mechanism for the Australian taxation department.

Now we have Senator Larissa Waters saying that we are going to remove fossil fuels in the next decade. It is like a couple of days ago was year zero. We will all be heading out to the countryside to a new cultural revolution. We are going to sit down there and live on beetles and nuts and we will be righteous. We will be hungry, cold and miserable but we will be righteous. But that is what you do, and it makes abundant sense. Of course we can get rid of all fossil fuels in the next 10 years. We do not need a car park anymore; we need a stable to put the horses in when we ride up here! This is the absolutely absurd position. The absurd position is evident in this. They do not care about the real environmental debate—the one that takes acumen, planning and, as it says in the report, resources to deal with the issues. They do not care about that. They do not care about having a proper analysis of the statistical probability that fire blight will come in. They do not care about that.

The Greens do not care about putting their hands on the hotplate and saying, 'I'll bring down the government if you do not properly deal with fire blight.' They do not care that they are not able to show anything that this Labor-Green-Independent alliance has done for the environment, bar one thing. I will give them one: they will probably get rid of rabbits on Macquarie Island. That is about it. That will be the piece de resistance. The removal of rabbits from Macquarie Island is about as good as it is going to get.

Unfortunately, I do not think that is going to stop us from getting fire blight. It is certainly not going to deal with African lovegrass. It is certainly not going to deal with Chilean needle grass. It is not going to deal with blackberry, St John's wort, myrtle rust and the Asian honey bee. And it is not going to stop fire blight coming into our nation. When it comes to the real, on-the-ground, definitive environmental statement, they do not have one. They cannot formulate that outside this building. How can you possibly think about the proper environment when what you are really concerned about is the next manifestation of the conversation at the manic monkey cafe of inner suburban Nirvanaville? That is really what they are concerned about.

Ms Plibersek—this is the misleading way they carry on—said on 1 August 2011, 'The thing that we need to remember about the reasons for doing this is that there is a serious threat to our economy.' She was talking about global warming. She said that there was a serious threat to our environment of not acting. She said, 'In environmental terms we are looking at losing the Great Barrier Reef.' I do not know where it is going. I do not know where the Great Barrier Reef is off to. I reckon I could find it; it is just off the coast of Bundaberg. But Ms Plibersek says we are losing the Great Barrier Reef. And she says that we are losing Kakadu. Where is it off to? She says we are losing the ability to feed ourselves. What a load of rubbish!

I will tell you when we are going to lose the ability to feed ourselves. That will happen when those opposite shut down the Murray-Darling Basin. That is when we will lose the ability to feed ourselves. Listen to what they want. They want to take 7,600 gigalitres of water out of the Murray-Darling Basin. We will not have an irrigation industry. They want to shut down the thing that feeds 40 per cent of Australia.

How are they going to feed the horses that we have to ride to work because they also want to get rid of fossil fuels? This is a mad world; it is the year zero of the Greens. It is a new world and they are proclaiming it each day. Each day you read about it. We will not eat; we will not drive cars! We are going to go to 80 per cent reduction in carbon emissions to take us back to 1910 levels.

So when we go through the doors in the morning—I suppose that now that we do not have a steel industry they will have to be made out of wood—how will it all work? Where is the economy that works like this? Where is this magical place? Where is this Xanadu that we are basing this on? I think it might be somewhere in the highlands of Tasmania—in a little, little house with a little, little fire that you see every now and then on the television!

Why are we doing this to the Australian people? Let us think of the other things. The Greens want to shut down rodeos. We cannot possibly have them! They are totally evil! We cannot have people out west enjoying themselves; it is immoral! As we return to being content hunters and gathers on the forest floor, we will not be allowed to have fossil fuel. We will have horses but if you leave the Greens long enough we will not be allowed to ride them—you can bet your life!

An honourable senator interjecting—

The blacksmiths won't. This is all part of the progression.