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

The Treasurer of the millennium! My suggestion to the Labor Party has always been: if you are going to change the sheets, change both of them. If you are getting rid of Gillard, make sure you take Swan with you as well. You have to make sure you clear this up.

Drilling down through this debt issue, we are actually going to smack up against the limit—we are coming against the ceiling. They will probably try to sneak through an extension of the debt limit. They always say, 'Don't worry; it is net debt.' But they can never actually explain the net debt. They can never explain how they get the net debt figure. We know what the gross figure is, but what they are going to take off the gross figure to get back to the net debt is a mystery. It is hidden in one of those rooms. It is obviously in the capable hands of Mr Wayne Maxwell Swan, the person who told us, when he extended the debt ceiling to $200 billion, that that extension was because China was going to go into recession. China never missed a beat, but our debt certainly went into hyperspace.

Whilst these people are running up this debt, whilst they are completely and utterly out of control—a complete and utter fiasco—they are building themselves a little telephone company. Because what we want is another telephone company! It is all right because they are borrowing all the money! Ultimately we will end up with about another $50 billion worth of borrowing. They will say, 'Oh, but some of it is a lease.' But you have to pay money for the lease. There will be $27 billion in borrowings up front—but it will work its way out and they have long-term leases and so on, they tell us.

Then, on top of all that, we have the clean energy fund of $10 billion. It is just so simple—obviously we need the Greens to be managing $10 billion, because they are such great economic managers! They have been doing such a splendid job, and it makes sense that Bob Brown deserves $10 billion! He is going to have $10 billion to splurge around the economy. This is what the Australian people are seeing at the same time as our democratic process is being dragged through the mud. The honour of office has been completely and utterly sullied. It has been a fiasco.

Think of this show as the nation's local accountancy practice. We have had the vision in the last week of them throwing the staplers at one another, of them kicking over the photocopiers, of them yelling and hurling abuse and of every staff member picking the side of a partner and joining in the fray. Then they look at the Australian people and say, 'We want your business.' 'No,' the Australian people say, 'we just want you out of town.' The Australian people are going to take their business somewhere else. They have to because, if we continue on this way, Australia will go out the back door.

Tell me one thing about this government which actually suggests competence. So help me—the Prime Minister lauds, as her greatest achievement, the carbon tax. That is your crucifix, not your achievement. That is the most absurd thing. That is the thing the Australian people have the most passionate dislike for. Yet, to show how completely and utterly out of touch they are, they say that the carbon tax is the Labor Party's greatest achievement. (Time expired)