Barnaby Joyce
New England · Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party · Australia
“Why do you believe that you can match the political, personal and religious philosophies just by reason of them arriving in Australia? It's not correct. It doesn't work. I'm not an imbecile. I'm not a racist.”
“Can you explain why we exist in this netherworld, where we talk up and down and around about the Chinese Communist Party and the PLA without ever mentioning their name? We know what's going on here. Why do we play this stupid game?”
“I have great respect for the member for Bruce, and I want it known that I genuinely think that the member for Bruce has his heart in the right place on this. What I do believe is that we have to understand the political dynamic that is currently before us.”
“There's a range of things I believe need to be addressed in this. We've just had a 0.6 per cent fall in productivity in Australia, and agriculture has a major part to play if we want to turn that around. That fall was premised before any effects of the Iran crisis came through, so I imagine right now it's worse.”
“Si vis pacem, para bellum: if you want to have peace, prepare for war. That was by a bloke by the name of Flavius Vegetius Renatus, but you can just call him Vegetius; that's how he was known. Of course, that could have been said by Plato, by Thucydides, by Dwight Eisenhower or by Winston Churchill.”
“You must abide by those guardrails. Home Affairs, where he is responsible, must make sure that those guardrails remain intact. Do you see any problem with any other philosophy that comes into our nation? Do you ever step aside from political correctness and say: 'No, that is not acceptable.”
The complete record
Every one of 204 lines we hold for Barnaby Joyce, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 1 of 5.
“Minister, Member for Bruce, what is the culture that connects you and me on different sides of the political chasm, with the same incredible, indelible belief of a love of our nation that we know is at threat and that you must protect? (Time expired) Proposed expenditure agreed to. Ordered that consideration in detail of the bill be made an order of the day for the next sitting. Federation Chamber adjourned at 19 : 35”
“Can you explain why we exist in this netherworld, where we talk up and down and around about the Chinese Communist Party and the PLA without ever mentioning their name? We know what's going on here. Why do we play this stupid game? We've just had the Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands here—and I'd like to commend the Prime Minister of Australia on that; I really would. Congratulations. Good work! But why do we all play this game? How are we dealing with that, Minister? Why aren't we being honest about exactly what the problem is? We all know it, but we don't say it, because we're scared. We're scared. That's a terrible thing for a nation that prides itself on the Gallipoli experience on Anzac Day. Can the minister explain what he loves about Australia and what he'll offer to protect it? What is the culture of our home?”
“You must abide by those guardrails. Home Affairs, where he is responsible, must make sure that those guardrails remain intact. Do you see any problem with any other philosophy that comes into our nation? Do you ever step aside from political correctness and say: 'No, that is not acceptable. That philosophy is not acceptable, and we will not tolerate it in this nation, this incredible nation we've created'? Do you have the courage to clearly enunciate what those issues are, to stand behind exactly what those issues are? Do you have the courage to say, in the face of the people who do not believe them, exactly your beliefs on behalf of Australia are? It's dangerous. It's scary. But you've got to do it.”
“Why do you believe that you can match the political, personal and religious philosophies just by reason of them arriving in Australia? It's not correct. It doesn't work. I'm not an imbecile. I'm not a racist. But we have to that understand that we can't just keep pouring people into Australia and thinking that everything's going to be fine and dandy. It's not. I want to ask the minister—and he knows better than all of us—how we can bring into this nation people with a view which I know would be anathema to the member for Bruce and just expect them to change that view. What are we going to do to change it? I know that the member for Bruce and I, on different sides of the political equation, believe in something. There are the guardrails for Australian culture, and if you step outside them you're stepping outside what Australia is.”
“I have great respect for the member for Bruce, and I want it known that I genuinely think that the member for Bruce has his heart in the right place on this. What I do believe is that we have to understand the political dynamic that is currently before us. Australia is moving to parties such as One Nation because of this being a crucial issue. If you don't recognise that, then you don't recognise exactly what's going. In 2021-22 170,900 people, net, came into Australia. In 2022-23 538,000—1½ times the population of Canberra—came into Australia. In 2023-24 about 1¼ times the population of Canberra came into Australia. In 2024-25 306,000—slightly less than the population of Canberra—came into Australia. This is not looking after the home affairs. This is being completely recalcitrant from the reality of what is before us.”
“In certain areas, like the protein hub, which is Tamworth, our biggest issue now is getting hold of water to underpin producers such as Baiada. Their kill rate will be going up to seven million chickens a week. They cannot possibly do it—they cannot employ the 1,400 people who will work there—unless they have access to water. They want to know what the answer is and, to be quite frank, so do I. I want to know about an issue that is especially pertinent to the cattle industry of Central Queensland, which my colleague the member for Wright would understand. We currently have an incursion of fire ants. If the fire ants get out of the Brisbane area and into Central Queensland—”
“There's a range of things I believe need to be addressed in this. We've just had a 0.6 per cent fall in productivity in Australia, and agriculture has a major part to play if we want to turn that around. That fall was premised before any effects of the Iran crisis came through, so I imagine right now it's worse. I want to know what the current focus of the government is to develop agriculture—where that focus lies and how you're intending to bring it ahead. I want to know what your current plan is for infrastructure, especially vital infrastructure such as dams. Where do you intend to build them? Do you intend to build any If not, what is your plan for the growing requirements for food security, which is indelibly linked to water security? I want to know how you've been working with industry on a water basis.”
“The division that they have now put out there about our position, which was supposed to be unanimous on AUKUS, is incredibly dangerous for us. AUKUS is not there, really, to look after a situation where a totalitarian regime is attacking the United Kingdom or the United States. It's there to protect us, and now we're the ones that are in the bill. The Prime Minister must come out today and unequivocally support this.”
“Si vis pacem, para bellum: if you want to have peace, prepare for war. That was by a bloke by the name of Flavius Vegetius Renatus, but you can just call him Vegetius; that's how he was known. Of course, that could have been said by Plato, by Thucydides, by Dwight Eisenhower or by Winston Churchill. We have got to understand that the recent intimations from the Labor Party that they are going to get out of AUKUS are incredibly dangerous. I want to run some names past you: Senator Roger Wicker, Senator Jack Reed, Senator Jeanne Shaheen, former senator Jon Tester and Elbridge Colby. They also don't want Australia in AUKUS. I always thought there would be problems from them—problems from the United States—or problems from England. I didn't realise it was going to be problems from the Australian Labor Party.”
“There's disdain for a certain group of people, where a person can own a private asset and can, at a later stage of their life, from their endeavours, hand that private asset over to other members of their family for them to be the beneficiary of generations of work. I commend this grievance to the chamber.”
“They didn't want to, but now they feel that they are compelled to comply rather than work with their better angels. These people were never, ever going to destroy what they take as so important as part of their lives. Every Monday morning, I go to the top of the hill behind my house to do Sunrise for Channel 7. One of the reasons I do that is to show the Australian people that overwhelmingly the countryside is not desecrated. There's the bush, there are the fields, and there are the creeks. It is there. We have managed it. We have looked after it. But what's happening to us now is not about environmentalism; it's about socialism.”
“It's a change to the whole dynamic of the ecosystem, which was never there before. We're seeing that as part of the process as well. So what are we going to do in Australia to try and turn the ratchet—not keep it where it is—from the left back to the right to reinstall private ownership as a primary part of your freedoms in Australia so that, when you own a land freehold, it means you actually own it freehold. It is not a case of you being some sort of tenant on a bureaucrat from Canberra's property. It is actually your place. When are we going to realise that the management of so much of this land over so many generations has left in a form where—if you're going to bring these regulations in now, why do you think the families never destroyed it beforehand? Because they didn't want to.”
“You will never get greater damage to the environment than what you see under the auspices of the creation of intermittent power precincts, and why is it done? It's done so a select coterie can become exceptionally wealthy through capacity investment schemes. That's what underpins it. On the coast it's reef legislation, and for areas out west if you don't have a control of regrowth—with things such as butterbush and walga—you actually turn areas into an environmental desert because nothing exists under those trees. In our areas we have a thing called invasive cypress pine. If you can't touch it and if it just grows up, nothing grows under it. There is no wildlife, there are no kangaroos, and there are no wallabies. There's nothing. There are no koalas—nothing.”
“We are seeing the EPBC Act come into place, divesting us of our assets, making us, basically, at risk of a criminal act on our own land that's been owned by our families. One of the perversions of this is that a group of people who don't have to abide by this are the intermittent power precincts, the swindle factories. They don't have to abide by it. They do as they like: turn up, strip country, knock over all the trees. It's changed now, but, at the start, for koalas—blunt force trauma if they were injured when the intermittent power precincts knocked over a tree. We would go to jail for that, but they don't. This is the hypocrisy of it. There are two completely different standards. Apparently the intermittent power precincts are to help the environment.”
“You've completely destroyed the value of my asset.' And they say, 'No, this is on an environmental basis.' You look at it and say, 'No, what you're actually doing is straight out socialism.' This creates the grievance. So many people now in regional areas feel that the government is blind to their issues and that ownership is now beholden to a person in a faraway town called Canberra, who's never been a farmer and has no understanding about the sacrifice that's made over generations to pay for an asset. Yet they seem to have more power than the person who actually paid the asset off. In fact, their power is backed up by law. In fact, if required, it's backed up by the police. In fact, if it has to, it can get you sent to jail. This is one of the mechanisms that is stirring people up. They're so angry.”
“Outside my lawn, I would have to get permission for anything that I do. The whole tenor of that asset had changed. No-one had paid us for it. No-one had offered any compensation for it. No-one actually even gave a clear explanation about what it was about. This is perverse. We try to put it into a metaphorical form so that people in a town can understand it. If I were to turn up to a house and say: 'Look, from this point forward, you're not allowed in the second bedroom. You can only go into the lounge room if you've got written permission, and the bathroom can only be used for two days in the week.' You'd say: 'Well, why don't you just buy my house?”
“Now we're seeing that the authority of the department, the officers of the department, are basically saying: 'The minister is not correct. We can come onto your place and fine you.' In some instances, it would be quite serious. In some instances, you may go to jail. To show you how perverse this is, on a block that was owned by me and my wife, we were given colour codes. You could deal with blue without having to ask permission. With yellow, you had to get permission before you could do it, but you could then continue on with what you were doing. With orange, it was highly unlikely that they'd ever give permission. With purple, it's like you go straight to jail. The only part you could deal with without asking for permission was the blue section of your place. When I got the map of our property, the only section that was blue was my lawn.”
“If we put in a fence line—which we do all the time for better management of country, to actually exclude sometimes stock from areas that might be of greater natural worth—you could take the D6 dozer through, clear your line and put up your fence. You can't have fences under trees because, obviously, branches fall down and smash the fence. Unless you're there every day, it becomes a continual process. It's just a very inefficient way and the wrong way to do it. But now they're saying that maybe that's not the case and that federal laws will come into place. Even though you're abiding by state laws, you mightn't be abiding by federal laws. However, they gave us the guarantee at the start—Senator Watt did—that this would not be the case.”
“You could do with it as you wished as long as it was not obviously blatantly obscene such as—I don't know—killing koalas or something like that. Everybody abided by that. It wasn't an issue. If you go out to the country now, or get away from the city, you will overwhelmingly see forests. You'll see wildlife. You'll see all the things of nature that were there close to settlement in 1770. But the government believes that that was not enough. I believe that what sits behind this is not an issue about environmentalism. It's an issue about socialism—that, piece by piece, authority over your land is divested from you and vested into the state without payment. One of the peculiarities at the moment is that we were able to clear for fence lines.”
“The grievance I want noted today is the continual encroachment of socialism into the private assets of people on the land. It is done by caveat upon caveat and under the mask of things such as the EPBC Act, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. What we are seeing in the most recent iteration of this is that not only have we lost the value of our assets, without payment to the state, but now the EPBC Act puts on further regulations that diminish the value of our assets without any payment to ourselves. To give you an example, we were of the belief that if you paid off a free title asset over generations that free title actually meant something. It meant that you had the minimum of encumbrances on that asset.”
“My question is to the Treasurer. Treasurer, it seems impossible to divine what the cost of the Capacity Investment Scheme is in the forwards. The Capacity Investment Scheme underwrites the swindle factories, and I think the Australian people have a right to know what it is, so can we get within $5 billion? Is it less than a billion dollars? Is it between $1 billion and $5 billion? Is it between $5 billion and $10 billion? Is it more than $10 billion? Is it part of the $18.2 billion? Just spitball us a number. Give us some idea how much this is going to cost us.”
“People don't rent houses because there was an option that they could buy, but they decided not to, so they decided to rent. Generally, overwhelmingly, people are in the rental market because they cannot afford a house. As such, they are a static block in the market. And that static block can be moved up, so there are more in houses, or down, so you're squeezing people at the bottom out to live in their cars. What you've done, immediately, with those people can be seen no more clearly than in the clearance rate for houses in the member for Cook's great city on the weekend. It was around 80 per cent; it's down to about 54 per cent—”
“And so you won't build the Inland Rail, which is freight rail, which actually pays for itself, but you will build a fast rail, with an 80 kilometre tunnel, and you've put money towards it. An example of how passenger rail just never washes its face—but it eats its head off—is the one in Melbourne called the Suburban Rail Loop. It's going broke before it even starts. So they're tipping more money into it—because that's what you do: if something's not working, obviously, you go and just put even more money into something that doesn't work! So they can find money for another passenger rail, but they can't find money for the freight rail. What we've also seen is this statement, which is wrong, that this budget is somehow going to help people who rent. People rent because they can't buy.”
“But, if you win, we're going to take 47 per cent—45 per cent plus a two per cent Medicare levy. We're going to take 45 per cent and a minimum of 30 per cent off you.' This just tells people: 'Why bother?' They'll think: 'It'd be better if I just whooped it up and had a jolly good time. That would make more sense. I've always wanted to go skiing in Sapporo. Why not go?' In this budget, I couldn't see anything to show that they're going to build a dam. There was a freight rail called the Inland Rail—and they just made up this fantastic figure, and they got rid of that. They are going to invest in high-speed rail from Sydney to Newcastle. Now here's the trick: that probably will cover about 30 per cent of its running costs from the tickets, even if we ever build it, and will cost well in excess of $100 billion—well in excess.”
“The other great asset on the balance sheet is the entrepreneurship of small-business people. Small-business people, by the very nature of their being in business, take risk. It's not like a salary or wage earner. They have paid tax on money. Then they invested in a business which they may lose their shirt on. They may lose money, and therefore we are always mindful of that, because we need these entrepreneurial people to work our nation's assets on the balance sheet. What this budget does is to say: 'We're going to punish you for being entrepreneurial.' It's saying: 'If you lose your shirt'—and remember that we've had record insolvencies in small business, says ASIC, in the last 12 months, and an increase in insolvencies of over 34 per cent—'we're not going to give you anything back; if you go broke, hard luck for you.”
“P&L are called taxes. So they increased their taxes to cover the trinkets that they handed out. To be honest, they should have told people when they were handing the money out that they were going to have to get it back. A business makes the assets on the balance sheet work better to earn more revenue in such a form that the assets create the revenue and therefore pay the taxes, which go across to P&L. So what are the assets on the balance sheet? There are two major ones. There are the actual seed assets, which governments do have a role in. They are ports, railway lines, freight railway lines, approvals for mines, streamlining things so that they can get going, dams—dams are a great seed asset. Have a look around. Where there are dams, there's wealth. You can't miss it.”
“And they're moralising about how they get it. Here's another fundamental thing about economics. You have your balance sheet of your assets and your liabilities, and you have your P&L, your revenues and your expenses. What we've been seeing is a whole range of expenses making their way to the P&L—cost-of-living measures, this measure, that measure. And they always come out as talking points from the Labor Party. Whenever you're in the media, out come the talking points. These are all things done for you as if they actually came out of the Labor Party's own personal pocket. They didn't. They came from the taxpayer. They got to a point where they went gone, 'Hang on; we can't pay for this.' Rather than make the assets on the balance sheet work better, they go back to the P&L looking for revenues, and revenues on the government.”
“You buy chattels, which are dispensable, depreciating assets, or you buy straight-out expenses: a trip overseas, a new stereo, cars, boats, bikes—all that type of stuff. And you will be poor. That's very simple. Now, the people who buy capital assets do it by not spending their money on chattels. They've paid their tax. And then, rather than go on a new trip to Sapporo to go skiing or to Port Macquarie for the weekend, they put their money away and they buy shares or they buy a deposit on a house. This budget says to those who are prudent, 'We are going to punch you.' It says to those who are spendthrift, 'We will reward you.' It shows is no understanding whatsoever of basic business principles. This is a budget, to be frank, that is driven by one thing: the government's run out of money and they're desperately trying to find it.”
“I don't quite know where to start on the paucity of this budget. As an accountant, I was always fascinated by two groups of people amongst the three. The one in the middle you didn't really worry too much about. They never really went that far ahead and never really went that far behind. The ones at the bottom I was always very interested in. They went broke, and I was always working out how they did it. They had some remarkable similarities. The ones at the top made a lot of money. Here's a trick: if you want to get ahead in life, you buy and sell capital assets. You buy shares. You buy a house. You can go out and buy yourself a block of gold if you want. But you buy and sell capital assets, and ultimately you will become wealthy if that's what you want to be. If you want to be poor then it's quite simple.”
“We had record insolvencies in small business—there was a more than 34 per cent increase in small business insolvencies in the last 12 months. So ASIC says. That's because people take risks and sometimes they lose. They lose their shirt. And that's why we reward them when they win. But no, we don't believe in reward! We believe in creating a stupid nation, a lack of entrepreneurship, a lack of hope and a lack of vision!”
“If we go to other things in our electorate, apparently you can't find $5 million for Mayor Jeff Drayton, but you can find $18.2 billion for the swindle factories, for the intermittent power precincts, your solar panels, your wind towers. And we're building the transmission lines all across the place. You're turning New England into an industrial dump for an intermittent product that's unreliable and hellishly expensive. If you want to do something smart it would be confirming Chiswick CSIRO's funding, but you're not. At this point in time, they believe their funding has been pulled. Everything about this has no vision for the regions. Everything about this is misinformation. Everything about this opaque or not the truth. And, of course, let's remember what we're doing with capital gains tax.”
“They're going to build a big precinct there to make solar panels—that's just another load of rubbish. It's never going to happen. We're just being told not the truth. Then we go to other things—the inland rail, we got rid of that. You came up with a fantastic figure, $31 billion, it's just that no-one can put any meat on the bone. They can't tell us how that adds up to $31 billion. Just say it! They say, 'Go to the axle report.' I did—it's one line, '$31 billion', no details. It's completely unbelievable. There's nothing that substantiates the validity of the Labor Party's capacity to get themselves around the numbers. It's all just a load of garbage. Blow your nose on the budget. It's just not worth it.”
“We all saw it the other day—they blew up Liddell, blew up the stacks. It was absolutely, incredibly stupid. Why didn't they refurbish them? Why didn't they use all that ingenuity that they have? Apparently they can change the climate, but they can't refurbish a power station. There was a 2000-megawatt power station, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. But we are spending $42 billion on Snowy Hydro 2.0, which is 2000 megawatts for three days. While we're on Liddell, they were supposed to get $5 million from the Regional Precincts and Partnerships Program. Mayor Jeff Drayton is actually the chair of the Labor branch there, and he said that you've squibbed on the deal, just forgot about it. Once more, it's just completely unbelievable. You say things, you never do them and people are let down.”
“Are you going to remove the ridiculous ideas of climate change policy and climate change departments so that you can put in, in their place, things that make money so that, from that money, you can pay for that compassion and your compassion can be authentic and your compassion can be paid for, or are you just a foolish, wonderful spirit?”
“Then go back to what Julia Gillard and everybody thought of at the time: this is for people with catastrophic disabilities; this is for people to whom we owe compassion. This is incredibly expensive. But, with a prudent economy that opens up its coal mines, runs its iron ore, runs its gas, has dams, has cattle, digs up the gold, processes the bauxite, has coal-fired power stations, has an economy that's humming and can produce money off the assets on its balance sheet rather than borrowing it from overseas—a lot of this NDIS money is borrowed. It's on the credit card. When you build up an economy that can hum, when you work the assets on the national balance sheet, you will make the money that pays for things such as the NDIS. In conclusion, that is the call that you have to make. Are you going to make this economy hum?”
“If we don't and our debt keeps going up, through $1 trillion and on and on and further up and further up, I'll give you a little lesson from a little bush accountant of what will happen: our cheques are going to bounce and we'll have no money for the NDIS—we'll have no money for anything, actually. One of the biggest issues right now in trying to bring this back under control is to really drill down and make the hard decisions that a responsible government needs to make. I would suggest to both sides of this chamber that we need a responsible Treasurer who will come up with pretty severe cuts, to be quite frank, and will say that there is a ceiling on this and it will go no further. If a Treasurer were to have that honest conversation with the Australian people, I believe they would go along with him.”
“If I was to say to a taxpayer, 'I want you to go out and do your job and I'm going to take $65,000 out of your salary to pay for someone of the NDIS,' I know the response I would get, and it wouldn't be a good one. That $65,000 is untenable for a million people. That's crazy. What's that? We're heading towards $65 billion. It's just out of the ballpark. So let us not confuse compassion with reality. Compassion has its ring road. It is based on logic. It's based on what you can actually do. Compassion is not wishful thinking. Compassion is actually being able to follow something through. Given where the NDIS is at the moment, it is not able to be followed through. If we are going to continue on with this—if we are going to be truly compassionate—we have to trim this up massively.”
“Remember that Tim Fischer, who was the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, was on the spectrum for autism. So they get that person's child on the NDIS, and they get paid to look after that child. Then a surprising thing happens: that other family look at one of the unregistered provider's children and say, 'Well, I'll be damned! Your child also looks like they might be a little bit on the spectrum, and I, as an unregistered provider, will look after them.' So they get paid to look after your child and you get paid to look after theirs. It's a great deal! It's a scam—a total scam. The average cost of the NDIS is $65,000 a year per person. That's $65,000 per year per participant on the NDIS. Somebody somewhere has to find $65,000 to pay for them.”
“It is right and just that you go to work—work five days out of seven, seven-and-a-half hours a day—to pay your taxes, to pay for them.' That is morally justified. The Australian people are very generous. If they see a person with Down syndrome or a severe disability, they will do that. But the Australian people have every right to kick up a massive stink when they see someone who's gone to a prostitute and put it on the NDIS, who's gone for trips overseas and put it on the NDIS, who's gone for pony rides and put it on the NDIS or who's had Reiki therapy and put it on the NDIS. The classic one is when one person is an unregistered provider and, in a suburb in Brisbane or Sydney, they divine that one of their friends has a child who might be a bit on the spectrum—a bit autistic.”
“They can say what they like; they don't have to pay the bills. To bring this back under control, it needs a cap on it. It needs to be said: 'This is what you've got.' It was supposed to cost $13.8 billion. Say: 'Let's double it and add a bit, to make, say, $30 billion—that's it. There is no more money beyond that. That is it. So find your most profound disabilities. They have to fit within the budget. And that is it.' If you don't do that, you have to say where you think the money will come from. You can't just believe in this magic—that it'll just fall out of the sky. You have to be responsible to the taxpayer and say, 'I'm really putting you on the hook for some massive expenses.' You have to say to the taxpayer: 'See these people?”
“Bill is going to bring forward some amendments, and I believe we should be supporting them.' Sukes was pretty good. He said, 'He gave us a fair touch up when we tried to do this.' He really did. He took to us in the papers and dragged us through the prickles. I don't know how many amendments there were—five of them? Sukes said: 'We'll give them four, and we're going to touch them up on the fifth. Let him know that.' And that was it. What is the point of that story? On both sides of this chamber, you'd better realise that, if we don't straighten this out, it is over—we will have to close down the NDIS. It is completely and utterly unsustainable. There has to be a bipartisan view. There'll always be the few who scream from the edges, because they never actually have to run the treasury bench.”
“I'd just gone past Goonoo Goonoo Station and turned off to my left. I was near the truck stop that always has the bins there—these are the bins that are not filled up with other people's rubbish—and I got a call on the phone. It was one Bill Shorten. He said, 'Barnaby, about that deal you were talking to me about, can we still do it?' He was wanting to do exactly what we were going to do and didn't want us to kick up a stink about his amendments. I said: 'Well, you should have done this in the first instance. We were actually trying to help the Australian people, the Australian taxpayer, and straighten this rubbish out.' I said, 'Look, I'll give it my best shot.' The shadow minister then was Michael Sukkar, and I said: 'Sukes, this is going to be hard, but I think, on behalf of the Australian people, we've got to trim this right up.”
“But, if we do that, Bill, you can't make them controversial. Let's do this for the Australian people. Let's get some amendments up, trim it up and let it through, because we're going to lose government, and, no matter how parochial you think we are, we have to put Australia in a better economic position, get some financial stringency in here and try and bring this thing under control.' Bill's a good bloke—I got along very well with him—but he couldn't come to it. He said no; he wanted to fight us. I think we still tried it, and he still fought us. I suppose he got a few points out there with people who believed that he was supporting them. But the rejoinder to that—I remember exactly where I was in the car. We'd lost government, and I was driving from Tamworth down to Sydney.”
“But they don't bring in all the people who you'd say: 'Well, I don't know about that. I don't know about that person.' A person on the NDIS has to have the capacity to look at a person who pays the taxes for the other person not to have to go to work and say, 'I feel completely comfortable asking this person to go to work for me.' If that person feels uncomfortable about saying to that other person, 'I think you should go to work for me,' then, I suggest, they should not be on the NDIS. It won't matter what side of the political fence you're on; if we continue down this path, this will hit the deck. When I knew we were going to lose government—I'd said, 'We're gone; we're cactus'—I remember I said to a bloke by the name of Bill Shorten, as politics does work: 'We should move some amendments on the NDIS to try and trim this right up.”
“This is insane. We have Public Accounts and Audit—I was there the other day—750,000 people or thereabouts are now on the NDIS. It was never ever designed for 750,000 people to be on it. It's heading towards one million people being on it. I don't think there are that many walking sticks to sell in Australia. A million people on the NDIS—it wasn't designed for that. In my belief, it was for catastrophic disabilities. We saw quadriplegia, paraplegia, schizophrenia, motor neurone disease. These sorts of issues are what we had in mind. We can't cover all these issues. It's unsustainable. And what people have to ask on the NDIS—I know how it works. I know how politics works. People come to your office, and they give an example of someone who quite obviously should be on the NDIS.”
“It was an immense payment, but it worked on the premise of something that had been discussed for quite some time, right back to 2008, and the Productivity Commission had suggested that we have an overarching scheme that encompassed so many of the forms of disability. It was well-meaning at the time, but the problem we've got is that it has become crazy. It is completely and utterly out of its envelope. It is unsustainable. Hard decisions need to be made, and, when hard decisions are made in government, they are unpopular. But the alternative is that it hits the deck. Not only does it do that, if you don't take control of it, it is a substantial part of the financial problems of our nation. We cannot have the NDIS drawing more from the budget than Defence, and that's where we're off to. I believe right now it's more than Medicare.”
“I thought the honourable member opposite might want to have a say. I was there when we started this in the Expenditure Review Committee. I remember it very well. Abbott at the time was believing that if it was untenable that we couldn't support the NDIS. We believed that the then prime minister Gillard had her heart in the right place, that this was a proper thing to do. We were a bit overwhelmed by the cost. It was a bit shocking. I think they said it would cost $13.8 billion. Around the table, we needed some convincing as that was not out of the box, that we could deal with that.”
“And we can't finalise the deal to get it through so we can land it here. It's not one deal of 100 million litres; it's deal after deal after deal that we can do. So I plead with the government: please get going on this. Go down to the department, bang some heads together and make things move, because we're losing these deals and you can't tell big players just to hang around for their money.”
“The issue is that we—some time ago, last month—passed the legislation to derisk this, because it costs about $250,000 to hire the boat and about $90,000 a day to push it through the water. You might be up for $200 million or $300 million on a punt. If it goes against you—if you go out of the money—you'll go broke. So we have to derisk it. The derisking process was done through EFA, Export Finance Australia. I have to say I'm incredibly disappointed. It is so slow. These deals are not turning around; they're bogged down. People are coming out and asking, 'How long before you can get this through?' And they're hearing 'A month—weeks.' When you're buying on the spot market, it's bang—it's like that. We've had product at $600 a tonne, and at Platts it's at $1,100 a tonne.”
“(): by leave—Whilst there is no money for Tomago, there is apparently $18.2 billion further for intermittent power rollout, the intermittent power swindle—the solar panels, the wind turbines, the transmission lines. I note that the Treasurer only mentioned the words 'climate change' once in his speech the other night, which was probably a very clever thing because it's terribly unpopular. We've the dearest electricity prices and the most unreliable electricity, basically, in the OECD. It is also important that we secure fuel, diesel—we've all agreed on that. I've been doing my very best to work with people such as Chris Monet in San Diego and with a range of consortiums trying to bring diesel in on the spot market from Singapore.”