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 2 of 5.
“If you do not realise that, if you do not comprehend that, then you have no idea about the economics of Australia. I want to go to the budget. In the budget I looked for a thing called the Tomago smelter. I really did. It's about to close. There's no money to prop up the Tomago smelter—none. That's going to be a big issue for about 12,000 people whose jobs are associated with the Tomago smelter. So I'm just going to say to the members for Paterson, Newcastle, Hunter and Shortland: there is a party called One Nation, and we are going to be playing incredibly hard in that space. We are coming to eat your lunch.”
“To become powerful, we must strengthen the natural assets on our balance sheet. These are the assets that actually underpin wealth and underpin growth, and they are in regional Australia. If you want to understand where our wealth is, then consider our terms of trade. Everything about you—your shirt, your watch, your car, your fuel, your underpants, your television set—is coming on a boat from overseas. Somebody somewhere must be sending something in the other direction to pay for it. What goes on a boat in the other direction so that thing in your pocket is not just a piece of polymer but has value? It's coal from regional areas. It's iron ore from regional areas. It's gas, overwhelmingly from regional areas. It's cotton. It's beef. It's grain. It's wool. This is what underpins the wealth of Australia.”
“I'd like to go back a little bit. I'm going to go all the way back to the Peloponnesian War, 431 to 404 BCE. During the Peloponnesian War, there was an Athenian general of the Delian League, Thucydides. Thucydides was up against the Peloponnesian League. Athens was on the rise and Sparta was on the fall. Why would I quote that? Now I want to go to today. Today there is a meeting between President Xi and President Trump. The person who quoted Thucydides and the Thucydides Trap was President Xi. Why? It's because he sees that China is on the rise and the United States is on the fall. The concern is that the falling power pushes back and there's a war. Why is that important to us? We have to become as powerful as possible as quickly as possible. I've been saying that now in this place for well over a decade.”
“What fees did Equity Trustees receive for handling the money of MWL? What fees did the directors of Equity Trustees receive to manage the funds? Who are the audit partners of Equity Trustees? What are the auditors' fees? What report did the auditor deliver on where Equity Trustees were investing? What working papers can the auditor present to describe diligence in their job? How much did they charge in Equity Trustees? No answers have been given. And, if they can't do the job, hand it over to me. I'll do it for them.”
“Yet again, I have a meeting with people who have had their money stolen. Lion Property Group has their 400 victims—$250 million has gone. The Albanese government, under the Assistant Treasurer at the time, Stephen Jones—he said the system had to prevent collapses, malfeasance, mis-selling and catastrophic consumer losses. You haven't done that. That's on the back of me representing First Guardian and Shield Master Fund. What is going on? Who is looking after this? What is ASIC up to? I'm going to give some tips, as an old auditor, for what they should look at in some of these authorising bodies. Who authorised MWL to have a licence? Who audited MWL? When was the last audit of MWL? What type of audit was undertaken—qualified or unqualified? What fees did MWL receive for placing the business? What security did the directors of MWL receive?”
“My question is to the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government. The minister has claimed that there is a $31 billion blowout in the cost of the construction of the Inland Rail. To give confidence to the validity of this number, as it seems rather incredible, can the minister nominate the five largest cost items and the amounts associated with them that are part of the $31 billion? And, if you can't nominate the five largest ones, can you nominate one and the cost item that is associated with it?”
“My question is to the Minister representing the Minister for the Environment and Water. Fire ants are currently on the march from Brisbane. We'll have a huge issue, obviously, if it gets out, with a reduction in the cattle herd—a reduction of around 40 per cent. It'll be one of the most devastating things that happens to the fauna of Australia, from koalas and echidnas to basically anything that travels along the ground. It's going to be devastating to the lifestyle of Australian people. We need funding by MYEFO. What is your plan?”
“I have been working as best as I can with the government—because we've got to put parochialism aside on these things—in regard to legislation and dealing with mitigating risk in such a form as you can bring fuel in here and encourage people to go into the spot market, especially in Singapore, and purchase product. When a tanker leaves, there can be up to 250 million litres on it if it's a large tanker. That's an awful lot of money. If the market goes against you, it could send you broke. I want to compliment the government on their actions thus far. We've got something done. We've got a lot more to do. I look forward to being a positive force in bringing that about.”
“Obviously, the issue in regard to the fuel crisis continues on in the seat of New England. In fact, it continues on in regional Australia. I was just on the phone then to Ben Clifton from Transwest. They still can't get access to product, and, in some instances, the nuances and legalities of arriving mean they turn up with multiple trucks and get turned away. We have Ben Clifton and others coming down tomorrow. They'll have a meeting with the minister for energy and resources and then, hopefully, later that afternoon or the next day they'll meet up with the Treasurer. It is vitally important that the ministers within the government hear from the people on the ground, especially those who are in the independent sector dealing on the spot market.”
“I move: That all words after "whilst" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words: "not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House calls on the Government to initiate a review of this Bill for any potential areas of conflict with other legislation, including but not limited to the Safeguard Mechanism".”
“And you will put our country at risk; you will do that. And you will spend, absolutely, over 10 years, hundreds of billions of dollars, trying to achieve the impossible; you will do that. The only way we can stop doing that is to get rid of the department. That's its whole purpose. Its whole modus operandi is to change the climate, as absurd as that idea is—that a department on the continent of Australia can change the weather. So I put forward this amendment. It just asks for you to consider. If you don't consider, well, I suppose then you're ignorant to the facts. And if you don't consider, it means generally that you know what needs what is going to be said and you don't want it to be heard.”
“I think it's incredibly important that the government understands how this is working on the ground in regional areas, because that informs the decision process. If we have an informed decision process, we cannot get ourselves out of the crisis but we can mitigate it. The longer-term plan, though, has to be for Australia to have a wake-up call and clearly understand that you are not going to change the weather. Forget it. That's fantasy. I might be an apostate as to the whims of this chamber, but it is absolute fantasy. You are not going to change the weather. You're not going to make it hotter. You're not going to make it cooler. You're not going to make it windier. You're not going to make it drier. You're not going to make it wetter. But you will make Australians poorer; you will do that.”
“I might say that, from talking to independent distributors before coming into this chamber, they still don't have access to product; there are legal issues, where it can't be delivered. But their frustration is that they hear us, with this, saying, 'Oh, well, this will fix it.' I might say, in a sobering form, 'No, it won't.' This assists. It doesn't fix it. The problem is still there, and it's there in an incredibly substantive way. We have to be able to acknowledge that. Tomorrow I'll have some of those independents in the building. They're having a meeting with the energy minister. The Labor Party is the government, so that's where they've got to go; that's who they've got to meet. And then, later on, they'll be meeting in the Treasurer's office.”
“So the best thing is, if you can, to get yourself a cap-and-collar arrangement and offload your risk to someone else. But no-one's going to take that risk at the moment, so there's a role for the government to come in and take that risk. Now, if you want to have a discussion later on about a cap arrangement, I think that's a viable thing to have a discussion about. With that, when they say, 'Oh, well, this is going to help the miners,' that just shows no understanding. Miners are on contract; they go on contract for megalitre buys. It's not that there's an option out there with magical fuel. There's a financial instrument and that offloads their risk. So they don't care about the spot market. This is talking about securing up the spot market, which is vitally important. If we don't do that, it's going to exacerbate the problem.”
“If you just forget about them and start thinking about the people you meet at the bowling club, you're probably going to go a lot better electorally. What we have to do is: be honest, and understand, first and foremost, that we need fuel. Where are you going to get it from? And the legislation talks to that. In very simple terms, there is a spot market out there. It's just that it's the price you want to pay. And people aren't really concerned, to be quite frank, about the price going up. Say you're bringing in a tanker—and the biggest tanker is about 250 million litres, so let's say you're bringing in that. So, if you're making a play for a hundred million litres at—I don't know—$2.20, it's 220 million litres that you're out there for. And you're terrified of downside risk.”
“We've got half of us that don't believe in net zero—great! The next step is to get out of the Paris accord, because that's just net zero with a French accent. And the next step after that is to just get to rid of the climate change department completely—remove it; get rid of it. I'll tell you right now: if you want to get a cheer when you're out talking to a room, tell them you're going to get rid of the climate change department—that's the one they react to the best. They're way ahead of us. They're vastly more enlightened and vastly more perceptive about trying to get this place back to a sense of reality and away from the fantasy that we currently live in because certain people, who have very loud voices and very small constituencies, take you out to dinner on the weekend.”
“The reality rather than the fantasy is that we're still using, and will continue to use in the long term, internal combustion engines. The reality is that you cannot move to electric vehicles, and to suggest that in the middle of a crisis is just oblivious to the circumstances that Australia is currently in. We've had electric vehicles for a very long time; they're called golf buggies. They've been around for a very, very long time. If there had been a buck in them, they would have expanded them. It's a wonderful thing called the marketplace. What we're trying to do is to legislate ourselves into alternative forms of energy—to just put aside all sense of physics and economics and believe we're going to arrive at this energy nirvana. Today is the wake-up call. So what we should be doing, in this parliament, is this. We're on the way.”
“The next question will be: do I have security of fuel throughout the term of the crop? The last question will be: do I have the fuel to take the crop off, and do people have the fuel to take the crop away? That's whether it's carrots, barley, wheat or cattle. It doesn't matter. I don't think this nation has properly addressed that issue. I heard from the minister for agriculture, Minister Collins, in the last sitting, and I did not get an answer that left me with any confidence whatsoever that the government had a plan or the foresight to see what is happening with regard to food security. Today, when you turn on the television, the issue they're talking about is food security. It's a ripple-through effect of the fuel crisis.”
“Well, I didn't get the predicament wrong; I just got the war wrong. The war ended up being in the Middle East. But that's just part 1. This amendment talks to how we should look at what we're about to do, which I commend—in fact, I work with the government to do it, which I commend—but we've got to make sure that it doesn't start running into further obstacles the moment the fuel starts arriving in Australia. If we don't have fuel, then we don't have food. It's a pretty simple equation. If we don't have the reliability of fuel, then the first question people will ask in the country is: can I plant? And is the cost of planting so excessive that it's not worth planting, so should I reduce how much and reduce the risk? The next question will be: do we have fertiliser so that we get a fair return from planting?”
“We have to start thinking about Australia and how to strengthen it. What is happening now in the Middle East is merely a minor play for the big one, which is the Taiwan crisis. When the Taiwan crisis happens, it won't just be fuel that shuts down; it'll be everything. President Xi says he's going to take Taiwan back by 2027. We live in 2026. We should have every minister on their pegs, saying what their plan is, saying how we're going to get alternate supplies and saying what the contingency plans are. What's happened with this is something that we should have been planning for at the start of the year. I mentioned at the start of the year in interviews what the biggest issue is for us: the potential of a Taiwan crisis. Why? Because of the restriction on supply lines and the calamitous effect that it could have on Australia.”
“If we go to electrification, we will go from the highest fuel prices to the highest electricity prices in the OECD. And the area with the greatest amounts of intermittent power is not renewable. That's just the nomenclature of those who want to rip you off. If you go to the place with the highest amount of intermittent power, it's South Australia. And guess what? It's got the highest price. It's the highest price in the country with highest price. And you want to strap your nation to that? If we talk about culture wars, there seems to be a culture war against the internal combustion engine. If you really don't believe them, go to the next election and say you want to ban internal combustion engines, and I'll see you in opposition. It will be quite simple. We have to have an epiphany here.”
“The safeguard mechanism for the emissions of carbon dioxide over 100,000 tonnes is precisely that. If we go to electrification, then we will have a huge problem, because our electricity grid has been destroyed by our desire to somehow change the temperature. There's this idea that Australia will change the climate. We actually, insanely, have a climate change department—a department with thousands of employees to change the climate. I don't know when you get to sack them if the climate hasn't changed appropriately. El Nino is coming. If we had efficacy, then I would want it stopped. That's the thing we should be doing. Stop it now so that it starts raining. People say, 'Well, that's an absurdity;' well, the whole department's an absurdity.”
“And you haven't got the roads, if you're fully loaded, to be able to take it on the number of axles they provide. It's just this mythical thing. What I have put forward here is this: we've got to move away from the climate change department. One of the big issues, after all the work of bringing fuel into Australia, is it runs into a thing called the Safeguard Mechanism. The Safeguard Mechanism is precisely there to push the fuel back offshore again. So we're on both the clutch and the brake and also the accelerator all at the same time and wondering why the engine's not going well and why we're not going anywhere. What we have to do as we move this legislation is clearly look at other things that impede us from the greatest efficacy possible.”
“I move: That all words after "whilst" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words: "not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House calls on the Government to initiate a review of this Bill for any potential areas of conflict with other legislation, including but not limited to the Safeguard Mechanism". I'd like to acknowledge that what we have got to understand is that—I heard the previous speaker, the member for Warringah. With all due respect, electric trucks are absolutely ridiculous. A Toyota Land Cruiser weighs a little less than three tonnes. One of those trucks has more than four tonnes of batteries. Of course that means its capacity, its range is not comparable to being able to deal with Australia.”
“If you have that alternate nation where your love resides, then that is where you should be booted out to. That is where you go. So I can't quite understand why. I accept that other people might say, 'Yes, that's fair enough,' and we might get something in a similar form that's supported by other parties. I want to acknowledge the member for Flynn from the National Party for his support on this. It is something that's seen as being on a bipartisan basis, because it's logic. It's not something that I parochially want to hold to as my own, and the only party I've mentioned here right now is the National Party. So, if this is something that can be supported in such a form to bring logic back into this, I think it will be overwhelmingly supported by the Australian people.”
“It's about saying that, if you hold dual citizenship, and you would obviously be aware of that dual citizenship, and that dual citizenship is a reflection of an affection for another nation and your affection for Australia is in such a form that you have gone out to commit a terrorist act quite obviously with the intention of killing Australians and of killing the people who are of the culture, are of the ethos, have given you comfort, have given you succour, have given you security, have given you the opportunities of free health and free education, have given you the egalitarian nature, have given you freedom before the law, have given you equality before the law, have given you opportunity and have given you basically a classless society—if that is so at odds with where you are and if that offends you so much that you wish to go and commit a terrorist attack to kill your fellow Australians, then why on earth aren't we kicking you out of this country?”
“I mean, when you think about it, if you keep Australian citizenship and we ultimately become responsible—because we don't have the death penalty in Australia—for jailing you, the cost of that is more than if you stay in a first-class hotel in Sydney. It is a massive cost to the Australian taxpayer. So this bill is about stating the bleeding obvious.”
“It comes with obligations, and those obligations are negated if you act in such a way to the complete detriment and harm of the Australian people and also of the culture, the egalitarian nature, of Australia. What this says—I thought was the bleeding obvious—is that, if you come from a part of the world which has sowed a seed that says that you find the culture of Australia anathema and you hold that so strongly that you pursue a terrorist act, then surely that strength of affinity and of love of that alternate nation, that alternate culture, should see you deported to it. Then, you should be living to your heart's content in another part of the world—becoming their problem, not ours.”
“If your affection for another country is so much that you want to keep the citizenship of that country and you, whilst here in Australia, decide that what you will do as a terrorist offence is murder people and kill people—as we have seen, unfortunately—then you should live your virtue and go back to the other country, wherever that may be. What is the reason that you should be staying in Australia? Why should you stay here? You obviously don't like the place. In fact, you hate Australia. So, if you hate Australia, leave Australia. It's really quite simple. You can't have a potpourri of allegiances that, on a time of testing, show that they are weighted towards another nation and away from the nation that we all live in. It has got to be seen that having Australian citizenship comes with rights.”
“I move: That this bill be now read a second time. I was booted out of this place under a section 44 case because apparently I had dual citizenship for a country that I visited for approximately five days. My father, who was not a citizen of that country—my mother was not a citizen of that country. It just so happened that, for a period of time, I was entitled to citizenship; therefore, I was no longer able to be a member of this parliament. I want to thank people, because it allowed me to have a world record three times as Deputy Prime Minister of Australia. However, if I'm not allowed to sit in this parliament, because of dual citizenship, why should I be allowed to stay in Australia if I commit a terrorist offence?”
“We now have cotton pickers sitting in paddocks, in million dollar crops, that can't move. If the crop can't be stripped, it's gone. This is happening right now. Sports carnivals, for young people at school, have to be cancelled because people can't get to them. We have people who just have to drive a small distance to get to a depot to get to work, but they're doing it tough. They're saying, 'Our budget just doesn't allow us to do this anymore.' And every dollar they spend on fuel is a dollar they can't spend on food. We have the building industry in my area talking about PVC—we use it during a drought, and we're heading into a massive drought with El Nino—having a 27 to 36 per cent increase just in April. Of course, people are saying this is untenable.”
“This is a fuel crisis. We've been told there's more fuel here, but it must be fuel from the 'mystery' fuel company because we can't actually see it. I'm absolutely astounded by the lack of comprehension of exactly what is rippling through our economy. It is not going to stop; it is going to get worse. I just want to enlighten people about the sorts of areas this is now going into, areas you've probably never considered. I have here correspondence from the funeral industry, from one of the major funeral homes in my area. The funeral industry are running out of fuel; they're running short. They can't basically, once people are deceased, move a body from where it is, out in the country, back to where it can be stored. The soul's gone; it's just the body. And we're told there's not a crisis, that apparently there's more fuel out there.”
“My question is to Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. Despite the answer from the Minister for Energy and Climate Change, we're actually being contacted now by funeral homes that can't get fuel and certainly by farmers. Does the minister for agriculture see any impediments for the production, processing and transport of crucial food, crucial groceries, to metropolitan supermarkets? And, if you do see any problems, what is your contingency plan?”
“When they go to the fuel stations, the towns run out of fuel. This has not been managed. This has been a fiasco, and I might say that it was first brought to the attention of this chamber by One Nation without a shadow of a doubt. We were talking about ISIS brides, we were talking about fuel, and now everybody's playing catch-up. You better start coming up with rationing. You better start coming up with alternative paths for fuel to come in here, because, if you can't work that out, we're going to have problems getting food to supermarkets.”
“If it's arriving with funeral directors, if funeral directors in country areas are contacting me because they can't get access to fuel, I think that should ring a bell about how trucks are going to go in carting product around. I can assure you that, every time they say there's more fuel, my phone rings hot. They say that there's more fuel in Australia. Well, why haven't we got it? Why isn't it in regional areas? What have you done wrong? Have you got it hidden? Who has got this fuel? The mythical fuel company? It's just there. It's out in the ether. We just can't get it to the stores. We can't get it to the fuel stations. If you have bulk uses of fuel like trucks do, 1,800 litres in a B-double—if they don't get it delivered to them in bulk so they can use it at their depot, they go to the fuel stations.”
“But this place has been fascinated by such rubbish as green hydrogen, solar panels, wind towers and climate change. This issue should have been seen. I tell you why. It's because one of the issues that we should be planning for, unfortunately—President Xi says he's going to take Taiwan by 2027. It's 2026. That will also shut down all your supply lines. They'll all get shut down. We should have had that plan. We should have had that worked out because the situation in a smaller form is what's happening now. If we had that worked out, we'd be able to better handle this one. Even now, there is no sense of really grasping this situation for exactly what it is before it's in its more, to be quite frank, worrying form: it doesn't start arriving at the supermarkets.”
“At the start, it was just like the fuel crisis: 'It won't matter, because there's stuff in storage.' But, as it starts to filter through and we can't get it to the marketplace—like we can't load cattle—you're going to start running out of food. We have got to have a plan. That's why I say that we must start rationing now. People aren't going to like it. People are going to be very upset by it. But it's better to show the people that you've got a plan, that you've worked out how much diesel is required and how much fuel is required, and that you'll work your way down through the most essential parts of your economy so they get the product first. If things sort themselves out in the Middle East, we can just wait until the fuel's running again and we can just go back to the way we were. We've been fascinated—well, I haven't.”
“Then I asked the minister, 'How many days supply of diesel do we have?' And he was almost incredulous: 'Nothing to worry about here!' Within a week: big problems. Right now, this is how bad it's got. I have funeral directors contacting me. They don't have the fuel to pick up family members who have died and cart them back so they can, in a dignified way, be kept in a condition that's appropriate before they're buried. And the government says this is not a crisis. I'll tell you where we're going to have a big crisis. We now have tractors that are unable to produce the food you need. They are basically sitting in a paddock because we can't get the supply of diesel.”
“We're hearing the word now, aren't we? We're hearing the word 'crisis'. It took a little while before they started saying 'crisis', but by gosh we're hearing it a lot now. And we're hearing the word 'urgency'. It took a little bit of time before they started saying the word 'urgency', but we're hearing the word a lot now. And of course what we're seeing is that they're rushing forward a bill. Do you know why they rush bills forward? It's because they're panicking, because they're not across the situation. I'll show you how much they're not across the situation. When I first brought this up three weeks ago on S unrise , they said, 'Don't worry, because we have electric trucks'—electric trucks, electric prime movers. I was gobsmacked.”
“I support income splitting. I think it's incredibly important. If you want to know where you're going to get savings from, close down the climate change department. All those savings can more than cover the cost of income splitting. It's totally unfair that you have couples discriminated against because one person chooses to stay home. You shouldn't have to stay home, but if you want to stay home, you should be allowed to stay home, and that should be recognised.”
“I'll talk about genetic testing and protection in life. What we have—and we've seen more of, as I refer to a study by Edith Cowan University—is people, especially with non-invasive prenatal testing, who are testing for the sex of a child below 10 weeks. We've had an unreasonable increase—the general ratio is about 105 boys to 100 girls. That's generally where it is. But what we're seeing in some sections is 134 boys to 100 girls, as people have a preference to move towards the abortion of girls so that—”
“One of the biggest issues in genetic testing is that, under an insurance process, it allows the insurer to remove any sense of risk. You don't have the risk if you remove all the high-risk components. The whole purpose of insurance is to have a pool of people in which you include low risk and high risk for the general betterment that those of a higher risk have a form of cover. If we allow genetic testing in and to go unchecked, then any person who has latency towards cancer, latency towards respiratory disease or heart attacks will of course be treated just like a person who is a smoker. They'll say, 'I don't really have an interest in insuring you, because I make more money out of this group.' I want to bring attention to something else that's in regard to genetic testing and the protections in life insurance.”
“These things were brought up first by One Nation—no rationing, now they're talking about working from home. So I'm trying to work out how this works. Abattoir workers—how exactly does that work? Do they take the bodies back and break them down in the lounge room? How do you work from home as a coffee shop owner? Do the semitrailers never leave the garage? What about supermarket workers? We've had an electricity crisis brought on by this government's climate policy and a fuel crisis brought about by climate policy. What we actually have is a government in crisis.”
“First of all, I'd like to say thank you to the people of South Australia for what is a remarkable turn in the politics of this nation. I hope that, with the great honour you've entrusted in One Nation, that One Nation does its absolute, diligent best to look after the people of South Australia. I'd like to say to Cory Bernardi and Carlos Quaremba: congratulations on a brilliant election, and you've done a great job. Now, unfortunately, it's back to the fuel crisis. When this started, Minister Plibersek said: 'Don't worry, we've got electric trucks to cart things around.' Well, no, we don't. And then Minister Bowen said there was no shortage. Next thing we know, there's a shortage. Then, Minister Bowen told us there was no crisis, and, next thing we know, he's telling us about a crisis. Then, he said there was no rationing.”
“They're dealing in multimillion-dollar businesses, and we're showing the naivety of this building if we don't start taking these people seriously. The best way to take them seriously is to say: 'Okay, come on down. We'll have a meeting in the Treasurer's office or the Minister for Finance's office. Let's see if we can sort this out.' It's in nobody's interests if the trucks that deliver to the supermarkets stop moving.”
“I've actually handwritten him a note because I know how it works—those ones get read. These independent operators are not bad people. They just said they've got to get a chance to sit down with the Treasurer. They're not saying, 'Oh, we hate the Labor Party.' They're saying, 'Give us a chance to sit down with the Treasurer and the ACCC, because the information you're getting is not the reality we're living.' A lot of the big fuel suppliers, your BPs and your Shells, are quite happy if some of these independents go under, because they'll just take their market share off them. So this is a lot more complex, and it's rolling out. Every day we don't get on top of this, it gets worse and worse and worse. I'm getting more and more of these letters coming to my office. These are from rational, sane, serious business people.”
“They're starting to move groceries. They said: 'It's going to run out. If we don't have fuel, we are not able to run the groceries to the supermarkets.' There has got to be a plan. The plan may entail saying to people in the cities: 'Sorry, there's only so much fuel you can use so that we can have fuel in the country, because, if the trucks stop moving, your food stops moving. And, if your food stops moving, you'll only need a couple of supermarkets to run out and then you really will have panic. You'll have it big time.' So get in front of the situation and deal with it. It is not in One Nation's interests, in Labor's interests, in the Liberals' interests or in the National's interests for this nation not to realise what is happening right now. I've written to the Treasurer, just so people know.”
“Then the people driving up the road, trying to get somewhere, get to these towns, and they're not going anywhere because there is no fuel. There are no charging facilities either, so forget about that. What happens then is that the prime mover with 90 head of cattle has to disarticulate. It's got a little bit of fuel left, and it just goes driving from petrol station to petrol station, which are also empty. And, when it does load up, it's going to run that village out of fuel. In the end, they couldn't find fuel. So there's 90 head of cattle sitting on a truck. This just gives you an example of what is happening. We've got to understand it and take it seriously. People are getting so furious out there. They're watching question time, and they're not seeing people take their problems seriously. As I said, that was a big operator.”
“There was a truck from Betts Transport. It did a number of runs—ran out to Ebor up to Dorrigo, back to Caroona Feedlot, which is near Quirindi, and then to the Gunnedah saleyards. Those B-doubles take 1,800 litres of fuel to fill up. They have about 90 head of cattle. Gunnedah saleyards had 6,500 head that day. That means you have about 72 B-doubles worth of cattle, and 72 B-doubles worth of cattle and fuel is about 130,000 litres. It wasn't there. The fuel just was not there. This is what happened. The truck goes in and realises it's down on fuel, and because it's not getting to them in bulk amounts, because they can't buy it in bulk amounts, they go to the fuel stations. Guess what happens there. They run the fuel stations out of fuel.”
“I want to start by reading something that I've just received. I'm getting lots of these: As of today, the main Shell truck bowsers in Tamworth are empty— of fuel— yet still pumping air and charging us for the privilege. This unmanned site has now created a significant administrative burden. We cannot get confirmation about restocking timeframes, and we are told refunds may take 24-48 hours. It's left our staff to cross-check and reconcile what fuel, if any, our trucks actually received. … one of our trucks—fueling from two separate bowsers—accumulated over $200 on the meter before the driver realised the pumps were empty. There is a fuel crisis. It's happening. It's rolling out, and we have got to have a plan if you want to stop panic. There is no plan. Here is another one for those in the cattle game.”