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 3 of 5.
“My question is to the Treasurer. We have been approached so many times in our offices about what is happening with this fuel issue. It's ridiculous to say that there is not an issue out there—it's patently absurd. What has been asked of me to ask you is: how quickly can we organise a meeting between the independent distributors, the ACCC and you—I'm happy to take the Minister for Climate Change and Energy as well if you wish—to address these issues so you can hear from the ground up? They're watching this. They really want to know what your answer is going to be.”
“People have absolutely no idea how to drive on these roads. It is pandemonium. If it happened once, it would be a novelty. But this has now happened numerous times. If you're not going to stop traffic being diverted up Danglemah Road, then you have to fix up Danglemah Road so it can be an alternate route in times of crisis—and it's certainly not that. The last time major work happened on Danglemah Road was the Great Depression, and not much has happened since. If anybody out there is listening to this: please fix up Danglemah Road.”
“The money has been in the budget; it's just that the motivation is not in the government. The final thing is something very close to my heart. Unfortunately and tragically, the other day there was a fatality on the Moonbi Range. This has happened now a number of times. People go onto Google Maps and find the next route. Well, the next route is the Danglemah Road. I live on it. The Danglemah Road was only built in 1927 because the country south of Danglemah was too wild. It's a single-lane dirt road, and then next thing it turns into a national highway, and it's just bumper to bumper with cars going in both directions and Teslas that won't go off the road because they weigh too much and they're scared of it. We had one truck that went off the side. We had to get chains to chain it up so it didn't fall off a cliff.”
“There's $20 million allocated to fix this up, but the federal government is just not starting. They're not allocating the money. It's got to be allocated, or you have to be somehow responsible for any accident that happens. The next one is in the city of Tamworth. We've got the money put aside to upgrade the New England Highway from the Calala roundabout out to Greg Norman Drive along the Goonoo Goonoo Road—it's part of the New England Highway—but it's just never started. They keep pushing it back and pushing it back and pushing it back and pushing it back, and the cost keeps going up and up and up. The people of the city of Tamworth—over 70,000 people—keep on asking, 'When is this going to start?' And all I can say is that that's a good question for Catherine King.”
“I rise today to talk about one laurel for the government and three barbs. The laurel is that I want to thank them for the money that we've got for road 358. It's the second range crossing for the New England Highway that goes from Willow Tree to Merriwa. It's the only road I'm going to get to open twice in my career because, the first time we opened it, it fell into the creek and they had to redo it again, and now we're going to open it a second time. And here are the three barbs. Another east-west road requires upgrade at the Port Stephens Cutting. Someone is going to get killed there. Unless you're on the two-way, you do not know about timber trucks coming down, and there are completely blind corners. It is widely used because it's the shortest route to the coast, and we've had logs come off trucks and go through cars as they come down.”
“I'm going to have to buy the neighbour's place to go any further up. So, if they knock off any more of this, I am out of luck and I say to Sunrise , 'I'm sorry about that; I just didn't have a higher hill.' So let's see that if this obligation is actually fulfilled. Let's see if the rhetoric turns into reality. Let's see if you actually deliver what was promised. Might I remind you what you voted for back in 2005. It was a long time ago, but you did. You voted for these responsibilities, these obligations, and even though it's later on you've got to honour them in 2026.”
“People say, 'You go up there because there's a beautiful view and the sun's rising and it looks wonderful; you and Tanya get out there and get the ratings for Channel 7 and have a whale of a time.' The reason I go up that hill is for mobile phone reception. That's why I go up the hill. If I didn't go up the hill, we wouldn't have the reception to be able to relay that program to the tower. From that area I get 5G because I can see the tower. It's on top of the Moonbi Range. It's just over there, and it's that line-of-sight reception that I get. I used to be able to get reception. Every time they changed the telephone, the 5G to 2G, I used to have to go further and further up the hill to get reception. Now I'm at the top of the hill. I'm at the top of my game, but there's no more hill to go up.”
“What I have seen in following this is that every office in regional Australia becomes a lightning rod for telephone complaints. What I have seen is that when you say to them, 'This area that you used to get reception in no longer gets reception,' they come out with the greatest weasel words. They say, 'In the past that was just fortuitous reception.' It's like you were just lucky it happened. Luck had nothing to do with it. They had reception and now they don't. In closing, on Monday mornings I do a piece on Sunrise . There's a hill behind my place, and I've got a track and it goes right up this hill. It's quite steep. It'd be 800 or 900 metres—I suppose 800 metres—at the top.”
“For a lot of machinery now, if a bearing's overheating or something else is going wrong, a message—in some instances sent to the tower, sent to Detroit if it's John Deere, or sent back to the dealership—tells you to turn off your tractor, because, if you keep it running, it's going to go from a $6,000 bill to a $60,000 bill and cost you a lot of money. This Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Universal Outdoor Mobile Obligation) Bill 2025 has to have the meat put on the bone so that the government will own the responsibility to get out into regional areas to have discussions with the community and say, 'Where did you use to get reception that you no longer get reception?' and at the very least match what they had, because they don't have it.”
“But, just observing—I'm not suggesting anything, but I'm observing—where a few mobile phone towers have been going, one might suggest that they're going into Labor electorates. One might suggest that. One might suggest that there seem to be quite a few going in around a place called Bega, but we are not getting any new ones out in other regional areas. This in itself means that there is a diminished standard of living and diminished potential in regional areas. Even now, mobile phone receptions are utilised by mechanics.”
“So we call on the government to actually own this and go out to areas and say, 'If you're not complying with the Universal Service Obligation, the network reliability framework or the customer service guarantee, you put at risk your licence for having a telecommunications company.' So let's talk about how you get more towers out, because the only way you solve this problem is to get more mobile phone towers out. Every time that bandwidth is utilised for 5G—after it will come 6G—more and more volume is required, so less and less area is able to be covered. There have to be more and more mobile phone towers put out around the nation. Lately, in regional areas, that's just fallen off of a perch. I must admit that the coalition were very good at getting out mobile phone towers.”
“Light a little fire? I mean, how does this work? You've got to have mobile phone reception, and we're losing it since they went to 5G. So how are we going to deal with this? Well, where a lot of people will go—and are going—is to Mr Elon Musk with his Starlink—with mobile Starlink. That's where they're off to. That's because we're going right away from any protections in Australia and using delivery of a foreign service, which, of course, should something go wrong, can be shut down, when we should be relying on telecommunications being delivered as promised through the Universal Service Obligation.”
“Even for a simple thing, like a person getting a flat tyre who's probably not able to fix it—that's most of this building!—there's no reception. They can't do it. It's a fundamental occupational health and safety issue in regional Australia that you have a mobile phone reception. It is very, very dangerous if you don't. Every person who's been in regional Australia will tell you about the time they came across an accident. They came across an accident. There were people on the side of the road. The car's disappeared. They just happened to catch a glimpse of it. It's gone off the road, to the side. There's the immediate panic you have: 'I must get the police here; I must get an ambulance here, I've got to find out.' And, if you don't have reception, well, what are you going to do? You can't leave the people. What do you do?”
“We had, the other day, a tragic accident on the highway near Moonbi. A person was killed. It was a truck, and it went into a car. They shut down the highway near Moonbi, so all these cars, from a national highway, started going up the Danglemah Road, which I live on. So the Danglemah Road, a dirt road, turned into the New England Highway, and these people didn't really understand that it's a single-lane road. As I went along, one truck had been pushed just off the edge, on the side of a cliff. It was just hanging on there. We—I didn't, but people from my property did—had to put chains on it so it didn't tip over. That person could have been killed. They went to ring—of course, no reception. Especially in remote areas, when someone has a heart attack, they've got to get on the phone. There's no reception.”
“We'll come back and we'll fix it up.' But they started falling off the log a bit on this one, and the Network Reliability Framework and the Customer Service Guarantee and the Universal Service Obligation—as I said, you're not complying with these anymore. They'll tell you not to worry about it, that they'll fix it up in the future, it's all under control and everything's hunky dory. Then came 4G and, of course, now we've got 5G. With 5G, it's almost like a line of sight, to be able to move with a big bandwidth. You can move massive amounts of files. It's great for your banking. You can download your movies. You can do it on your phone. It's marvellous stuff, except that now people on 3G get closed down. They have to grab that bandwidth back. There are all those people who relied on it in the country if you had an accident.”
“But, of course, the more data you move the more your range constricts in and the more you have to supplement that by new towers to get things out. So we had 3G come in, and we had to build more towers. That was fine, but the market in Sydney and other areas relied absolutely on the growth of the programs that were coming out from stockbrokers, from banks and from online delivery of films. Netflix and YouTube required more data again, so they went to 4G, buying the spectrum up. The spectrum became worth a lot of money, so they went into buying spectrum. And to get into buying spectrum they have to retire previous spectrum. When they retired spectrum those on the peripheries, regional areas, lost their mobile phone service. There's always a promise: 'Don't worry.”
“We said to them, 'You can't go to 2G unless you're offering the same coverage as what you had with CDMA.' So we subsidised a whole lot of mobile phone towers to get built all around the countryside. They said, 'We just don't get a return from a tower,' so we had bidding form. If we were going to put a tower up in, say, the seat of Cook, we'd say: 'There's money there. The ones that come up and ask us for the least amount of money get that to build a tower in the seat of Cook.' And off it went. There were 55 towers built in the seat of New England. Then they went to 3G. We said, '3G's fine.' All of a sudden, they could start moving more data. The world became consumed by data. Banks wanted to move bigger files and they needed more bandwidth to do that, and so it went to 3G.”
“The Liberal Party tried to get rid of me. It might happen again. But we actually prevailed, and then we had a majority of one in the Senate, and that was my vote. Because they campaigned against me, I didn't feel obligated in any way, shape or form to play ball. So I held down my vote. There was a fund. We got $2 billion of that. Then, in the next term, the Liberal Party voted with the coalition—the Nationals supported them—to get rid of the fund. That was smart. Then there were the Universal Service Obligation, the Network Reliability Framework, the Customer Service Guarantee, the Network Reliability Framework—a whole range of conditions that were put in place that Telstra had to put in place to keep their licence. I can do this without notes because I'm very across this. It's part of my life. Then we went to 2G.”
“We're talking about the sale of the remainder of Telstra. We only had to sell two per cent, and we lost control of it. Peter Costello, at that stage, decided he'd balance the books by paying off the debt by selling Telstra. I argued against it at the time. Probably, with hindsight, it was the right thing to do because the value of Telstra went down yet the debt was cleared. That's how, when people talk about how the coalition was not in debt, they did it. They sold Telstra to do it. Nonetheless, I digress. What happened after that in that negotiation—I'd just arrived in parliament. I didn't have a clue what I was doing. It was 2005. I'd never been in parliament and neither had any of my staff. At that stage, I'd won with the Queensland Nationals, which no longer exist, and we actually competed against the Liberal Party.”
“This issue in regional Australia is so very, very important. At the start, we had a thing called CDMA. It didn't carry much data, but it had a huge range. It used to be remarkable. When I was out at Saint George—you'd be miles away and you could get CDMA. You could get on the phone. If you broke down or something happened or there was a crash or you needed to get spare parts, CDMA worked. And then they said: 'No. CDMA's no good anymore. We're going to a thing called 2G.' The range got smaller, and they said: 'Don't worry. We'll push it out a bit.' At that point in time, the coalition, to give them their dues—I was part of it—had the Telstra debate, and part of that legislation that went through was because the Labor Party sold 49 per cent of Telstra and they had the remainder. It wasn't about the sale of Telstra.”
“My question is to the Minister for Climate Change and Energy. Since the commencement of hostilities in the Middle East, what actions has he had to assure Australia of security of fuel supplies, especially diesel, and how much diesel in days do we currently have in store on Australian soil?”
“There is more diesel used for energy in Australia than electricity. This building runs on diesel if the lights go out. And, if we run out of diesel, the lights in Australia will go out. The trucks will stop; foods going to supermarkets will stop; transport will stop—everything will grind to a halt. People will get hungry, and I don't see any plan in this place to deal with this.”
“It's very rare that I agree with the Maritime Union of Australia, but I do today. With the issues in the Middle East and the threats of closure of the Strait of Hormuz, we have to be incredibly aware of our vulnerabilities. We are supposed to have 23 days of diesel supplies—it's actually supposed to be 24 or 25 days, but, in the last quarterly analysis, we only had 23 days. That takes into account what is at sea on ships of convenience, which, at the right point in time, could be ordered to go to any other part of the world. That becomes part of the stock. It also talks about normal usage. If there is a run on diesel, we won't be waiting 23 days. Those ships of convenience will go somewhere else, and we will run out of what we do have incredibly quickly. Might I remind everybody that hospitals run on diesel when the power goes out?”
“For this purpose I support the bill, but I say: it's really just a forerunner of the far greater work that we need to do.”
“Dismiss any idea that I have such an inclination—I don't. But we have to understand that, given where we are right now, in the western Pacific, and noting what is happening in real time around Australia and within Australia, the circumstances that we find ourselves in are entirely different to what they would have been 20 years ago or 30 years ago, and the technology and capacity that is here now is multiple times more complicated and more destructive than what we would have had 20, 30 or 40 years ago. This is way beyond Cold War clumsiness, the Petrov affair and Kim Philby—that's all interesting reading. This is sleeping code, whether it's in the banking sector or whether it's in critical infrastructure, which has a 24/7 process of observation.”
“At the appropriate times and the appropriate venues—and we've seen it out the front of this building—the Chinese government have the capacity to organise quite a substantial number of people to turn up and either praise or demonstrate. How does that happen? How do they do it? What chat group are they on? Who's organising it? These are right in front of us now, so we need to have ASIO, ASIS and the Australian Signals Directorate working within government on a regular basis at the highest levels. The National Security Committee must have these bodies at the table, and these bodies must be courageous enough not to tell you what you probably read in the Australian that morning but to get to the substance of the issues that need to be pursued. I don't doubt for one second the patriotism of the Prime Minister or anything like that.”
“Within that structure there's a very good chance there's a malevolent force that has the capacity to create discord. That is ultimately what happens to Australia—you get a mechanism of discord, and the driving of it mightn't be as obvious as you'd think. It mightn't be people who really have their heart set on what is happening in Gaza or Palestine or Israel. What their heart might actually be set on is creating disturbance—that's what they want. They want disturbance, they want discord, they want disruption and they want panic, because that makes us, as a nation, weaker. There's another thing that we should be very aware of.”
“There's been no seismic change in this continual process of believing that there is a higher purpose than an attachment to the Australian culture. In a metaphorical state, there is no clearer indication than what we observed in that demonstration the other night. There was not one Australian flag there. There were Palestinian flags. There were sort of quasi-fundamentalist flags, where they do the appropriate changes so they can't be held. But, you know, it is a sign. It is a metaphor for what they want to portray. It was organised. It had the capacity to co-ordinate people to arrive. Obviously, the questions now are: How is that happening? What is that organisational structure? And people say, 'Well, you know, they might be all well-meaning.' No.”
“If there was an overarching form of guardrails of Australian culture—and that is not saying that is determined by creed, by colour, by race; it's just that there has to be those guardrails there—then there would be no motivation for a person to go out and kill other Australians in broad daylight. My concern is that they're not the only two people in Australia who think like that. My concern is that there is a whole range of people now in Australia who think like that. We saw, even after these so-called hate laws—which were censorship laws because they haven't addressed the problem—a demonstration in Sydney which explicitly reaffirmed the tenor of views that were the seed stock for the Bondi massacre. And it happened on television; we were watching it.”
“Then we have, I believe, decided in our foolishness to create a form of Australia where we don't have cultural control because we've believed in this euphemistic idea of multiculturalism when we should be concentrating on Australian culture, creating guardrails. The tragic representation of the balkanisation and the discord from a clash of cultural views of the world was Bondi. Why do I say that? Because the murderers at Bondi believed that they were doing something that was appropriate. They didn't know the people. There was no heat in it. It was cold, clinical, calculated and driven by their cultural belief.”
“We have seen, no doubt, people who have been members of parliament and their next job is for Chinese company, for a Chinese state-owned enterprise. The question has to be raised: When did those discussions for that job after politics start? Was it whilst you were in politics? And if it was whilst you were in politics, what were those discussions? Where did you have them? What was the skill set that you were really offering that company that they'd want you to work for—I don't know—Landbridge? Obviously this says that ASIO has to be the absolute essence of patriotism, the absolute essence of guile, the absolute essence of cunning to match up to the threat that is ever-present right now.”
“At the same time, a so-called 'research vessel' was making its way through Bass Strait, no doubt getting all the forms of the oceanography that are required so they have complete understanding of that section of Australia. Why? Because Melbourne's there. So that's Sydney and Melbourne. Now, it's so terrifying that people just want to switch off and say, 'It's not happening,' but it is, and that's the issue. If they're willing to put the tens of millions of dollars just into those excursions before you even look at the platforms they used then they're also willing to put the money into working out how they can have eyes and ears inside this building, how they can have useful fools, how they can create the mechanism for financial gain in such a form as you feel beholden to them. That is also absolutely the point.”
“There is also just straight out observation, whether it's cartography or oceanography, to work out all the dynamics so that, if it's really required, they can bring devastating force upon our nation. Is that rhetoric? No, it's not. We have seen the flotilla that went to the Tasman Sea adjacent to Sydney and practised live fire exercises. The issue there is that we didn't know about it. That was one of the most sophisticated ships in the Chinese navy. What is the purpose of being there? Well, there are two. One is to give a very unsubtle message to Australia to be careful, and the other one is to practice just in case they need to do it. And of course they're practising why? They're practising because they're near Sydney. It's as simple as that.”
“We either believe that he's having a joke with us or it's rhetoric or that he's serious. I'm of the view that he's serious. In doing that, there will be a diligent process of organisation to iron out any possible problems that we might be part of for their purpose, which means there is a heightened reason for them to be right on the balls of their feet, trying to insert themselves in a way that gets people on side even if they're not even aware they're on side—but, you know, friendly fools—and also using things such as AI to its umpteenth degree to make sure that they have the appropriate code in the appropriate areas that can create mass disruption if required at the appropriate time.”
“This is happening right now, and it isn't so much a secret. It is playing out right in front of people's faces. We in this nation have a great reason to try and become as strong as possible as quickly as possible, and I've been saying that for a very long time. Ultimately, strength is the only thing that is going to keep you safe, and in Australia we've almost been on a working plan to make ourselves weak. We've done it with everything from energy policy to our loss of manufacturing to a fascination on policy that we can't possibly change such as climate policy, and all the time we have been becoming comparatively weaker and less able to deal with the substantial change in circumstance that is around us. We've also have to realise that President Xi Jinping has said that they will take Taiwan by 2027. We are in 2026.”
“I go to one that is of great concern recently—not so much because of its significance but because of the discussion and the rhetoric that surrounds it. It is the Port of Darwin. The Prime Minister of Australia, whilst in Dili at a press conference, made it clear that Australia was going to reacquire or take back the Port of Darwin. It is owned by Landbridge. That's a Chinese state owned enterprise. It was an incredibly foolish thing that we lost control of it. Ambassador Xiao Qian almost immediately came out in Canberra and said, 'No, you won't be taking that back.' It was as direct as that. To this point, I haven't seen any discussion in the chamber or a statement from the Minister for Foreign Affairs as to how they're going to reconcile those two completely different positions. This is in live time.”
“I made it a distinct purpose to tighten restrictions, especially those pertinent to state-owned enterprises. I remember reading in the Chinese English newspapers that I was noted as 'Ban-a-Buy' Joyce because of my role to try and tighten up foreign investment by state owned enterprises in our nation. I was derided as a bigot, a racist, a redneck and a xenophobe. Now I'm just correct because the state owned enterprises were doing precisely that. Chinese state owned enterprises were doing precisely that to get a foothold in Australia. People have to understand that the Chinese government sees things in their national interest as not being defined by their borders. If they have a financial interest, that's a national interest.”
“This obviously is important because we're dealing with the lapse of legislation if it doesn't pass. We're also strengthening powers of investigation for malfeasance that warrants investigation. It's pertinent at the moment because we live in a dynamic environment, which is changing to our detriment. We have in the world at the moment the rise of totalitarianism and there is most definitely an overt form of intrusion into Australia's operation of its government. We have, even in this building, had issues pertinent to people with interests working, whether they realise it or not, on behalf of other governments, and I also have had reason to question the motivations of policy directions at certain times. I'll go back to the time of changes to the Foreign Investment Review Board that surrounded the sale of Cubbie Station.”
“That would be a generally decent thing to do, but instead we're going through this bureaucratic fiasco. We're putting people in hospital with stress. I followed this up last year, I'm following it up again now, but there has to be some resolution to this. I am very disappointed, and I put the minister on notice that at the first opportunity I get in question time—I managed to get one question in the last two years; it's a reflection of how things were going for me—I will ask them what we are doing about this. For those who are sitting back in their rooms, Minister Mulino, at the next opportunity I'm going to ask you about where we are with this process.”
“I've asked Minister Mulino, who I know has been talking to Melinda Kee—that's good—if we can give these people a break. Rather than have them go through this—they have to go to AFCA to get to CSLR and then they've got to go back to the trustees and countersue them and find out the liabilities that reside there. These people did what they were asked to do. They put their money in a super fund. They didn't go wild on the London Stock Exchange; they put their money into super and went back to their jobs. These people are going to have to continue working—I don't know, maybe waiting tables—because they have no money. What should be happening, if we really believe in supporting superannuation and other measures, is ASIC should pay these people out and then they do the footwork and the legal work to recover the money.”
“I listened to the remarks of the honourable member who just concluded about keeping things safe, about dignity and about making sure that people can get their super and that no-one intrudes on it. That all sounds like marvellous stuff, except for people who were with the First Guardian and Shield funds, where $1.2 billion went missing. There's still well in excess of about half a billion dollars that they're looking for. They were just the people that the member was talking about. These were the schoolteachers. I know one very well—my former wife. The money has gone. It's just disappeared—hundreds of thousands of dollars, reflecting their life as a teacher. It's not just one but multiple people—about 12,000 people. We're expecting these people to become KCs, King's Counsellors, in pursuit of their money.”
“And if we are to be resolute in changing Australia back to something that is an adornment and a respect of the Gallipoli legacy and heritage, then we cannot do it by demonstrations in the middle of Sydney, completely at odds with court orders and the directions of the police, without an Australian flag in sight, that laud a form of aggression and antagonism that is nothing but the demise of this great nation of Australia.”
“If you come to Australia, you have a responsibility to not be in the crime pages or on social security, because then you are not an asset to the nation; you are a burden to the nation. When you come to Australia, you have to act in such a way as to give good representation of other people from your part of the world, who you may also wish to come to this nation. It is not an issue of colour, creed or geography. It is a representation of actions and how you act in this nation. We have to say the things that in the past would've been called 'politically incorrect'. We have to become strong. We have to understand that the circumstances of how Australia is have unfortunately and tragically changed.”
“I do not believe in multiculturalism. I believe in an Australian culture. I believe in an Australian culture that is formed by legacy, heritage issues, such as Gallipoli. I believe in some of the heritage issues that have been given to us by the Aboriginal people. I believe in an Australian culture. I don't believe you can have this amorphous mass of multiple cultural perspectives on how we should be Australian, because inevitably it leads to Balkanisation, it leads to friction and it leads to death. I believe that we have to clearly understand that, when you come to Australia, there is most definitely a contract. When you come to Australia, you are a representation of whence you came.”
“I don't dispute for one second the trials of her life, but that does not give her licence to go out and carpet the rest of Australia from the front of the town hall. She's brought the award into disrepute. She should hand it back if that is her belief about Australia. If not, the National Australia Day Council should explain why she should keep it. If you were to go out and promote the intifada in the form of—I don't know what you would call it—an abrasive, piercing caterwaul, the approach of inspiring that violence would absolutely be to the detriment of Australians of the Jewish faith. It would bring about friction, which would inevitably lead to further deaths. A person who does that needs to be called to account, no matter what former laurels they may have attained or what former life experiences they may have had.”
“I wished to speak on today's matter of public importance, but I unfortunately missed out. I would take issue with the member for Wentworth's statement, which was: I think we need to build a modern version of the Australian story, because we have this Gallipoli myth about who we were back in 1914. I'll start by saying that the 'Gallipoli myth' is not a myth; it is one of the fundamental parts of what is Australia. It is part of our iconography. It is something that we hold so firmly because it identifies Australians at their very best. What we should be doing is attaching where Australia is now to that Gallipoli ethos more than what we saw with the disgusting behaviour of Grace Tame, who was apparently Australian of the Year.”
“Human beings are human beings and want to be treated with respect, want to feel secure, need guidance, need a male role model, need a female role model, need to be respected, want to have dignity in their lives, with a job that's worthwhile, and don't want to be categorised as 'oh, well, you believe that because I'm Aboriginal then this is the sort of life I have to live because you think that that this is the place I have to live'. I might want to live in the centre of Sydney. I might want to be an accountant. Double-up on your successes and be a lot more circumspect about coming up with another yet another Canberra program which will have all the bonhomie as it goes out the door but, if you reflect on it in 10 years time and say, 'What did that achieve?' will have some minimal success but will be a very short story.”
“That's it—followed by another SUV that'll be here tomorrow. I want us to close the gap. I think it's incredibly important. I think we have a huge moral responsibility to do it. I just call on this parliament to find the things that work. Put aside your political correctness. Stop believing that there's something magical, that one human being is so fundamentally different to every other human being that they work through a whole different set of genetics. They're not. They're people.”
“The only thing we're missing is one for girls, where they have a boarding school and do the same thing, bringing in, quite frankly, poor white kids from farms who can't afford to go away to school—the family budget doesn't go that far—and also Aboriginal kids. I bet you that'll work as well. If you bring those sorts of ideas forward, you're going to get so much support, even in regional areas. We'll say, 'Yes, that's great.' But what we'll see here is that you'll announce this and it just won't turn the dial. It will just be 'here comes another SUV with another clipboard and another person who'll turn up and go through all the welcome to country stuff and say all the right things'. They'll wander around, people will have a chat to them, then they'll jump back in their SUV and off they'll go.”
“I used to terrorise my daughters, saying that, if they played up, I'd send them to Mount St Bernard College up on the Atherton Tablelands, which a lot of kids from the Gulf came into. That always pulled them back into gear. That's sort of doing a similar thing up there, but we need a girls one—and don't make Farrer co-ed. That's where they're going to try and head off to. It works very well as a boys boarding school. Leave it as a boys boarding school because that works. It gives them a collegiality with guys off the land, with Aboriginal kids from Walgett and Moree and Saint George coming in there. It's good. It has proven success.”