Barnaby On Fire, Blight Of Greens Politics

Senator Joyce was on fire today, dear reader, in his speech to the government’s Quarantine Amendment (Disallowing Permits) Bill 2011 (emphasis added):

Senator JOYCE (Queensland—Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) (11:10): It is a pleasure to rise here in support of the sentiment of Senator Xenophon’s bill—who by reason of health is not able to be here today—though acknowledging that we will not be supporting it. But it is clear to state that we have heard a tirade—well, not a tirade, sort of a wet sponge from the Labor Party, about how the National Party has not been doing anything, but they spend their whole time complaining about the National Party and what it has done, which is fair enough.

What I can look at is the Labor Party’s record. You do not have to go too far from this town to see the effects of the Labor Party’s record on anything to do with biosecurity or anything to do with real and effective dealing with environmental issues—such things as African lovegrass, which is not that far from here, and serrated tussock. You have just given up on all these things. You do not care about them anymore. You apparently can cool the planet, but you cannot deal with African lovegrass. You can rejig the whole of the Australian economy on a colourless odourless gas, but you cannot deal with Asian honeybees. Apparently you are going to lead the world on changing an economy based on carbon dioxide, but you cannot deal with myrtle rust in your own country. It just goes to show how absurd the Labor Party have become.

I remember as a kid going in to see my dad when he was involved in the BTEC scheme—he was a vet—and spending days going out with him bleeding cattle. At a later stage he was in charge of that brucellosis and tuberculosis eradication scheme in northern New South Wales, out of Tamworth office. That was a great success. Australia got rid of brucellosis and tuberculosis. New Zealand still has it. It goes to show what a country can do when it is motivated.

But we are going to get nowhere with the Labor Party and the Greens. They are not really worried about the environment in the proper sense. What they are really worried about is the philosophy and the theatrics. They are really worried about social re-engineering; that is what they really want to do. I was listening Senator Milne’s discussion here today about quarantine and we started hearing about floods and fires and famines and all the incredible things that are apparently going to happen. But even their grand architect, Professor Flannery, says there can be seen to be ‘no discernible correlation‘ between changes in the extent of fires, floods and famines and global warming. It is one of these total absurdities that is trotted out here. What I did not hear Senator Milne or the Labor Party talk about is how they are dealing with biosecurity as it is at the moment. And of course we have no confidence in them.

You can bet your life that under this government, the Green-Labor-Independent government, fire blight will come in. It is just a matter of when. It is going to come. We have already heard today about the evidence that a quarter of the shipments have had issues pertaining to them. They are failing before they have even started. If someone said that in a quarter of your cars the brakes are going to fail then you would probably recall the cars. But they are going forward with the process under the current arrangements because they do not really care about the environment. They do not really care whether we wipe out the pear industry in Australia. They do not really care whether fire blight comes into this nation.

It is absurd. With all the trash of leaves and litter that is going to be coming in from farms, which will have fire blight, sure enough we are going to get fire blight.

What will the Labor Party do then? They will deal with it the same way they are dealing with African lovegrass, with Chilean needle grass, with St John’s wort, with the Asian honey bee and with myrtle rust. They will not deal with it because they do not really care. What they do care about are the theatrics. They care about people dressing up as koalas and parading out the front of this building. That is the Greens and the environmental movement—dress up as a koala and wave a placard. But when it comes down to dealing with the issue, when you really need the competency to grasp the issue and deal with it, they do not have it and they do not care about it. True environmentalism is actually looking after the environment in a hands-on and real way. Whatever happened to the production of an effective rust to deal with blackberries? That has gone nowhere.

I had the privilege the other day to visit the farm where Farrer developed a variety of wheat that took Australia into the 20th century. He developed it from a small plot down on the river. I saw at that point in time the sorts of competencies our nation had, the sorts of desires and the thrill that the government had to get behind people who were giants in this nation. But this government is not investing in them. This government is taking the resources out. This government is incompetent even when it comes to the health of our own people. What about the Indigenous people of Northern Australia? What happened to the tuberculosis clinics in the Torres Strait Islands? You care about the environment but you do not care about that part of the environment. That is another little thing you have moved out of the way. Let us not worry about tuberculosis coming. Let us not worry about the infection of the Australian people. If we get drug resistance in tuberculosis, we have no hope of treating it.

All you care about is the hugging and kissathons at the end of the vote. You do care about completely redesigning our nation’s economy, even though we see on television Europe falling over. The global financial markets are falling over and there is complete and utter culpability of what we did the other day. You just do not care and you step back from it. As I said the other day, it is part of the Vandals who have overtaken Rome. The philosophy is over; the Labor Party has finally been subdued. What we have in the Prime Minister is basically a manifestation of Romulus Augustus. It is all over and it is merely a figurehead. The philosophy is now occupied by somebody else. It is a sad day. The party that was once the party of Curtin and Chifley is now, what? What have you become? You are a vacuous type of shell.

Senator Milne: Madam Acting Deputy President, I raise a point of order on relevance. Until Senator Joyce arrived we were having a sensible debate in the chamber about the merits of a bill on biosecurity. I would ask that Senator Joyce direct his remarks to the bill on biosecurity.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT (Senator Boyce): Order! Thank you, Senator Milne, there is no point of order. Senator Joyce.

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

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

I agree with him—

with long periods of intense droughts—

I agree with him—

punctuated by heavy rainfall and flooding,—

I agree with him on that too—

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

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

Now we have Senator Larissa Waters saying that we are going to remove fossil fuels in the next decade. It is like a couple of days ago was year zero. We will all be heading out to the countryside to a new cultural revolution. We are going to sit down there and live on beetles and nuts and we will be righteous. We will be hungry, cold and miserable but we will be righteous. But that is what you do, and it makes abundant sense. Of course we can get rid of all fossil fuels in the next 10 years.

We do not need a car park anymore; we need a stable to put the horses in when we ride up here! This is the absolutely absurd position. The absurd position is evident in this. They do not care about the real environment debate—the one that takes acumen, planning and, as it says in the report, resources to deal with the issues. They do not care about that. They do not care about having a proper analysis of the statistical probability that fire blight will come in. They do not care about that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An honourable senator interjecting—

Senator JOYCE: The blacksmiths won’t. This is all part of the progression.

Senator Milne: I rise on a point of order. We are discussing a bill on a quarantine provision relating to fire blight and world trade. I ask that you ask the senator to be relevant to what is before the chamber.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT (Senator Boyce) (11:26): Senator Joyce, I have been assuming that your comments were going to bring you back to the topic in hand. Could you please ensure that they do.

Senator JOYCE: Thank you very much, I will. Fire blight will come into the country under this government, this regime. What do we call the regime? Big Brother No. 1! Under this regime fire blight will come in. Without being jocular, if fire blight comes in we will lose the apple industry. We will totally lose the pear industry; it will definitely be wiped out.

We got to this position because the Prime Minister of Australia went over to New Zealand and it just seemed like a cool thing to say. She was moved by the moment. She was moved by the podium. She thought, ‘I’ve got to say something.’ She said, ‘Your apples can come in,’ and then she walked away, to the smell of burning flesh. This is part of the crazy government we have.

I don’t know; maybe if they have a change of leader they will change their position. I was watching the next contender for leadership—the former leader—sing the other day over in Perth. He was doing a marvellous job! He was being moved by the mosh pit! Apparently, he said that he sings like a cow. He was very tired. He asked the people whether they wanted him to sing. And I thought, ‘There’s my next Prime Minister. I’m feeling so comfortable about where we are! Things are looking A-okay!’

If we do not have a competent government occupying the treasury benches soon, on so many fronts—fire blight will just be one classic example—this nation is just going to start falling down around our ears. They have shown no competency. Whenever it comes to a test on biosecurity—we are not in the government; they are—they have shown no competency whatsoever in any way, shape or form on any of the major environmental issues and in the real environmental battles. There is not one thing that they can direct our attention to where they have shown a real interest in protecting the environment of Australia.

They are very interested in the social re-engineering of Australia. They have been usurped by the Greens and have now gone down the path of almost profane economics that will put the whole of Australia at threat. But they are doing nothing at all to deal with the real environmental problems.

We have had so many issues and so many battles. I can remember postweaning multisystemic wasting syndrome. Now it is the fire blight issue. We have had, in the past, governments that were actually competent. The brucellosis and tuberculosis eradication campaign was the classic example of what happens when you have real, fair dinkum people who get out and do a job and bring about a result. We do not have that with this government. What we will end up with is the destruction of a large section of the agriculture of the southern basin, because this government, backed by the Greens and the Independents, will be responsible for fire blight coming into this nation.

Tags: african lovegrass, asian honeybees, barnaby joyce, biosecurity, brucellosis, chilean needle grass, fire blight, myrtle rust, quarantine amendments bill 2011, serrated tussock, st john's wort, tuberculosis