I do love that rare, near-extinct breed … the Straight-Talkin’ politician:
2GB Chris Smith Afternoon Show Transcript
7 May 2013
Topics: Beef industry crisis, Budget deficit.
Chris Smith: Barnaby, good afternoon.
Barnaby Joyce: Good afternoon Chris. How are you today mate?
Chris Smith: I’m very well. I’ve heard from your team to say that you are in Richmond at a beef industry meeting, but this is not the Richmond near Windsor in Sydney right? You’re in the middle of Queensland.
Barnaby Joyce: This is Richmond in the Gulf. We’re up here because we have a Beef Crisis Meeting. What that means Chris is that last week we had cattle selling for merely $20 a head at Longreach. That’s disastrous. When you think that you’d need 25 head of cattle to pay for the fortnightly groceries. You can’t do that, you’re not going to survive.
What is it caused by? Well, three things. One thing is the drought. There’s not much you can do about that except pray for rain. There are two you can do something about. One is the live cattle trade. When you shut it down; it completely decimated our markets so that people don’t have a market to sell into. Now all those cattle are going south and they’re forcing down the price in other areas.
The Indonesians are happily sitting back saying: “Well you made our life a misery and now we’re making your life a misery”. That’s why we need to be so careful that we never overreact. Sometimes we see these terrible things on television. They’re terrible but we have to fix the problem not stuff the industry.
We have a parliamentary secretary who doesn’t believe in the live cattle trade. This just shows you how incompetent the Labor Government is.
Chris Smith: It’s so out of whack. Maybe it’s because of all those farming-oriented cabinet members Barnaby?
Barnaby Joyce: They just don’t seem to get it. Why isn’t the Trade Minister Mr Emerson, instead of doing his funny little dances and his OP Ed pieces about et al and sundry, why isn’t he, the actual Trade Minister, over there trying to fix up our trade? Why isn’t he over in Indonesia trying to fix it up?
The other thing is the dollar’s high. The dollar, if you actually want to, you can actually affect it. It’s not written on tablets of stone and presented from Mount Sinai. You can influence the price of the dollar down if there is real motivation and desire to do so. One of the reasons they don’t do it is because they want to be economically pure. The way we’re going at the moment we’re going to be pure in debt, economically dead, so let’s make sure we keep our industry going.
Chris Smith: Let’s give people an idea. You’re saying $20 a head, right? Two years ago, one head of cattle sold for $500. That’s how far the industry has plummeted.
Barnaby Joyce: Yes, obviously they didn’t all sell for $20 a head but that was the bottom of sale. It gives you a sense that what happens then, so your listeners would understand, people won’t sell them at the saleyards; they’ll just shoot them in the paddock because the cost of transport is more than what you’re going to get. More to the point, these people are under the pump. The bank manager’s screaming at them, the values of their place is going down. If you think about it in another way, imagine if you got your pay packet and it was only a fifth of the money or an eighth of the money you usually got in it. You’d be a little bit shocked wouldn’t you?
Chris Smith: Now, the deficit, it seems to get worse by the day. We’ve had Penny Wong this morning on the ABC today confirming the blow out will hit $17 billion.
Penny Wong: What I can confirm is that we are facing a very significant revenue shortfall from what was anticipated. Certainly in the current financial year if you look at what was expected at Budget until now, we’re going to be receiving as a government, about $17 billion less and we do anticipate that we will see revenues hit across the Forward Estimates. So, in that context, given the challenges the Budget faces and the nation faces, the Government has to take responsible decisions, so we have indicated today that we won’t be proceeding with the boost, the additional boost to the Family Tax Benefits that was planned for later this year. That’s a regrettable decision, but one that’s responsible in the economic circumstance.
Chris Smith: Okay, so the Family Tax Benefit is out of the picture because there will be no added bonus associated with that. Another broken promise out the window – but they have to do that. While Penny Wong tells it how it is Barnaby, we have the Prime Minister yesterday with school children, she seems to have school children with her almost every week now, she didn’t think the deficit was such a problem.
Julia Gillard: Now, we’ve got to work our way back to a surplus and obviously pay off the debt, but the scale of the debt is around 10 per cent of GDP. What does that mean? It’s the same as someone who earns $100,000 a year, having a mortgage of $10,000. I think most of you would know, you’re probably living in homes mum and dad are buying, that they have mortgages well in excess of $10,000 and they would happily change places with someone whose mortgage was just 10 per cent of their income. That’s not something that you have to worry about.
Chris Smith: So Barnaby, relax, it’s only a $10,000 mortgage.
Barnaby Joyce: She’s an imbecile. This is incredible, the debt as we speak right now is $271.1 billion gross. If you don’t believe me, check it out for yourself, AOFM, Australian Office of Financial Management website. On top of that you’re going to have your state debt. Of course if things fall over you’ll be picking up the state debt as well. Between the State and Federal Government debt we would be well in excess of half a trillion dollars. Our GDP of this nation is 1.3 to 1.4 trillion dollars. So if my mathematics are correct, even if you just take the Federal Government debt, it’s getting close to 15 to 20 per cent of our GDP.
Dear reader, this really, REALLY angers me.
The “GDP” fallacy.
GDP is not … NOT … government income!!!!!!!!!!!
The government’s income (ie, from taxing us) for this financial year, was projected in the October MYEFO to be $373 billion. Finance Minister Penny Wong has now declared that the actual budget outcome will likely be $17 billion less than predicted. So that’s about $356 billion in annual income for the Federal government this year.
The Federal debt is (so far) $271 billion. Meaning that the Federal Government debt-to-income ratio is 76%.
So Ms Gillard … and Barnaby … the correct, honest analogy would be as follows:
“It’s the same as someone who receives $35,600 a year on public welfare, having a personal line-of-credit of $27,100.”
Please, please … get this right! GDP is not … NOT … government income!!
Chris Smith: She’s fiddling with the numbers mate.
Barnaby Joyce: You see what they do, it’s so annoying, they say, “Oh the net debt, the net debt…” So where are we going to get this magic money Ms Gillard to pay off your gross debt? Where they’re going to get it is the cash reserves in the Future Fund. The Future Fund’s there to pay the public servants’ superannuation because they never put the money aside for. So all you’re doing to taking money from one credit card to pay off the other credit card and both credit cards are overdrawn.
Chris Smith: So there was no real surprise about the Newspoll results today. Labor’s primary vote has fallen to 31. That’s normally shock horror stuff. I just get the feeling that we’ve become desensitised to these numbers now.
Barnaby Joyce: The Australian people have given up on them. The Greens and the independents go with this crowd. They’re also ducking for cover now, pretending they weren’t there. Mr Windsor gave us this government. Mr Oakeshott gave us this government. The reason they’ve done this to our country is because they let them. To this day they are supporting them. They’re all in there together. They all wanted their time in the sun where they ran the show. Well they ran the show and what an absolute and categorical disaster it is, from Richmond in the north where they’re dealing with a cattle industry in crisis to down in the south where we’re running out of money. Left, right and centre and all over the joint, we’ve gone out the back door.
Chris Smith: I want to put this to listeners this afternoon, Julia Gillard also last night spoke about her desire to see more female Prime Ministers and hoped there would be less focus on makeup, hairstyles and choice of fashion. Now as I remember, a lot of the cartoonists and commentators had a great deal of fun with his glasses and his eyebrows. What about Bob Carr’s glasses, etcetera, etcetera? I don’t think that we’ve been overly critical of Julia Gillard’s state of dress or what she wore or how she looked any more than we mentioned the same with other Prime Ministers. It’s just how good you do the job.
Barnaby Joyce: We all get caricatures. They’ve had me tangled up in barbed wire fences and hayseeds hanging out of my mouth. It comes with the territory. If you don’t like the heat get out of the kitchen. They probably will have more female Prime Ministers and I hope they do, but by gosh I hope they’re vastly more competent than the current one we’ve got.
Barnaby Is Right 
Many people might agree listening to Julia Gillard that she is a problem for re-election as she sounds like she is talking (down) to 5 year olds. It is so annoying.
To put matters into perspective the Labor government has gone down to the track and gambled it all on THE MINING BOOM NEVER ENDING. It must come as quite a surprise to federal Labor that it has. So what now? No plan B? welcome to disfunctional one term governments in this country.
To put matters into perspective Tony Abbot would not do much better. His strategy is to transfer wealth to the riches amongst us (miners, big business and wealthy Australians). To do this he will have to slash and burn and tax average Australians to the hilt. If average Australians cannot see the writing on the wall then they will before the end of his first term should he win government.
The question is if it is better under a business owned government (Liberal) whose stated position is to transfer wealth to those who do not need it or is it better to stay with a socialist government which refuses to reign in the rorts in social security and refuses to protect our borders lest they upset any voters? The electorate will make up its mind shortly pursued by the most biased media I have ever witnessed, a business media which is engaging in a one sided attack for no other purpose other than that IT IS NOT AN OBJECTIVE MEDIA AND DOES NOT REPORT FAIRLY. No wonder Labor wanted to reform the media. It needs to be taken out of the control of big business interests and be controlled by (average) Australian shareholders who share a range of values.
Who’d want to be a politician anyway? Personally I could not sell my soul, a pre-requisite for being in public life.
Agreed Mick.
How could they NOT SEE that the “Mining Boom” would end?? China’s biggest customers, the EU and USA are in economic tatters. If they’re not buying, China’s not making and selling. If China’s not making & selling stuff, they don’t need our dirt.
Ergo: end of the mining boom. A sixth grader could see this coming. (but not our Treasury geniuses).
With no revenues coming from the “mining boom”, a hollowed out economy, a $270 billion federal debt(plus another $17billion this year), can anyone calculate how many centuries it will take to put us back in the position we were in a mere 5 years ago???(assuming a surplus is even possible anymore).
But hey, bankster profits are up, shares are up, politicians salaries are up. Electricity prices are up. So are fees and charges, levies and taxes. Federal spending is up. What could go wrong?
Don’t worry though. The Libs are coming to save us. Tony’s going to fix things with the help of Malcolm(Goldman Sachs) Turnbull. Prime Minister Turnbull. Has a sort of “ring” to it, no?
Does anyone else smell a rat(with gold teeth)???
Yup, well said TF.
This is seipgripe from John Seip of Gympie Queensland with Warren Truss ,as a rewliable conservative member who knows the process in producing a dollar ,unlike all the union heavies whose sole interest seems to be to create jobs under industrial conditions which make us uncompetitive ,but none seem to have learnt that first we need employers who have started a humble business on a stretched family budget & as a result of growth assistance is needed —but reality dictates that no employers =No jobs
Wake up you union heavies!!! –your predecessors shut down the hand cutting of sugar cane due to union interference & crops left in the field at the end ,stoppages on ship loading or mill function ,
Now the harvester builders have ALL gone 5 in BUndaberg alone –ALL gone — by acquisition or competitiveness And as the first mechanical harvesting contractor on a solid legal footing via ASPA you would have ruined me if not for being a’ Barnaby (Joh) tough’ type ,
You cannot tolerate to see anyone make profit from resourcefulness & self sacrifice by exercising rights to hire & fire according to conditions ,
Nor would you have a clue about the gut wrenching experience of finding the wages under tough conditions ,
Stand aside for Abbott ,or Turnbull or evenPalmer or Katter to see this place hum again .
Seipgripe
http://www.alor.org/blog/entry/the-achilles-heel-of-the-conservative-movement-by-eric-d-butler
“…..Mr Butler claims that no conservative movement can halt the growth of the Welfare State, Socialism or Communism, until it promotes a change in the basis of credit creation and its control. He warns that centralised credit control is a powerful instrument being used to create a programme of economic and political centralism, leading ultimately to the World State, or to the collapse of civilisation…….”
PP paying the freight to market for $20 a head cattle. As one who has spent a life in or associated with the commercial fishing industry there is one glaring example which has always bugged me. I am now 84 and a retired age pensioner. For ever the primary producer has paid the fright for his product to city market. For ever, when he requires some product of the city he is still the one who pays the freight. Extremely un-fair. Why is it so?
I have not noticed the price of meat dropping much for the general consumer.
The dollar has just fallen 5% with more to come. The cost of new capital equipment just went up 5%. Everything we wear and use just went up 5%. The pensioners get nothing. Unionists will strike for compensation. In real terms everyone loses except the banks and unions. So that will help our country get back on is feet? Would you form a new enterprise when the employees are targetted by unions and you are fearful to employ knowing it is a cost you cannot easily shed if need be. The resulting calamity of all this will be blamed on carbon, entrepreneurs, anyone other than the neo nazi groups led by the likes of big G and big S here, and big O in the US. These people, who want a NWO controlled by bureaucrats in Brussels under the auspices of the UN have no concern for Australia’s wellbeing. They want only to be a part of the elite who run the NWO at the Australian worker’s and taxpayer’s expense.
“These people… have no concern for Australia’s wellbeing. They want only to be a part of the elite…”
Correct.