Tag Archives: canberra times

Barnaby Mocks “Divine Word Of The Free Market Gospel”

6 Jun

Barnaby Joyce writes for the Canberra Times:

Jaunt through colourful past brings future into focus

Politics at the federal level has lost much of its lustre. The Labor Party are screaming at us through the nightly news that they are for the high jump. You can almost tell that they are past caring.

They do care about preselections in their dwindling number of safe seats, though. So there is a high degree of interest in whether Senator David Feeney the “faceless man” can become “Batman” (i.e. member of) after the retirement of Martin Ferguson. I suppose he will then be the “faceless batman”.

When the present situation in Australian politics gets you down, there is respite in our past.If you are a politics junkie then Tenterfield, in the northern New England, is a must. Tenterfield is the place where our continent was united, where our states joined to become one “indissoluble Federal Commonwealth”, in the words of the preamble to our Constitution.

We are the only island continent not burdened with the divisions and demarcations of national borders.

Tenterfield gets its name from the home in Scotland of the Donaldsons, Stuart Donaldson being a pioneer in the area and also the first premier of NSW.

Tenterfield was prepared as a battle site to defend Australia from invasion by Japan in World War II and tank traps can still be seen in the country nearby. Not to be parochial it was also the home of Robert Mackenzie, the third premier of Queensland. It was the last major railway station going north before the ultimate tariff, narrow-gauge railway lines, brought things to a grinding halt in Queensland. It was the home of Major James Thomas, who defended Breaker Morant, a seminal action in our history, Australia taking one of its first steps away from English oversight.

Dr Earl Page and John Hynes started the NSW Country Party in Tenterfield in around 1918, today Australia’s second-longest established party, after the Australian Labor Party.

Most noted of course is the 1889 federation debates held at the School of Arts on Tenterfield’s main street, and the paternal role that Sir Henry Parkes played in those debates. Edward Whereat withdrew from election for the NSW seat of Tenterfield to allow Sir Henry Parkes to make one of his many re-entries to Parliament. It is said that Parkes showed his gratitude by visiting Tenterfield perhaps twice during his tenure as the local member.

If politics drives someone in your party around the twist and they are searching for something lighter, well Peter Allen came from Tenterfield also.

Hanging in the School of Arts is the New England flag from the failed 1967 referendum to create a new state apart from NSW. The local member, until only very recently, was Richard Torbay. Even though he has resigned and been referred to ICAC, he was still polling at more than 50 per cent weeks out from a by-election he was not standing for.

To the west of Tenterfield is the derelict tobacco drying sheds, the casualty of a policy that says it is all right to kill yourself with smoking but you must do it with tobacco grown overseas. In town is one of Australia’s most successful hearse manufacturers, who are being killed by overseas tariffs.

The remainder of the world that excludes Australia lives in a pragmatic place away from the divine word of the free market gospel and premises their policies on bilateral arrangements of mutually negotiated benefit.

Drake to the east of Tenterfield used to have a timber industry which the Greens closed down. It once had a mining industry which the Greens don’t support, and it has a cattle industry which the Greens are trying to shut. Not surprisingly, the unemployment rate is through the roof. This is yet another iteration of current Australian politics.

The election that will be held in 100 days’ time will fundamentally be an election about the future, not the past, nor the present. Does Australia want a future where sensible government is returned to Canberra? Or will we continue to wallow in the morass of excessive promises, high debt and internal fascinations that have dominated federal politics for the last five years?

I think the Australian people have basically made their mind up on this question. The interest will turn to localised battles, where the margins for defeat are high, such as in New England.

In those seats, the people will ask themselves do they feel that the Labor Party, Ms Gillard and Mr Swan deserve endorsement of their current form of government? Or should they change to the alternative side, and most likely have a representative who is part of the solution to fixing their problems?

Love the sarcasm.

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Into The Unknown And With So Much At Stake

1 Jun

Barnaby Joyce writes for the Canberra Times:

It is 5.45am on Monday morning as I leave St George for what will be my final budget estimates as a senator for Queensland.

Below me is the Western Downs of Queensland and to the east is the sun rising over the Bunya Mountains between Kingaroy and Dalby.

I have an unsurprising sense of apprehension because if I fail at the next election, this won’t just be my last budget estimates as a senator for Queensland, it will be my last full stop. This puts my personal position in somewhat of a correlation to my nation. In the next few months the nation will make a decision that will influence our future financial health in an emphatic way.

Budget estimates, if properly pursued, should flesh out the capacity of ministers and departments to manage the finances of the nation in straitened times. The combined picture, across departments, should cast some light as to whether there is any hope of extracting the country from the financial deficit death spiral that could drive the government’s social contract with the Australian people into the ground. Because of the complexion of the political participants, budget estimates becomes more of an Alice in Wonderland wander in the political park, hoping to stumble across a wondrous mushroom that will illuminate the path to the political knockout punch.

If you are supported in anyway by a government payment then the position of the budget should be of crucial importance. If you receive medicine subsidised by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, if you drive on a federally funded road, if you go to a doctor that gets paid by Medicare, if you rely on States who rely on federal funding to pay your school teachers, if you drop off kids at child care, if you want a defence force to stop your nation falling into foreign hands and if you work for the public service then you should be a fiscal conservative, if for no other reason than self-preservation.

What will Australia look like if the cheques bounce? How on earth do we repay the debt if it arrives at the market value on the budget statements of $370 billion, remembering there is no legislation to increase the limit above the current $300 billion limit?

It is 9.35pm on Tuesday night and I have just been to a function for Tom Sefton, Liberal candidate for Canberra. Two tours of Afghanistan, former conference president of St Vincent de Paul, married with one kid but up against a 9 per cent margin. He is in for a real test of his mettle. In a Liberal-Labor stoush where the public service is under the pump, even though it is Labor debt that has to be repaid, Tom will need skills in this battle. He has to work hard if he is to have a chance of a close fight.

Last year the Gillard government reduced the public service by more than 3000 people. The pressure that is on the public service right now is because of the reckless and wasteful spending of the government right now. When the last Coalition government left office, there was not that pressure on the public service because the budget was managed responsibly and, whether you agreed or disagreed with them, you got a sense of stability from those controlling the reins of power.

The best thing for Canberra would be to restore that sense of stability and competence to the federal government.

Down the road from where the function is happening at Marcus Clarke Street, Civic, is the new ASIO headquarters where apparently the plans have been lifted and are now in the hot hands of someone in Beijing.

Everything is closing in. We owe so much money to the same country, and that same country is acquiring interests in our power supplies, rural land and more. I wonder if the Foreign Investment Review Board is taking any notes and taking into account what may be contrary to the national interest.

The interesting thing for me is soon, for whatever the outcome may be, I will be a free agent. Yes, I will have to and so I shall, resign. Tom Sefton shall stand in what would otherwise be an impossible task in the seat of Canberra but this current fiasco parlaying as a government makes all seats possibilities. Political correctness will state that “there is nothing to look at here” as far as Chinese infiltration into Australia’s national interest is concerned. What else could they say?

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Greens “Land Of Little Pink Clouds Of Happiness”

6 May

How remiss of me. Here’s Barnaby’s column last week for the Canberra Times (my bold added):

Political fiasco drawing to an end, but the pain will linger on

It feels like the political show is rolling the credits and the crowd is leaving the cinema on this Green-Labor-independent matinee.

One evening this week, Tony Windsor flagged one evening his inclination for a same-sex marriage referendum; then, the next morning, he said he was not going to raise it with the Prime Minister, nor was he going to vote for it.

This was followed by some incredulous babble about Facebook, social media and all in all translated to utter confusion.

Julia Gillard told us that the economy was going so well that the deficit had blown out to $12 billion. The debt went up by another half a billion and now the earnest scribes who swore black and blue that the debt was not a problem are now looking earnestly at the camera saying it is. Meanwhile, Labor delivered a similarly confused explanation from the Windsor book of high Athenian rhetoric.

But we do have one cost that is proportionally going down and that is unfortunately, our defence spending, which is now at its lowest level since 1937. I find that the most powerful tool to engage the electorate is to suggest what would happen to our nation if we let this Green-Labor-independent political fiasco continue in the job.

At the current Wollomombi Falls trajectory, there would not be much among the rocks at the bottom to pick up.

The Greens want everything ever dreamt of in their Kubla Khan, Xanadu euphoria, otherwise known as party meetings, to be paid for by a mining tax. The fact that they can never nominate a mine they support or wish to expand seems irrelevant in the land of little pink clouds of happiness and chatty tea parties with hesitant girls, tardy rabbits, and mad milliners.

From our side of the political debate, my friend Clive has not been helping out. Clive, please, starting a party is what Bob Katter has made into an art house film. Why join him on the set? It is a little more difficult than what is first anticipated and new parties gather new ideas at about the same rate as they gather self-appointed messianic figures who wish to grace Australia with their unrecognised talent.

Business is sitting back biting their nails. Business wants certainty, sanity and honesty; it sees the government crab walking to a new tax to cover the National Disability Insurance Scheme because they have no money for its promises.

It is a genuinely essential program to look after those severely disabled, but to be genuine in your belief in this, the government must suggest what current plans would be cut to pay for it. Anything recurrent you borrow for is a sign of bad management and temporary in its sustainability.

Taxes are always a drag on economic growth. If you keep putting on a little new tax that won’t hurt you, you will ultimately get to one that, in combination with all the others, economically kills you.

At this juncture my feelings are not excitement at what the polls say is an impending election win; my choice to stand in New England makes my participation in that event a lot less likely. My feelings live somewhere between apprehension and anger.

How did this harlequin political crowd manage to formulate such a financially disastrous voyage? If they had done nothing more than continue on from where the Coalition left off, if they had basically gone on holidays, giving instructions that nothing much should happen beyond the set course of 1997, then our position would be vastly better than it currently is.

I remember very well the excited glee as Labor members went around a barbecue in the Parliament House courtyard at the start of the global, but actually more US and Europe – financial crisis. They proclaimed that government had to “go hard, go early, go household”.

I remember thinking they should have added “go off your head and go broke”. It was like the kid who had just learnt a rude word in a foreign language and was showing all in the school yard how smart they were.

They had no knowledge or desire to genuinely delve into the vast complexities of the financial grammar or even to undertake the sober step backwards, to have a good sleep, cold shower and observe the situation and our very minor global role soberly.

Now, Michael Chaney, chairman of National Australia Bank and Woodside Petroleum, is comparing our financial fate to that of Ireland. I wish him better luck than I had a few years ago.

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Barnaby: Government Ignores Debt At Its Peril

12 Apr

True to his word, Senator Joyce has not relented in drawing attention to the dangers of ever-rising debt.

From the Canberra Times (my emphasis added):

A couple of years ago I was apparently a financial hayseed from the wild west of Queensland when I mentioned the debt.

Canberra is the canary in the coal mine for debt and the canary hasn’t been chirping lately. Mr Wayne Maxwell Swan has lost control and the cuts to spending and jobs are imminent.

I was startled at the trajectory of the debt when it was at $100 billion, and to be honest most ignored me. It wasn’t the size but the speed of the increase that worried me. Our gross debt is now $238 billion.

Last year Thomas Sargent won the Nobel prize for economics partly because of his work on government debt.

He noted that if you choose not to debase your currency, which can be the precursor to social collapse, government debt must be repaid through running budget surpluses at some point in the future equivalent to the size of our debt.

Debasing your currency is what the USA, UK, and EU are all doing, by “printing” money. In our Orwellian world of doublespeak, that is now euphemistically called “Quantitative Easing”. Their currency debasement is the key reason why (a) Switzerland’s central bank pegged their currency to the “QE’d” Euro, to protect their economy, (b) Norway’s central bank acted to weaken the Kroner, after all the “hot money” that was going to Switzerland went looking for a new “home” threatening to damage their economy, and (c) why the Aussie Dollar is way overvalued, wiping out whole industry sectors here, with only Bob Katter (and now, Paul Howes) arguing that something should be done.

Mr Swan believes, and this is just not going to happen, that we will have a surplus of $1.5 billion next year. Well, by then our gross debt will be about $270 billion and the custom of late means that it will be vastly more than that.

When Labor came to office, you owed $56 billion, so to get the debt back down to this level, Mr Swan will have to run budget surpluses of $1.5 billion for 142 years.

That’s the important point. A surplus does not mean that the debt is repaid, it just means you have a little bit of money to start paying off the debt.

So what are our other options?

Before our debt gets to $270 billion it has to pass through our current debt limit of $250 billion.

What would happen to Canberra if the limit on the nation’s credit card was not extended? A rather large train runs into a rather large boulder in a few months’ time.

If you choose not to do that you have to instead extend your overdraft again to your fourth debt limit in four years. Now we have an incredibly fast train going off the edge of a very large cliff in a year or so. So which one do you want?

Or do you just close your eyes and say a quick prayer to the Lord that it will all go away? Dear Jesus please pay our credit card off.

My humble suggestion is that you do everything possible for the cogs of the economy to turn in the most efficient way to make us as much money as possible.

This should start by getting rid of the carbon tax.

In my portfolio of water, I would recollect that between 2000 BC and 4000 BC the great civilisations of the world managed to create an economy from the development of irrigated agriculture. The Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus Valley in what is now Pakistan and the Yellow and Yangtze in China.

If you do not have the capacity to create excess commodities, you do not have a surplus-generating economy. Yes it must be environmentally sustainable but it must exist.

This week I have been travelling around the Northern Territory looking at options for expanded agriculture. The people up here were hit hard last year when Four Corners ran the country for a month and exports of live cattle to Indonesia were banned. They are still recovering.

I have just been to a meeting where it has become apparent that when the government doesn’t know the answer they just invoke the word ”environment” and then they are miraculously endowed with omnipotent qualities that preclude your right to question them.

There is one other way we can pay back the debt. We can just tax people to within an inch of their life and vainly hope that they are motivated to remain in the legal economy.

On a scale of one year, you only started working for yourself in the last week. From January 1 to April 3 you have been working for the government.

How much longer do you want to work to pay for the NBN? How much longer do we all have to wait before common sense takes over in a big white big building on a hill in Canberra?

More wisdom and commonsense in his little finger, than in the rest of Parliament House combined.

Barnaby is right.

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“Selfless Shine Above The Selfish”: Barnaby

8 Apr

To a humble blogger whose most fervent core belief is that “PRIDE is the root of all evil”, Senator Joyce’s column in the Canberra Times resonates strongly:

Selfless shine above the selfish

Easter, Queensland’s state election is over, Parliament is out, time to relax with the family.

Relaxation is essential but in so many careers our life is like climbing a cliff continually reaching for that next foothold or crevice to pull us further up. If you stop too long you will cramp and fall off and if you have reached your top, well then, it is all downhill from there.

At the triathlon in Mooloolaba last week the general aim of competitors was to do a PB. At work, a career implies aspiration, as the alternative is regret. How many colleagues in the coffee room tell you that they are aspiring to a lesser job on lower pay? Spiritually, have you ever come across someone who told you they actually did find enlightenment but got bored with it in favour of banality?
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Relaxation, like sleep, is an elixir on so many levels. So I am in Forster-Tuncurry ”relaxing”. At church on Sunday the local parishioners asked what I was doing. I told them I was ”relaxing with the family” which can be an oxymoronic juxtaposition. Some of the parishioners were ”relaxing” as well; some had been relaxing for years.

There are a lot of businesses that are very busy here helping people relax. To relax, apparently you have to consume lots of stimulants such as coffee, served at many shops up and down the main street.

You have to be eternally vigilant that you don’t go from purposeless relaxation to exercising as you go for a walk. Just as dangerous is reading the paper in which you may find a philippic written by some column troll and you will be taken back to work to write your rebuttal against this oxygen thief.

Then there are the questions you ponder as you stare at the ocean – what is the right proportionate mix of all these component parts; career goals, physical health, spiritual depth and how does one make sure that it is does not crowd out the most important responsibility to your family. How much is the appropriate amount of guilt you should feel before you are stirred from the slumber of ”there is more that I can do but I really cannot be bothered”.

Senator Judith Adams was a great example of an unselfish determination to serve. While some at Judith’s stage of life would have been content with relaxing, Judith instead took on board the major challenge of federal politics. Judith would have known her fate, but she worked until the end.

Born in Picton, New Zealand, she migrated to Australia and worked as a nurse. Judith began serving in the Senate in 2005 at the age of 62. I started then, too, I was 38. She was pro choice; I was and am pro life. Judith was a regional Lib, I am a regional Nat.

On so many levels we were likely to lock horns, but we didn’t. In 2008, I was honoured to attend the funeral of Judith’s husband, Gordon, a former Royal Flying Doctor pilot. Judith was a very matter-of-fact, practical and driven woman.

Politics is a job where you have the unfortunate experience of working with colleagues who die. Good people. It is the flip side of people like, and I will say it, Craig Thomson. I will say it because some drag the office down while others raise it up. A person can respect their public office while being completely at odds with a lot of what you believe in, but they conduct themselves in such a manner which deserves nothing but respect. Judith was such a person.

My recollection of Judith will be her intense interest in the lives of regional Australians. She committed to the task knowing she was never going to be a senior office holder. The reality is that many of the wider public would probably not even know her name. The strength about Judith was that this was not what was driving her.

She just wanted people to have their lives affected in a way which made things better for them. She didn’t want the fuss and the bother of the laurels. Even when she was going around on her electric wheelchair in Parliament, she always said that this was only temporary and that she was getting better. I have a sneaking suspicion she realised the truth but just didn’t want the attention to distract her from her job for others.

Barnaby is right.

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“It’s Time For Governments To Stick To Their Knitting”

29 Mar

Senator Joyce writes for the Canberra Times:

Gillard is on a suicide mission

A joke I remember well from school is that of the Japanese Wing Commander briefing his pilots before a mission in about 1945. In emphatic language he lauds the virtues of Japan, the Emperor and the war task, then orders that the pilots load their planes with bombs, fly low into the rising sun and on into the sides of US ships. The Wing Commander then asks ”any questions?”

”Only one,” comes the reply from a bandana-wearing pilot in the front row ”most honourable Wing Commander, have you gone completely crazy?”

I am waiting for some bandana-wearing Labor parliamentarian to ask the same question of Julia Gillard after she has ordered her troops to reload their planes with the carbon tax and fly it into the side of the electorate.

She has just seen the most precise example of an electoral annihilation in Queensland. The exit polling indicates that cost of living, trust and the carbon tax were issues foremost in voters’ minds. My own survey on the polling booths affirms these findings.

Predominantly voters wanted to speak to me about two things on Saturday, the carbon tax and debt.

What was the PM thinking when, after this disaster, she announces a rededication to this ludicrous cause? Anyhow, my colleagues and I will back Gillard’s stubbornness over discernment and capitalise on the Labor party’s inability to do the bleeding obvious and drop the carbon tax.

Tony Windsor claims that the Queensland election was a victory for independents; well of course Tony, how did the front pages miss that story? Only two out of five were re-elected; one sits in a safe Labor seat (Gladstone) and the other suffered a 10 per cent swing against him. On average the independents suffered an 18 per cent swing against them, even larger than the 15 per cent swing against the Labor party, but in WindsorWorld this is a job well done.

Hubris is our greatest foe. The Katter Australian Party, or its next reincarnation, will harvest a resentment vote on the aspirations of those whose lives or rights may not change enough for their vote to lock in where they last placed it. Labor will be still trying to ”get back to its core” but this will prove near impossible with Julia Gillard casting a clumsy shadow over all Labor grassroots philosophy.

The LNP has a massive task in front of it. It must start paying back debt; it has to put a broom through the areas of the bureaucracy that are not willing to go on the journey that the public vote has overwhelmingly asked for; it has to still invest in key infrastructure or the state business plan will not be able to raise the money to pay the debt.

Importantly it has to change the culture about how it sees itself and how the world sees Queensland. It has to brush the cobwebs from tourism venues that seem to be still living in the ’80s. It has to realise that the wealth, coal, cotton, cattle, grain and the troublesome coal seam gas start in the regions and the people in the regions know this.

The LNP has made a good start by scrapping more than $650 million in programs that aim to change the temperature of the globe. Trying to change the climate from a room in George Street is absurd. We may as well send Campbell Newman to South Korea this week to help the world dispose of nuclear material, and there would be more chance of success there than in changing the climate.

It is simply not the Queensland government’s core business. Every dollar spent on these woopy ”green” programs is a waste of taxpayers’ money if there is no relationship between the spend and a real outcome.

A fundamental lesson of the Queensland election for all political parties is don’t get too carried away saving the world when it is quite evident that is not the league we play in; leave that to the US, China and the 100 million population league. Instead, concentrate on roads being safe, nurses being paid on time, the public books to be kept in order and living costs to be kept under control.

It would be peculiar if Australia took the lead on regime change so it is doubly so when you try do it on climate change.

It’s time for governments to stick to their knitting.

Barnaby is right.

I particularly and enthusiastically applaud his astute observation that Australian political parties should not “get too carried away saving the world when it is quite evident that is not the league we play in; leave that to the US, China and the 100 million population league”.

Indeed.

We are a pissant little country; a big-arse island continent, with a tiny population.

A pimple on the bum of the world.

Nothing wrong with that.

Except when idiot, corrupt politicians decide to squeeze the pimple, thinking that they are “saving the planet”.

It is high time that Australian politicians – and Australians more generally, for that matter – gave our relative overachievement-in-sports-driven national hubris the big punt, and instead embraced the humility that would enable us to avoid being taken on the kind of mad “frolics” that Senator Joyce wisely resists.

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Barnaby: People Want A Positive Future

8 Mar

Senator Joyce writes for the Canberra Times (my emphasis added):

One of the useful parts of the obligatory election trudge around the countryside is that meetings, functions and party events become a great barometer of what is worrying people.

Don’t go on the road if you are looking for self-affirmation; voters do not turn up to tell you what they like about government and politicians.

If a summary was given of what is making people talk at the mandatory Q and A session at the local hall/bowling club/RSL you would not be surprised that it is a thousand miles from what seems to be the concern on the ABC’s Q&A. There are four issues that are becoming constants: excessive market power in our retail industry; foreign ownership of strategic Australian assets; the carbon tax; and coal seam gas.

The businesses that go to functions ask, when will anyone seriously deal with excessive market concentration and the resultant exploitation of smaller market players? This was once seen disparagingly as a ”poor bugger farmer” issue by the more enlightened in the corridors of Canberra. Now senior corporates are also starting to ask the same question. The chief executive of Coca-Cola Amatil, Terry Davis, has highlighted his difficulty in finding a margin for Coca-Cola on a shelf controlled by two very dominant retailers and a second-tier wholesaler.

Foreign ownership of key agricultural assets and our ever increasing reliance on foreign borrowings by our government is a two-for-one package. People do not believe that Swan has the debt under control, and he hasn’t, he has borrowed an extra $11 billion over the past four weeks.

They believe that there is a naivety pervading the carte blanche approach to any investment to any area for any reason. They ask when does the government ever say no and the answer is that our Foreign Investment Review Board is like the Venus de Milo acting as wicket keeper for Australia: looks good but stops nothing.

People are surprised to learn that if a foreigner wants to buy any residential land then approval must be sought. However, you can buy any farm in the country without seeking approval if it is worth less than $244 million. There is probably only one farm in Australia over that threshold.

People have a pathological dislike of a policy called a carbon tax. Sections of the left hate it because it is seen as a mechanism to create commissions for major sections of the banking sector. The right hates it because it is a totem for the fallacy that government is better at spending money than you are and has wiser and more noble motives than you have. Everybody in between hates it because it is just so patently absurd. Government policies that make people poorer don’t cool the planet, they just make people very angry.

Rather than help the proponents of the global warming debate the carbon tax has been completely counter-productive for them. The reality is that there is now a strong majority who have a strong scepticism of the global warming narrative and a large number who just don’t believe at all. Many of those who do believe in it, don’t want to pay for it.

Finally, and it is the issue du jour: coal seam gas. This issue is politically remarkable as it has linked the far left and the far right. It is the powerless landholder against the miner and the expectation that the government should act for the powerless. It is the usurping of an individual’s property right, the under pinner of an individual’s security, the seedbed of the individual’s liberty. It is the green issue that links to the shopping trolley.

Unfortunately for the government, it is in so much debt that its political future, based on the delivery of services, cannot be met without the income stream from the royalties and the tax.

What then really angers people is that the topics they see discussed on their TVs, and from their government, do not match these concerns.

People want a more positive future where government talks about the delivery of substantial new infrastructure and a vision of a new horizon of economic opportunity in the north and other undeveloped parts of our nation.

Instead we have a Labor government obsessed with its own machinations and a Treasurer who seems to think his main job is to pick fights with Andrew Forrest, Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer.

Damn!

He sure has his finger on the pulse.

Imagine such a man leading the nation.

The words of the great Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu spring readily to this blogger’s mind in picturing such a future:

“To lead the people, walk behind them.”

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”

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Barnaby: Greens The New Soldiers Of The Dark Age

11 Nov

Senator Barnaby Joyce writes another corker of a column for the Canberra Times (emphasis added):

This empire is collapsing as the Vandals approach

Curtin and Chifley are the Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus of the Australian Labor Party. Leader’s gifted with character and formed by the most precarious event of our nation’s history.

Keating never really blew my hair back. My initial vision of Keating, on the mentioning of his name, is a man proclaiming to the nation that “this was the recession we had to have”. He was generally the narrator more than the architect. He remains a doyen of the second floor of the Senate, the press gallery, and is now deified in musicals to bookstores, but I am always searching for the ardent navigator inside the incisive invective that the media continually proclaims to the world he possesses. He was good but he was Dean Jones not Bradman.

His forebear does, I believe, hold a far more intriguing narrative. Hawke, the drinker, the Rhodes Scholar, the charmer, the statesman, with an innate sense of the Australian people. Hawke was confident and his love of people put him at ease with the electorate and vice versa. Hawke is the triumph of the America’s Cup, the round of golf and a person who was genuinely Australian yet had that presence which resonated in the faces of other world leaders.

When I think of Kevin Rudd I see a man giving a press conference after being disposed of by Gillard. Later, I see a person being moved by the moment of the mosh pit at a concert in Perth, asking if they want to hear him sing, even though, by his own proclamation, he sung like a cow. My skin goes dank and clammy my shoulders buckle and I want to crawl under the table with embarrassment for Kevin.

Julia Gillard is the Romulus Augustus of the traditional Labor party, merely a figurehead of a fallen empire, there at the discretion and direction of the new soldiers of the Dark Age, who need a banner so they call it Green. Once they arrive in the capital you know the epoch is past and the philosophy is fallen. The Greens are the Vandals attracted by the trappings but lacking the competency to run the country which under their rule will pass to dust.

Julia says she wants 8000 new members but this may be a very telling exercise. Her leadership is soulless, her lieutenants are philosophically lazy and her army are mercenaries motivated by influence rather than cause. Get Up, The Greens, the clandestine conspirators, the ultimate benefactors of an ever diminishing union base, are her battalions. They are not motivated by going to the borders to fight for their true constituency for them their energy is directed to the internal archaic spoils of a lost Rome.

This week epitomised a nation that has lost touch with the fundamental concepts of serious management and been replaced by a creed formulated by the Magnus Opus of such wondrous works as The Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore. It was tragically congruous that the carbon tax passed on the same day that the media was dominated in Australia by a trial of a case involving a certain doctor and the death of a certain singer in the United States.

So we are building a $50 billion second telephone network when we are only $32 billion away from our next debt ceiling, the point where on presentation of the nation’s credit card, the checkout attendant says “transaction declined, see bank for details.” We have a global economy that is progressing like a drunk on roller skates on the edge of a cliff. We have issues of tuberculosis in our northern neighbours, an inability to properly control our borders and the IMF predicts that China will overtake the United States as the biggest economy in the world, in purchasing power parity terms, by 2016.

Television is occupied with a voyeuristic indulgence; the trial of a doctor, for which everyone has an opinion but for which no one has any real knowledge.

From the questions on the carbon tax that I have asked Penny Wong there is no understanding of the intricate and long-lasting effects to our economy. Most Senators would not have read more than 10 pages of the 18 bills.

In voting for a carbon tax they are voting on the vibe that we can somehow affect the temperature of the globe from this, genuinely wonderful, town of Canberra, not on the stringent, analytical reality of what we are about to do as the Greens reboot our nation at their new year zero.

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Barnaby: Labor Is Rudderless, Clueless, Hopeless

4 Nov

Senator Joyce writes for the Canberra Times:

The Qantas chief, Alan Joyce, has been hanging around Parliament House for the past few weeks, not because of an impending aviation calamity, but apparently because he likes the decor and the coffee. Well, that is what you would have to believe if you are to believe the Government.

To say the Qantas lockout and fallout came as a surprise does not pass muster especially now in light of the abundant leaks from key Labor Party ministers, all protecting their jobs in the shadow of this fiasco, so as to quarantine themselves from the political fallout in the rumoured leadership change.

Julia Gillard wrote the Fair Work Act when she was Industrial Relations Minister in 2009. Section 431 allows the minister to demand the parties come to the table and avoid the massive damage which has happened to the nation’s airline and our nation’s image. The Government had at its disposal the mechanism to avoid the travel chaos over the weekend. However, Gillard was not convinced of her own competencies in writing the Act or her Government’s capacity in administration of her own Act. She claims that section 431 could not be used because it has not been used before. Well, why did you put it there? It appears she did not even source legal advice until Saturday afternoon. Breathtaking!

Our nation’s Government is not on auto pilot – it is rudderless, clueless and hopeless. The Qantas dispute is a metaphor for the Government’s day-to-day management as we lurch from crisis to crisis. It is the same management style as the live cattle debacle which brought about a middle-of-the-night closure of the live cattle trade that we did not need while creating an immense diplomatic issue with our largest neighbour. From overreaction to no reaction at all; in fact with the Qantas issue to a position where we are in a desperate search for a government pulse. The vision of flying back into Canberra this week, on a very crowded Virgin flight, was one of a government fascinated in cooling the planet while we raced past $215billion in gross debt. Qantas planes sat forlornly on the tarmac as a new aviary for swallows. But then the Qantas debacle is not a new pattern for the Government.

During the election last year Gillard promised to implement whatever the Murray-Darling Basin Authority decided. After the authority released a plan that was a dud, the Government backed away, and started blaming us for introducing the Water Act. Now the Murray-Darling Basin draft plan is about to be released and the Government will have to display a competency, completely absent at the moment, to avoid the public furore which occurred last year.

Coal seam gas is an issue that has to be addressed in a more complete manner, as demanded by public concerns, but no senior Labor Party members are offering any solutions. At the moment they seem more obsessed with CO2 than H2O.

Labor has provided the apogee of its political engagement with Australians with the carbon tax even though Canada is running a thousand miles from any similar action, and Europe has a scheme which is little else than tokenism supported by a volatile and at times fraudulent carbon market, where the scams associated with carbon credits would make pyramid scheme marketers blush. China is improving the carbon intensity of its economy by pulling down dirty little coal-fired power stations and building massive new coal-fired power stations. Absurdly, we will pay China for the carbon credits it generated in its country under our carbon tax with money borrowed from them.

Yes, the carbon tax legislation was finalised with a back-slapping, clapping, kiss-a-thon mirrored in the big banks with a salivating let’s go out to lunch on Bob Brown’s big bank billion dollar bonus as the commissions on the permits transfer money from the suburbs to the centre of town.

In a political team when it becomes apparent that the halfback cannot pass, the five-eighth cannot catch and the coach is a plant from another greener team, then the crowd of supporters dismally dwindles to a core of the loving family members, the morbidly curious and those recently removed from the closest pub.

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Barnaby Punches On

14 Oct

Senator Joyce writes for The Punch today:

An unaffordable tax beyond all regional doubt

When I think of regional Australia, I think of long drives, lots of wildlife and lights in the sky not on the ground. There is another thing that now distinguishes regional Australia: an absolute rejection of the carbon tax.

Senator John Williams recently conducted a poll in the seats of New England (based around Tamworth) and Lyne (based around Port Macquarie). After receiving over 9,400 responses, 89 per cent of residents are against the carbon tax.

The reason for this is not that hard to fathom. When it comes to the carbon tax, the greater the distance, the greater the cost.

From 2014, the carbon tax will apply to transport fuels, making the costs of getting things out to regional Australia more expensive.

People in regional Australia already pay more for electricity too. Australians in regional NSW spend 25 per cent more on electricity than those in Sydney and Australians in regional Victoria spend 30 per cent more than those in Melbourne. There are already people out there who can’t afford the price of power as it is.

The carbon tax will make our industries less competitive. That is its whole point. That means some will lose their jobs, even if jobs are created elsewhere.

What sort of solace is that to the coalminer in the Hunter valley who must tell his wife and kids that they have to move to western Queensland to keep a job? They probably would like to stay in the Hunter where their family, friends and home are.

Most of the jobs forecast to be lost as a result of the carbon tax will be in regional Australia because that is where the mining, manufacturing and power generation jobs are.

Economic modelling by the Queensland Labor government found that the carbon tax would see 41,000 fewer Queensland jobs, with the biggest impact in regional areas. The Rockhampton and Gladstone area will see economic activity fall by 8.2 per cent, the Mackay area by 5.7 per cent, double to triple the impact of the carbon tax on the rest of Australia.

NSW Treasury figures show that the carbon tax will lead to 31,000 lost jobs in NSW but over 26,000 of these jobs would be in regional Australia, including 18,500 in the Hunter, 7000 in the Illawarra and 1000 jobs in the central West.

Some of Australia’s most competitive manufacturing companies are in the food processing industry located near Australia’s world-class agriculture. The carbon tax will add $3.3 million per year to the costs of just one of JBS Australia’s abattoirs. JBS employs over 4000 people in regional Australia. After the live cattle fiasco, the last thing our beef industry needs is a carbon tax.

Unemployment in regional Australia is already higher at 6 per cent, compared to 5.1 per cent in the rest of Australia.

Given all this you would think that a government seeking to introduce a carbon tax would carefully analyse its impact on the smaller towns and communities which may not be able to recover if their local abattoir or mill cannot survive the higher costs of a carbon tax.

But, no, the government has not released any economic modelling of the impact of the carbon tax on regional areas. That’s despite the Queensland, New South Wales and Victorian governments doing so, although they haven’t had access to the same economic models that Canberra has used because Wayne Swan refuses to release them.

The Government is treating Australians, particularly regional Australians, with absolute contempt. The people of Rockhampton want to know what the carbon tax means for them, the people of Newcastle want to know what the carbon tax means for them and the people of the La Trobe valley want to know what the carbon tax means for them. The government, though, is refusing to give them any answers.

When the last Coalition government faced heat over National Competition Policy in the 1990s it asked the Productivity Commission to evaluate what its impact had been on regional Australia. It made these results public, including the finding that employment was lower in 33 out of 57 Australian regions because of national competition policies. Not everyone liked NCP but at least the government was up front about its impacts.

Another poll released the other day showed that one out of every two Australians think that minority government has been bad for Australia. Is that any wonder when we have a government which goes back on its promises and fails to be up front with the people about its own policies.

And for the Canberra Times yesterday:

Mad carbon tax burns hole in Labor’s credibility

It is a frightening thought that our nation is about to recalibrate its economy on a colourless, odourless gas at a time when the global economy is on the edge of a precipice.

It is deeply saddening that the warrants, given before the last election on the banks of the Brisbane River to national television, that ”there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead”, mean nothing and that by reason of this the dignity of the office of prime minister has been sullied.

It is a very bad day for democracy when the views of the Australian people as voted for at a federal election, then reinforced in all the polls since, are to be ignored.

It is historically momentous that the oldest party in Australia has been dragged so low that they are now the captive to the peripheral extremism of the Greens party, which is quite evidently determining substantial sections of the Labor Government’s policy.

Former Labor leader Kevin Rudd is obviously on the move against Prime Minister Julia Gillard and there is no love lost between the two or reason for any dtente. Australia is suffering all the signs of a government which is in critical and dangerous demise as they fight each other, rather than sail the ship which is now heading toward a rather large economic iceberg.

Last week we borrowed an extra $2billion, again, and we are now $212billion in gross debt. Our manufacturing industry is in real trouble and the final thing our nation needs is a tax that removes the strategic advantage we have, cheap power.

Industry lobbyists have been literally running around desperately trying to cover the multiple exposures coming down the path to them. Their frustration is palpable.

The banks are happy, however, they are about to score a ticket to billions of dollars in commissions. This is the new world that the Greens have forced on a capitulated Labor, which is now stumbling around making excuses for this complete and dangerous policy fiasco.

As Manufacturing Australia’s Dick Warburton said, the commodity boom will one day end then our economy will be one of services, banks and agriculture. This trio will be trying to pay off a massive debt left by a party that maxed out the credit card when there was a minerals boom.

May the divine spirit have mercy on us, as our nation tries to pay the debt off when China decides that it does not wish to pay us as much as it used to for our coal and iron ore.

The key issue is this, whether you are the most fervent supporter of the argument on human induced global warming, or alternatively believe that human capacity to change the climate is vastly overblown, there is one unifying fact; Australia’s action on carbon reduction will have no effect whatsoever on the climate, it is merely a gesture.

So how much do you wish to pay for this gesture? Labor’s political position is that on the one hand it will have little price effect, which if that is true then the carbon tax as a pricing mechanism is pointless, yet it comes with a multiple $100million bureaucracy.

On the other hand, if it does have a bad effect then Labor promises to compensate you. People only get compensated if they have been unjustly hurt. So who by this statement does Labor believe will be hurt? Pensioners, steel production, coal mining, power companies, low-income earners all by Labor’s own admission of compensation will be hurt by this pointless gesture to placate the policy desires of the Australian Greens.

The final lunacy is that Australia signs up to send up to $57.9 billion a year to the very dubious carbon credit market overseas. Your loss of lifestyle will support the most lucrative scam market in the history of the planet.

So good luck finding the mythical green jobs they promise, good luck paying back the debt and, most importantly, the best of luck finding one Labor member who will say that they will campaign at the next election knowing they are personally responsible for the predicament this mad tax put us in.

UPDATE:

If only it were true.

And … if only Senator Joyce sent his knockout punch in this direction too –

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