Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

You will have none from me. What I can say is that this is a very sad time for our nation; it really is. It is something that has frustrated so many people out there. They feel that they are disconnected from this parliament. They feel the parliament has gone off on its own form of frolic. There is a belief, I think, in the Labor Party that somehow people will forget about this. They will not.

We will start with a couple of fallacies. No. 1, it is of course not going to do anything to the climate. It is a question you have said I have asked you 600 times and, Minister, you have never answered me once: by how much is it going to change the temperature of the globe? It is not. That is the primary fallacy and, once they recognise it, people say, 'Then why are we participating in it?'

The other one is that you believe carbon is currently free; that apparently people are getting their power, their fuel, for free. They do not. The reality is that there are people out there—and they might be a long way from this chamber and out of sight—who cannot afford it as it is. That is the issue and the crux of why this thing is so selfish and so self-indulgent. There are people for whom one of the greatest issues in life is to try to pay the power bill. Where I grew up, in the New England, there are people—and you will laugh, you will giggle, and that absolutely antagonises them—