Senator JOYCE (Queensland—Leader of the Nationals
in the Senate) (5.40 pm)—What a complete
display of utter hypocrisy. We had the capacity to deliver
fairness and equality but they voted for hypocrisy
and platitudes. We had Senator Hanson-Young talking
about a patch-up job. I am afraid, Senator Hanson-
Young, I would prefer a patch-up to a flat tyre—that is
what you have delivered to the people of regional Australia.
Then we had Senator Brown, so help me, railing
against queue jumping. This is almost like Brave New
World. A couple of weeks ago he was telling us, ‘It is
the “don’t ask, don’t question policy” on leadership,’
and today we have the Greens railing against queue
jumping. It is a very interesting paradigm that we live
in.
What is it about? Senator Brown and the Labor
Party are also proffering their advice on how we have
to save money by not educating people in regional
Australia! How pathetic is that? The money we have
wasted on ceiling insulation could have been used to
educate kids in regional Australia and given them a
tertiary education. We could have used even a portion
of the money you wasted on the BER to fix up this
problem. We could have used the money you just threw
out the door with your $900 cheques in a better way—
that is, educating people. The greatest nexus with your
aim of social advancement is education. You voted
against it today and so did Senator Xenophon and the
Greens. They voted against social advancement for
those who live in disadvantaged areas! You can go
through all the platitudes and histrionics, but the fact is
that you had the opportunity to vote for justice but you
voted against it. That is as simple as it gets.
This is who you voted against: Dalby; Kingaroy;
Rockhampton, which is Labor town, both state and
federal; Hamley Bridge; Angaston; Riverton; Ballina,
another Labor town; Gympie; Nambour; Warwick;
Gladstone; Bundaberg; Orange; Dubbo; Northam;
Bunbury; Busselton; Tamworth; Lismore; Shepparton;
Wagga Wagga; Nowra; Lithgow; Mount Gambier;
Byron Bay; Singleton; Branxton; and Dungog—yes,
you also voted against your people down in the Hunter
Valley. You voted against those people because of the
urbane society that you are trying to create—this urbane
Green-Labor clique. They believe that they have
the right to go into a tertiary institution but nobody else
does. It is not there for other people. This is part of the
bumper-sticker morality that now pervades this place.
It is quite clear and simple: you could have voted for
fairness, you could have voted for equality—you could
have voted for the capacity of people in inner regional
areas to go to university after a gap year—but you
voted against it. I can assure you that after two years in
the workforce—which is what they will have to do
with their, on average, 30 hours a week in 13-week
blocks over 18 months—people will peel off. People
will make their decision: ‘Bother it. I’ll stick to doing
what I’ve been doing.’ They will have a new social
network, a new girlfriend or boyfriend and a new job,
and they will not go. So you have compromised their
capacity for social advancement in life—if you believe,
as I thought Mr Whitlam did, in a tertiary education.
It is so obscene for a party that spent in excess of
$81 million on an ETS that never went anywhere,
which even they themselves denied. That amount of
money could have been used to educate people. Education
is right at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
There are people who will go without food to educate
their kids. There are people who will go without a better
house, without new clothes and without a car. One
people’s principal desires is the education of their children.
But you voted against that and now we have to
put up with this absolute and utter hypocrisy that is
being blurted out by all and sundry around the chamber,
these amazing platitudes. In this new, Kafkaesque
bureaucracy, they have found it in their souls to leave
people behind. And what do they offer? ‘Oh well, we’ll
send it to an inquiry.’ We only have days till the end of
the year. You know that. There are time constraints. To
say that this is a surprise is a load of rubbish. This has
been fought and people knew that it was coming, that
the time was coming. The coalition had to act. Senator
Nash, Senator Williams and Senator Mason acted to try
and bring a resolution on this.
I do not know what is going to happen to the
whales; I really don’t. I do not know whether they are
going to be saved or whether they are going to be
slaughtered; I just do not know. What I do know is
what is going to happen to those kids in regional Australia.
I do know what is going to happen there. They
will not get the chance for the same standard of education
and of life as is delivered to people in Sydney,
Brisbane and Melbourne. I do not know what precedence
in the scheme of things the gay marriage bill
should take. But apparently Senator Brown believes
that the gay marriage bill, whales and everything else
are more important than delivering equality, in its most
seminal form—the capacity to deliver to people the
ability to advance their lives via education.
Then they talked about being out of time. That made
complete sense when, last night, I watched as they
started going back into the address-in-reply to the
Governor-General’s speech! No, you are not out of
time—you are just completely and utterly disorganised.
This whole parliament has turned into a farce and a
joke. You have nothing that you are going forward with
and you just leave the crucial issues behind.
So what are we going to say to the regional people
who you so earnestly told you were going to look after
when you attained the government benches? What are
you going to say to the people of Ballina? What are
you going to say to the people of Rockhampton? How
does this one actually work? ‘We believe in you, but
we don’t believe you should go to university’? ‘We
believe in you, but we believe that you’re a second-rate
citizen compared to someone in Sydney or Melbourne’?
‘We believe in you, but’—wink-wink, nodnod—‘
we believe in you just a little bit less than we
believe in the whales’?
That is apparently where Senator Brown is: he has
more concern about things in the South Seas that he
has no power—none whatsoever—to affect. And he
puts that up as an excuse to leave regional people out.
Today, he, Senator Xenophon and the Labor Party
could have put up a change that would have made people’s
lives better. They could have made people’s lives
better. They could have done something constructive
that would have actually taken people ahead. They
could have been decisive. They could have been compassionate.
They could have shown foresight. They
could have stuck to their vision of who they were as a
party when Gough Whitlam brought in greater access
to tertiary education. But, no—they descended into
hypocrisy, they descended into the murk and they
turned away from regional Australia. (Time expired)