DEPUTY LEADER’S SPEECH
NATIONALS 2024 FEDERAL COUNCIL
National Press Club, Canberra
Thank you very much, Bridget, and thank you to everyone for attending Federal Council this year.
It’s great to see you all in the room.
It’s great to have all of our individual state parties together to participate in Council, and we always do.
We have great debates, but it really does help give us direction so we can do our best to represent you in Federal Parliament.
They say that oppositions don’t win government.
They say that governments lose government.
Well, I can tell you this time around, that will not be the case, because this opposition with David Littleproud and Peter Dutton will win government because we are presenting an alternative.
We are giving the people of Australia a real choice.
And I’m excited, because this is the first time in a long time that it has been so blatantly apparent the difference between government and what we are proposing our government would look like.
We have a lazy government at the moment.
The Albanese government is truly lazy.
They’re not making decisions.
They’re funding business cases and reports so that they don’t have to make a decision.
Just in water alone, they’ve provided another $44 million for another round of business cases on projects that have been discussed, talked about, and reviewed since the 1980s.
But it’s easier to fund another report or business case than to actually make a hard decision.
Labor are standing in the way of our enterprises, of what we in this room stand up for.
We know that it is our resources industries and our agricultural industries that actually drive the economy of this nation, and that’s why we will reduce red tape and make it easier.
Instead, Labor, with my opposite number, Tanya Plibersek, is standing in the way of progress.
She’s blocked a 400-hectare tailings dam at Blayney on the grounds of cultural heritage, but she’s signed off on a 12,000-hectare solar farm in Central Australia on grazing land.
Apparently, the environment and the landscape in the ecology of Central Australia don’t really matter, but a 400-hectare site at Blayney is really important.
She’ll block potentially a mine that could make $200 million a year for the New South Wales Government, but she’ll have that solar farm.
They’ll sign off on renewables projects on a whim and 28,000 kilometres of transmission lines that will go across prime agricultural land.
They’ll sign off on that, but they won’t allow a mine.
They would rather fund compensation packages than allow production.
Just in the Murray-Darling Basin alone, a $300 million compensation package for communities will not touch the sides for the damage that is being done by that policy.
It is estimated that the water buybacks will decrease production in irrigated agriculture by $111 million a year, and they’re offering $300 million in compensation.
It doesn’t stack up.
The same is in the live sheep export.
They’ll cut that whole industry, and they’re only offering a compensation package of less than $200 million, and only a third of that is actually being set aside for producers.
It is appalling and lazy government.
That is why, just last week, we saw 2000 farmers come to Canberra to rally from all over the nation.
I can tell you that this man, our leader, David Littleproud, stood up and gave an absolutely cracking speech, clearly identifying why The Nationals are different and what we will do in government to support our primary industries and bring them back to the prime position that they should hold in this nation.
Bridget’s absolutely right, talking about the Teals.
It’s okay for Zali Steggall to say we need a 75% emission reduction because she’s not going to be looking out her window at offshore wind farms like they will in the Illawarra, the Hunter, and Bunbury in Western Australia if this government gets back into power.
She’s not looking at the 12,000 hectares of solar panels, and she’s not going to have 80-metre high transmission lines going across her rooftops, but we are.
That’s why our nuclear policy is so important.
Yes, there will still be renewables, but we can be strategic and sensible about it, and we can make the best use of existing infrastructure instead of trying to rewrite our landscape.
So we are the government of choice.
We are the government that will support industry, will support primary industry, and will support small business.
We will address this growing ESG wokeness that is now seeing aid organisations—organisations who supposedly want to feed the world—write to banks to urge them not to finance livestock and dairy sectors.
Can you believe it?
What are people going to eat?
If we are eating, we know that protein leads to better health outcomes, and yet we’ve got aid organisations writing to banks to say, “Stop financing the livestock industry.”
I can’t get my head around it.
We’ve got Matt Kean telling us to stop eating red meat so that we can all play our part in reducing emissions.
I’m not going to stop eating steak, I can promise you that, and give me a lamb cutlet over a bit of tofu any day.
So we will bring common sense back to the table, because that’s what the National Party is all about.
We are practical people.
We know that you can have a good idea, but unless you can implement that idea, it is worth nothing.
So with that, I would like to introduce our leader and the next Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, David Littleproud.
ENDS