Senator Barnaby Joyce – The National Party Manifesto

Below  is National Party Leader in the Senate – QLD Senator Barnaby Joyce’s speech to the National Press Club in Canberra today. I call this the speech the National Party Manifesto. A brilliant piece that succinctly sets out the future role of the National party in Australian Politics.

In my opinion this speech is proof that Senator Barnaby Joyce is a once in a life time Politician, blessed not only with an extraordinary intellect but an enormous dose of common sense. The following is a 4,500 word essay / commentary of Australian politics, political party’s, the demise of State governments,  and commentary of Labors handling of the Australian economy and our national indebtedness, the ETS, the ACCC, and much more. An fascinating, enlightening and enthralling read.

You’ll want to email this onto everybody you know.

.
Senator Barnaby Joyce
Leader of the Nationals in the Senate

NATIONAL PRESS CLUB OF AUSTRALIA

ADDRESS : MONDAY 11 MAY 2009

After the last election – and I believe for the 16th successive poll going back to the 1969 Coalition victory – learned opinion-writers commented on the twilight of our Party.

And the time-honoured retort from a National Party politician in that circumstance is of course to note that we’re still here, and that one ought to check the pulse before pronouncing on the corpse.

Well, I’m not going to do that. The 2007 Federal election loss was a devastating event for the Federal National Party, not only because it saw us out of Government in every single jurisdiction in Australia, but because it underlined the drift from our Party’s history and traditions that we permitted for a decade or more in the name of unity.

It is also a low ebb in terms of our representation, exacerbated by three key features of our electoral performance since the end of the Fraser Government:

1. the loss of long-term strongholds to independents who in some cases express our traditional Party values better than we have;
2. the departure of Members to independent status, on at least one occasion because of a feeling that we had betrayed our heritage;
3. the concession of core seats to the Liberal Party, from who we had become insufficiently distinct or losses of blue collar conservatives who prefer Labor to a mute National or suburban Liberal.

In Australia there is a highly powerful political force. It has no name but it is instrumental in the determination of every election result. It has no policies but its desires are analysed and reanalysed and mused over and assumed and purported. It runs no candidates in elections nor does it have a party machine, yet everyone aspires and claims that they represent it.

In fact, this political force is the epicentre of our Nation and it lies at the heart of our system of government. That force has been brought about by the right and obligation of all to vote in elections.

In a country where voting is compulsory you do not have to inspire people to get out of bed to vote – they have to or they get fined. The trick is to somehow harness that vote, particularly the swinging voters. The swinging voters are the key to electoral victory.

The challenge for a major political party is to cultivate that centre group so that they swing to your beliefs or swing away from other’s mismanagement and put you and your political associates into Government.

In seeking to capture those swinging voters promises are made to win Government and then broken once elected where expedient to do so to stay in Government.

Playing only to the centre however has its dangers. In the desire to be opaque, lukewarm, inoffensive and passionately politically tepid, there are flanks that open up to the left and to the right of the centre.

The Labor Party strategy is very adroit in that their flank is covered by their able lieutenant, the Greens, who orchestrate political pas de deuxs on issues where it is inconceivable that the right could outflank them on the far left.

But when it really counts, that is election time, and on crucial pieces of legislation as seen in the stimulus package and alcopops tax, the Greens can be completely relied on to support the Labor Party. Good luck to the left in that they have a very clever political formula – this formula helped the Labor Party get 43% of the vote and win an election.

The conservative side of politics has a dilemma in that it looks for one political product to sell at times to two groups of people with, at times, two different social and economic tastes. Even the terminology, conservatives that are liberal, could be deemed to be politically schizophrenic. The conservative side of politics, like the left, has a diversity of viewpoints and even tensions.

There is a critical thread I’d like to draw between these two themes: of the tendency for the philosophy of political movements to adapt rapidly to the short-term environment; and the current position of the National Party at the Commonwealth level.

Our electoral standing is at root a consequence of the Party’s decision to blend in, chameleon-like, with the approach of its Coalition partner. Many might of course note that this did mean participation in the full eleven-plus years of Government, and that there was significant influence brought to bear at the Cabinet level, but now we find ourselves at the end of that sequence, it’s an inevitable conclusion that it was at a substantial long-run cost.

Let’s look at a current issue that clearly shines a spotlight on this problem. I believe there is a paradox that the conservatives can represent a voter who in the same breath could be skeptical without ruling out the role of the Government being responsible for bringing about moral good, so coherently believes in small tax and small government, yet also believes in a social program tax, such as the emissions trading scheme to haunt us all with its battalions of bureaucratic tin gods on the quest for Australia to cool the planet.

While conservative voters will care for the environment, they may divide on how to best achieve that outcome. Many conservatives question whether an ETS, a tax, should be placed on businesses regardless of whether they are profitable or not, and regardless of whether the proposition put forward has any efficacy on what it wishes to achieve, global cooling.

A carbon reduction scheme which for all intents and purposes will not reduce carbon as far as the globe is concerned so will have nil effect, except for those who profit from the bureaucracy and those who punt the paper around the market place making sizable commissions on the way through.

To the rest of Australia this is a political gesture to make you feel good, which you undoubtedly will as long as you don’t have to pay the price. It is not surprising that when you ask people to put their own job on the line, for the warm inner glow of environmental world peace, their views on the emission trading scheme change quite markedly.

How do we deal with divergent views within the community? If in the end the left have two viewpoints and the right only have one. The result is pretty much as you see around our nation. The left win everywhere except Western Australia, where they were beaten by the fact that there were two political views against two political views.

There is very limited latitude within the Australian political system on what political members say and how they vote.

The left has dealt with it in some fashion by having a moderate view displayed by the Labor Party and a more strident view displayed by the Greens. The National Party gives the conservative side the capacity to display a variance of views that reflect the actual variance within the community. This avoids the disenfranchising of the political voice of sections of the community bringing a cynicism towards politics and politicians.

The obsession of the major parties to capture the centre ground has meant that the only way certain groups that never have the numbers in the party room will get heard is with their own distinct political party or to create highly regulated and highly disciplined factions.

I think the former is a more honest transparent approach than the latter and so does the public with the growth of Greens at the expense of the Labor Left. This also is the reason the National Party came into existence in 1913 and for this reason it is as important today as it has ever been.

It is interesting that the anonymous valiant spirit, apparently well placed within the Liberal Party, who in The Australian on the 4th May suggested a purge of dead wood from the Liberal Party and the National Party. He suggested it as an urban based aspirant within the conservative side of politics who wants to “fix things up” through the purview of his own life in the leafy suburbs of what I would suggest are the more affluent parts of the capital cities. They suggest over a cup of coffee that when you do stand up for regional issues, read don’t agree with them, you are divisive.

May I suggest that when it is your electorate, and you don’t stand up for them, you are weak.

Ultimately this “please don’t be difficult” approach really should be translated as “you must remember it is politically correct that my views are more worthy than yours because I say so”. It is roma lacuta causa finita and by the way I live in Rome.

The current electoral redistribution show that many think that regional areas are overrepresented and should lose seats. This is metropolitan Australia reinforcing the power of metropolitan Australia. It is here that the National Party must play a vital role in reminding us that Australia is more than a series of metropolitan capitals.

Now we have to look at the interplay between the financial consequences of current Labor mismanagement and the role of governance in our nation and the capacity to deliver a regional voice.

More and more the affairs of our Nation are run by the Federal Government. Whether we like this or not it has become the natural course of the political stream. In the near future, States for all intents and purposes will be irrelevant. If you do not agree with this, suggest to me the pieces of legislation lately passed that reinforce the strength of the States.

There are States now, if it wasn’t for the Federal Government underwriting them, that would be effectively bankrupt and therefore have lost the capacity to deliver basic services which is supposed to be their core function.

The natural progression over the history of our nation has been away from a federalist system to a centralist system.

Philosophically this is very disconcerting but the actions and practices of all political parties has brought this about so they are all responsible for it and now I find in all sectors there is a loss of faith in the purpose of States.

Unfortunately the reality of the financial ramifications of where we are currently, further exacerbates this shift because our Nation is quickly getting to a situation where it won’t be able to afford three tiers of government and it is States that will be removed. Therefore the National Party has to have a strong role in Federal Politics.

The State’s house, the Senate, has never been in living memory ever really a State’s house. Rather it has been an endorsement of the major political parties’ views in the Lower House with an interplay of parties of sectional interest. Even this week, I have heard people ask what Malcolm Turnbull is going to do in the Senate on the ETS. I must be missing something or more appropriately Malcolm is as he has never made a division in the Senate yet. Not that he is supposed to he is in the Lower House.

We need a bicameral national parliament to protect ourselves from totalitarianism and to mitigate at times the misconstrued ideas of a prime ministerial office and the executive. The purpose of the Senate was to take this problem into account, thus Tasmania with a population roughly of the Gold Coast, has 12 senators however the Gold Coast has none. The question is, without taking away from Tasmania, how do we make the Senate more relevant for the people of the Gold Coast?

To recreate the efficacy of the Senate we have to get the Senate to represent regions within the State rather than the State. In fact in the future I strongly believe it will be regions within what was the State. Each region would elect two senators and this would give regional people a better representation in a current tide that is putting more and more power into the metropolitan vote.

If New York can only have two senators, the same as Montana, then Brisbane can have two senators and North Queensland have two senators and four other regions in Queensland two each as well, elected at each election. We do that in any case currently in the ACT and the Northern Territory.

Let’s face it, in my State nine senators come from one town Brisbane, one Senator from Townsville, one comes from St George and the other Senator has been in the paper a lot lately about exactly where she lives.

If you are elected as a Senator from a particular region you will have to be relevant to a geographical area to an extent that you get a quota. Assuming two are elected at an election from each region and one gets 40%, another gets 30%, and the rest of the quota exhaust, the new senators would have to be geographically relevant rather than just sectionally relevant. In time, people might even get to know their name.

It is essential in keeping a spread of power in our Nation that there be constitutional recognition of local government. This will be the forerunner for direct appropriation from the federal government to local government for the provision of certain services, with strong and severe oversight against local political nepotism and corruption.

What was the ethos that supports farming the initial base of the National Party? Farming is in essence small business. So let us develop on a path that is philosophically consistent with the inception of our political ideals in the second oldest political party in Australia.

Just as demographics have brought about a metropolitan centralisation that has disenfranchised regional Australia, commercial centralisation has disenfranchised small business.

Following from these principles the National Party has at its centerpiece a commitment to the Australian individual’s right to go into business and not be excluded from the commercial class.

Critical to this defence of free enterprise is ensuring that the ability to produce at a profit is not compromised by the over centralisation of the marketplace. It is implicit in our desire for freedom that freedom encompasses that our own endeavours lead to our own future. Exclusion from the process that allows our endeavours and exertions to be the major determinant of our future, is a limit on our own freedom.

The self determination of the individual vitalises the Nation. The corporate manual of the organization emasculates the more total display of the variety of views. Small business allows you to say “it is my business I can say what I like”.

Australia has the belief that small business is protected by the ACCC. It is obvious the ACCC at times has a tendency to ignore the rules of our Nation’s Parliament, such as their aversion to enforce the Birdsville Amendment. In most other instances the ACCC doesn’t have the power that people believe it does. The result is market centralisation and that is exactly what we have got in all major sections of our nation. A handy little scapegoat for the Government and others is to say it is all the ACCC’s fault.

In fact, our Trade Practices Act is weak and that is detrimental to competition, small businesses and consumers. Our merger law is weak and this allows markets to become highly concentrated. As markets become concentrated consumers face higher prices.

We need a strong law stopping companies from abusing their large market share to drive out independent operators. Those independent operators are critical to competition as once they are driven out of business consumers face higher prices and less choices.

We need a law against geographic price discrimination, a practice that large companies use to drive out independents. Large companies should not be allowed to charge different prices at different locations in the same geographic area as this is harmful to competition and consumers.

We also need a divestiture power to break up large companies that act contrary to the consumer interest. Finally and very importantly we need clear and unambiguous food labeling laws so Australians can have the choice to buy Australian.

Why should we be worried about market centralisation? Quite simply because with market centralisation comes political power that that wealth can wield in Canberra to the exclusion of what would otherwise be the democratic weight of the Australian people.

The centralisation of market power in retail, in banking, in fuel and in commercial shopping space, has been embellished by those with the political power to pursue their interests in Canberra, at the expense of the greater freedom of the Australian people.

The ultimate and now very prominent reflection of centralised politically endorsed, commercial power is the global advent of sovereign wealth funds and wholly owned sovereign government entities. This is the anathema of the aspiration of the private business as the protector of the myriad personal philosophies.

The National Party has a great understanding of those small businesses in our nation’s marketplace being squashed by a quasi confused religion. No better exemplified than by Mr Rudd’s removing the single desk for wheat to, in his parlance, let the market rip then later inflicting Australia with his sermon of “I do not know what I am but I’m not a neoliberal” who apparently are people whose character is questioned because they let the market rip.

When small shop owners in large shopping malls are paying 10 times and sometimes 20 times more per square metre than the anchor tenant, what we have is not competition, but blatant exploitation.

When small shop owners in large shopping malls have to disclose their incomes to the shopping mall owner, so that the shopping mall owner can decide what to charge them in rent, this might be common practice but it is also a form of commercial serfdom which in its day was also common practice. The potato farmers of the 21st century travel to their fields in lifts from the shopping mall car park.

Just as the exploited tenant in a shopping mall makes the shopping mall highly profitable, regional Australia is the often forgotten source of our nation’s wealth because it is not centred on a 000 postcode but is the place where our primary source of our income is determined.

If you look around your living room tonight and what you are wearing today and decide that you live in an abundance of imported goods, in fact imported goods which gives you the standard of living that you expect, then you must ask the question who is putting things on ships and sending it in the other direction or is there some new miracle of commerce where people send you something for nothing. I suppose they do in the short term, it is called borrowing.

So we see the National Party in the Senate reflecting as its core issue the rights of regional Australia and small business, in many instances one and the same thing. The National Party in the Senate is not just a party for farmers. It is much more.

We are the party of small business, regardless of where you are in our Nation, and if you look at our Senate team this is a reflection of our members. I am an accountant, Fiona (Nash) is a farmer, Wacka (John Williams) owned a hardware machinery shop, Bossie (Ron Boswell) was a manufacturers agent and Nigel (Scullion) was a fisherman. That is small business, that is who we are and that is what our political members reflect in the Senate. The decency of hard work, social responsibility, service to your community and individualism exemplified by the commerce of small business.

Now after discussing the course of the political stream into the future and who the National Party in the Senate represents and why and who we in the Senate actually are in person, let us look at the current economic political path to destitution that our Nation is on.

It bothers me that this Government, at a more visceral level, allowed the disguise of its more radical reforms and its ongoing administrative failures and latest significant policy jettisons and its ludicrous fiscal belief in an imported plasma screen inspired domestic recovery, as simply necessities of the current global economic situation.

When the global financial crisis started the Labor Party blurted out like some B grade movie “go hard, go early, go household”, but they appeared to leave out “go to hell in a handbasket”. We are now seeing that this nefarious foresight has meant that the global financial crisis is quickly becoming, and possibly has become, the Australian financial crisis and this will affect those at the political edges the most, once more regional Australia and small business.

As our capacity to borrow now disappears, remember all our savings of course are gone, the public expenditure will start withdrawing to basic essential services in big metropolitan centres. To regional areas we will give you potholes.

Do the sums, forget netting off to such vagaries as HECS debt. Concentrate on real debt with real repayment requirements and this will include a soon fully drawn 200 billion dollar facility then add tomorrow’s extra requirements somewhere between 100 and 200 billion dollars, plus what cannot be moved in bonds to finance the Broadband commitment plus the underwriting of the States’ real debt of 150 plus billion dollars.

Somewhere between 450 to 500 billion dollars owed by governments within the sovereignty of Australia which the Federal Government has promised to repay, that means that somewhere within our Nation in the near future, at a conservative cost of funds of say 6% considering we’re at historic lows at the moment, we will have to find at least 27 billion dollars a year just to pay the interest.

Now they wont find it so you know what they will do, they will just borrow more money to pay the interest. That is economic palliative care before an uncomfortable demise.

To those in the commerce of small business you will be competing against a Labor inspired diluvium flood of debt that will drown out excess equity and in a recovering global economy, force interest rates in Australia through the roof.

As I strongly suggested in Senate Economics Committee meetings some time ago, we will be unable to pay back this debt.

I have never seen anything so peculiar as the exit strategy that was handed forth in the little orange book by Mr Swan in the last stimulus package. Basically what we had was two bullet points that said when things get better we will pay the money back. I never knew it was so easy.

If I have to go back to accountancy I will try this out on sundry bank managers. I will sit on behalf of my client on the other side of the bank manager’s desk and say “you see Mr Smith of the bank, Mrs Jones will pay you back that $2m she owes you when things get better”. In the past I have always found this slightly more difficult than what was proposed to me by the Treasurer. Paying back debt should be the absolute primary motivation for this current government.

I truly believe, however, that our government may have gone beyond the tipping point of no return where you can pay for it out of the general running of the nation’s business. Now our only alternative is absolute radical reform, as I suggested at the start of this speech in regards removing a tier of government, and sales of major publicly owned assets.

This will be one of the greatest and spectacular blunders of any government in the history of our nation that they, starting with $21.6 billion of cash in the bank, and reserves aplenty, in their first term would be asking permission to go beyond $200 billion in debt and this was apart from the underwriting of their State Labor Government brothers and sisters with their $150 billion plus sub prefecture debt and then the underwriting of the banks, and then the creation of Ruddbank and the naïve belief that the bond market is the eternal friend of misguided treasurers and that credit agencies don’t know what they are doing and will let you get away with it and on and on it goes but not happily ever after.

It is all going to end in tears. As an accountant I have seen this so many times before and believe me just think about it as you are driving home tonight because it is not that complicated. How would you, or could you possibly pay this money back?

A conservative view is genuinely conservative – not the transient conservative branding of a Labor leader on the make. Apart from its fiasco in finance, we believe that Government has no purview to assume rights to private property either. Private, almost by definition, means we are talking about property of the individual, rather than the community.

For those on the land, the greatest threat to our livelihood comes from the blanket assumption by various Governments that their conclusions on environmental matters give them the right to direct our use of property.

This has led to any number of restrictions and taxes, and I note from mid-April a particularly bizarre example that the NSW Government is now taxing the collection of rainwater in dams. The dams are private property, as is the land on which they sit. It is not a gift from the Government, and nor, for that matter is rainfall.

And this isn’t an issue restricted to rural Australians. Anyone running a small business in this country knows how much easier it would be if various Labor Governments weren’t kow-towing to the private interests of their union base and urban white collar green.

I’m quite comfortable with Governments providing the structure to limit the risk of industrial and environmental exploitation, I just don’t see why the minority interests of the trade union movement or well read, well meaning environmental zealots, are allowed to dictate those limits or exert influence vastly beyond the proportion of their numbers.

So in summary the National Party’s role in the Senate is to mitigate the effect of the executive who pitches, to bring about their continual role in power, with policy designed and packaged for the swinging voter of the centre. The National Party must be a voice in the space that is left by the move to the centre and most importantly, the National Party must go forward with policy that reaffirms its belief in its core constituency, small business and regional Australia.

Within the National Party there is generally a social conservatism however I don’t believe that any party should have a platform that relies totally on moral views, which have a bad tendency to catch us short. There will continue to be an expectation that the National Party will exert a reaffirmation of the Judaic Christian principle that underpins the freedoms and liberties from which we all benefit.

However we as a Nation rarely think about where these freedoms came from and are only too willing to worship the vacuum and denigrate the premise on which our society is set. I don’t think the National Party has much room for growth in the Swat valley.

In closing, our historical farming roots help us understand why green things grow and we can cast an eye over the political fence, to see why a core philosophy clearly delineated is a successful political dynamic in the Senate.

Ambiguity on the political wings is a path to oblivion. For Australia the loss of the National Party means that those away from the centre political demographic would only be represented by that infuriating tokenistic gesture of “look at the things we have done for you” in the process of doing everything for the people we go out to dinner with in Canberra.

*****

END

Have Your Say!