There are so many things that come to mind with that headline – like when Barnaby Joyce wrote off an $80,000 government Toyota LandCruiser wagon by driving it into a flooded creek on the way to his northern NSW grazing property. Or when he had unprotected extramarital sex with a staffer and got her pregnant. Or when he turned up drunk at work. Those are the sort of personal lapses of judgement you worry about with teenage kids.
Of far more concern is Barnaby’s full speed ahead, “get ‘er done” approach to infrastructure, be it the NBN, dams, or inland rail. These are all major projects that require significant planning to get them right but Barnaby gets annoyed with that sort of trivial impediment to his announcements.
In June 2016, Joyce appeared on Q&A where he said the majority of people only wanted 25mbps download speed and fibre to the premises NBN would be a waste.
“We have to try and always do things within our means to repay the debt that we have and that, unfortunately, is the raw rule of economics, trying to do as much as we can to make sure we run a tight ship,” said Barnaby.
Joyce added that returning to Labor’s FTTP version of the NBN would cost the Government an extra $30 billion and take six to eight years longer to deploy than the Coalition’s Multi-Technology Mix version of the NBN – a claim that has proven to be false.
With the government’s MTM $27 billion over budget and four years behind schedule, they finally announced an extra $4.5 billion to upgrade to FttP that “will give up to 75 per cent of fixed line premises across regional and metropolitan Australia access to ultra-fast broadband by 2023”… maybe.
The concept of “do it once and do it right” was lost on the LNP who thought the internet was for playing games and watching movies.
Now Barnaby is insisting that we spend more than $600,000 to provide a single fibre connection to a business in his electorate. In his letter requesting government funding, Joyce said the upgrade was “urgently needed to address the continued increases in bandwidth required at Costa’s Guyra facilities for the many software and online systems utilised to support the company’s high-tech practices and equipment used to achieve greater yield efficiencies”.
Bugger the little people who can’t access their emails or whose kids can’t sign in for online learning.
Barnaby brings this same level of foresight and planning to his fetish for building dams.
After drip feeding millions to an LNP donor and party operative, through various companies that all lead back to the same guy, for feasibility studies and business cases, Barnaby is sick of waiting and announced $5.4 billion in funding.
“We’ve done the homework on Hells Gates Dam and it’s now time to get on and build it. We have put our money on the table, so let’s cut the green tape, get the approvals and get it done.”
The dam proposals have not been scrutinised by the government’s own National Water Grid advisory board; the Hells Gates plan does not have an environmental impact study (no study is even in development); nor does it have a detailed business case.
So far, Barnaby wants dams to deal with droughts, requiring them to be full, floods, requiring them to be empty, and hydro-electricity, requiring them to be flowing. I’m not sure how he hopes to achieve that.
Joyce is also in a rush to get his pet boondoggle, the inland rail, underway. Four years after the project – worth $14.5bn and counting – was announced, about 130km of trach have been laid and we still don’t know the final route.
As reported in the Guardian:
“Some of those communities that will be most affected by the project are raising serious questions about who will really benefit from the massive outlay: big business or local towns?
Regional farmers have expressed alarm as their land is cut in two by the tracks and they question why local landscape knowledge has been ignored, particularly when it comes to flood risk.”
Sounds like another Joyce disaster in the making.
Barnaby likes to boast to the guys in the front bar that he can blackmail the government into giving him what he wants.
“We’ve taken water and put it back into agriculture so we can look after you and make sure we don’t have the greenies running the show basically sending you out the back door. That was a hard ask but we did it,” he told farmers at a Shepparton pub, saying an ABC Four Corners investigation into alleged water rorting in the Murray Darling Basin was trying to “create a calamity” from which Barnaby would save them.
At the time, the South Australian Water Minister Ian Hunter called for Joyce’s removal.
“He is absolutely incapable of doing the job he has been given,” he said.
I can only concur. Barnaby should never be put in a position of responsibility – he’s a very expensive idiot.
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