Barnaby Joyce attacks the Australian
Greens over 'secret deals' with Labor.
Greens over 'secret deals' with Labor.
Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce has launched a scathing election-eve attack on the Australian Greens, who look set to hold the balance of power in the upper house after the federal election.
The Greens hold five Senate seats, but opinion polls have them boosting their representation to seven or eight, which would effectively give them a casting vote on contentious issues.
Senator Joyce told a Rural Press Club breakfast in Brisbane on Thursday that there were secret deals between the Greens and Labor that could see the reintroduction of death duties, a 50 per cent top marginal tax rate and an end to coal mining, live cattle exports, rodeos and fishing.
"We will see a Labor-Green deal," Senator Joyce said of a Labor victory on Saturday. "The Labor Party are only going to get about 40 per cent of the vote and if they win, they'll win (on) the Green preferences and the Greens will have every right to say: `You got there because of us and you will pay the piper and (we) will call the tune'.
"Death duties will come back, and Julia Gillard might say no, but it's not her choice because the Greens determine what goes through the Senate."
Senator Joyce said the Greens' anti-mining stance would deliver "a nation full of wind chimes and windmills".
He said he also feared for the future of Australia's $500 million rice industry, which exports to more than 70 countries, including many poor African nations.
Senator Joyce said the Labor government was unwilling to release the plan for the Murray-Darling Basin because of the Greens deal.
"If you take the capacity to feed 20 million people out of the top of the chain then there's someone on the bottom of the chain that doesn't get fed - somebody you haven't seen, some person living in Kenya, some person living in southern Sudan who doesn't get fed because you made the decision that you weren't going to grow rice," he said.
"So how many people do we want to starve to death because of this decision?
"What is the appropriate moral bounce? Is it appropriate that 10,000 people starve to death or maybe 20,000?"
