Election 2022 live updates: Barnaby Joyce says ‘what China will respect is strength’ in National Press Club address

Q: Following a similar theme, would reserve the right to renege on a coalition deal with the Liberal party depending of what guarantees have to be given in a hung parliament, or alternatively, would you seek to have in that coalition agreement a veto over those deals with the crossbench?

Barnaby Joyce:

These things are hypothetical and I think you open a can of worms when you go down that process. The Nationals obviously, because we are a different party, we negotiate our Coalition agreement with the Liberal, if – and other negotiations I don’t know of, I have no party to, and I will let other people make the decision about it.

Updated at 23.39 EDT

Q: I want to pick you up on negotiating with independents because the idea put forward is that would lead to chaos in the parliament. I want to go back to February when your own aside were holding up the government’s agenda because of vaccine mandates and your own side, basically, toppled at the religious discrimination bill, so when you are talking about chaos in a parliament, I mean, we have already got it.

Barnaby Joyce:

No, we have not.

Q: You have not been able to get your own agenda three.

Joyce:

What you are talking about is a singular issue, one issue. If you have got independents, you are going to happen every day.

You will not have small iterations, from time to rare and infrequent. It will be a daily thing … If independents are the way to go, if that is the righteous, proper process for the government of our nation, then let’s have 151 of them. It will be total and utter chaos.

Updated at 23.38 EDT

Q: Just to follow on that, they don’t know the policy, you mentioned Labor’s housing policy but some of that was incorrect … You still have outspoken senators voting how they say they are going to vote so what is the difference between negotiating with a teal independent and negotiating with a coalition backbencher?

Barnaby Joyce:

Well, the difference is the coalition backbencher has said they support a coalition government. When they went to the people, they said, “If you vote for me, I will be supporting the Nationals and the Liberals on supply and confidence and by doing so giving them the capacity that the prime minister elect – to go to the governor general and say, ‘I have got the numbers’. That is a big difference. What teal people do is they say, ‘I am not going to tell you the …’

And then you say: ‘Hang on… Who am I voting for? I don’t get it. And am I voting for Mr Albanese or Mr Morrison?’

No coalition backbencher has gone to their people before an election and said: ‘Well, although I am in the National party it might be up for grabs.’

Updated at 23.37 EDT

Barnaby Joyce:

I am getting a sense you are not voting for me. There is a whole range of your question I just don’t agree with, and I think I will deal with … them one at a time.

We have made massive investments in health. We actually negotiated for the Murray Darling Basin medical school.

That goes right back to John Andersen when we started expending a capacity in Newcastle.

I have been up to Darwin and talking about the expansion of what we are doing a Charles Darwin University.

I was in Shepparton in two weeks ago and it was investment in allied health. We have got a doctor in David Gillespie. As I said, we have a regional health minister. The Labor party have a minister for the republic so when we take you to a hospital, our idea is to get your blood pressure down. Theirs is to take a photo of the Queen down.

So, this health policy, it is about the movement of doctors in urban areas where we say to you if you work in a regional area, we will take a year off your HECS. If it is a very remote, we will take two years of your HECS. They are not Labor policies …

… The telehealth process – I spoke to Doctor McPhee who looked after the people of Emerald for in excess of 30 years, making sure that people get access … Gabby, we put in our negotiations with the Liberal party in excess of about $66m to get new magnetic resonance machines into regional areas so that if someone has cancer we can find out about it soon and get them the treatment and I can go on and on and on, Gabby.

We can go and show you how – the expansion of our prescriptions, so when you get prescriptions, you pay less amount of money if you are a pensioner. These are all part of our health policy. Do we have a challenge as we go forward? Yes, we do. I’ll be trying to address it? Yes, we are.

Do we have a regional health minister? Yes, we do. Have we seen an alternative from the Labor party or the Greens? No, we have not.

On the next issue, we say these things make people unpopular – so many times I read in the paper when I know the polling and I hear something and I go, ‘someone has been fed like a Chook’.

They have given them something and they have swallowed it whole. I know the polling of what they have said is not right.

Q: So, the polling is wrong?

Joyce:

What I acknowledge is that, yes, in certain areas where there is a soft vote, especially in urban areas, they want to understand that we have made – the Nationals – have made a commitment with the prime minister and we are sticking to it, right? And that is your answer.

Updated at 23.34 EDT

Q: It is estimated that is about $4bn that Australia is missing out because of the lack of services and stuff. It is hard to get a GP in rural Australia right now. People are starting to regular book every couple of months to collect their ailments because they can’t get there when they are sick. Telecommunications has been dodgy for a long time and notwithstanding the bit of money that was thrown out in this campaign in response to the regional – rural telecommunications review there has not been a lot of that has been done over the last decade since you have been in government.

We are going into an inflationary environment, and people have high exposure to debt because it regional housing prices are running through the roof, rentals are short. I think in one of your local towns, Tamworth, it is about 0.7% is the rental vacancy.

Barnaby Joyce:

I am with you, Gabrielle. So, a health question and a rental question?

Q: No, no. We have got those conditions, right? In the meantime, the thing that you are known for most, right across the country …

Joyce:

Johnny Depp’s dogs

Q: Well, no. There is something more than that. It is the $100 roast and it is the prosecution of the climate wars, and so, while you have been off on the kind of climate frolic, these traditional services that we need in rural Australia are lost. So, given the recent intervention by your senator Matt Canavan on net zero being …

Joyce:

A long question … I have got a bleeding nose.

Q: I have got so many questions. I am told that if the Nats went backwards in all of their seats after Senator can advance intervention. So, haven’t you given those conditions failed on your key KPIs in terms of representing the bush.

Updated at 23.31 EDT

Q: Can I just pull you. .. up, Labor is matching your safeguard mechanism but effectively, lowering the threshold. Isn’t it the fact that at the moment, you are not actually enforcing the safeguard mechanism so the companies involved with this?

Barnaby Joyce:

There are exceptional circumstances defining how the baseline works. There are a number of ways you can define how the baseline lease with the point of the ceiling is that it was precisely a ceiling. To stop emissions being let off the hook and going through the roof. That is what it was about. What they have brought in is not a ceiling.

They have brought in a cave with a low roof, and this – they are going to keep winding it down and they have not put forward a policy of an alternate industry. We want to develop and alternate industry so that in the future people can make a choice.

Updated at 23.29 EDT

Q: Mr Joyce, I don’t think it’s remarkable to say your job as National party leader is to win National party seats first, and government second. Some of your Liberal colleagues say they are paying a very high price for the perception that you’re not ambitious enough on climate change. What would you say to those Liberal colleagues and the Coalition voters who vote for them if they end up losing will you be overseeing a Pyrrhic defeat?

Barnaby Joyce:

A Pyrrhic defeat. No, let’s have a look, our nation is an honourable nation. Why? Because we make agreements and we stick to them*. We have honoured every agreement, right now, Boris Johnson says he wants to take a break from his 2050 target.

(*The French would probably say something different.)

Germany, Italy are firing up the coal-fired power stations again. There was $35 billion in fossil fuels that the – 35bn euro, sorry, that the European Union bought off Russia in the first week – in the first month of the Ukraine crisis. They only euros of aid into the Ukraine.

This is the reality of the world.

… China, which produces half the coal in the world, their last two quarters were records amount. Record. Record production in coal.

What our nation does, and what’s so good about us, this is why we are so diligent we make promises and keep to them. We are doing that. So when we do this, we make sure that we nutted out as how we are going to get there, how we keep our economy stable, and right now you are seeing it. We developing an alternate industry. Not a transition, alternate. Our alternate is hydrogen. We invested more or hydrogen through the campaign than the Labor party has. They haven’t even got – our investment in renewables is massively ahead of theirs.

So, when it the truth is understood, we are a noble nation who abides by their agreements when other nations are stepping away, and through this campaign, we have invested more in an alternative industry, in the hydrogen industry than at the Labor party which, to be quite honest, I don’t know what alternative industry they are investing in.

What they have talked about is in transition and in regional areas transition is read as unemployment. The policy is to reduce the safeguard mechanism. We have a safeguard mechanism. It is like the ceiling on this. It is out of the way but it stopped going through the roof.

They are going to bring the ceiling down to about head level for tall people and that is going to be around 213, 215 of them will bolt their heads on the fans and the lights and they will be a new tax placed on them and we can’t have that. We have an honorable position and a logical position.

Updated at 23.26 EDT

There is a brief interlude while Barnaby Joyce’s nose bleed is addressed.

I know you are going to get 1,001 photos of me with a Kleenex to my nose, congratulations. So the alternative is I leave. Barnaby Joyce suffers from a bleeding nose during his address to the National Press Club in Canberra. Photograph: Dean Lewins/AAP

Updated at 23.31 EDT

Q: The company says it needs an extra $2.5m. To finish that.

Barnaby Joyce:

That’s the question. You are saying are you going to allocate more money to a business case for a coal-fired power station, not whether you agree with a business case for a coal-fired pow station because there a business case that partially done on a coal-fired power station for Collinsville, now we have to come to the question do we allocate more money to that and that’s a realm much other things we need to consider.

Updated at 23.22 EDT

Q: Mr Joyce in your speech you said that Labor was being deceitful for saying something in the Hunter Valley, different …

Joyce: I’m still listening. Hold on yes. Keep going …

(His nose is still bleeding.)

Q: To what it was saying in the cities – but what we are seeing at the moment is Nationals MPs saying that they support a coal-fired power station in central Queensland, Liberal MPs saying it is never going to happen. We are seeing you say you want more coalmines in the Galilee Basin, Scott Morrison has refused to say that when he was asked at a press conference in this campaign. And we have seen your candidates say that next zero emissions is flexible. Nationals candidates and Liberal MPs say that’s not right. So isn’t it the Coalition being more egregious talking out of both sides of your mouth, given the issues with Liberal MPs facing more climate conscious constituents, does that make the Coalition agreement between the Liberals and Nationals more vulnerable?

Joyce:

No, don’t you love you get a bleeding nose in a press club. Anyway. No, it doesn’t. Because what we are doing is both the Labor party and ourselves are talking about if there is – we have got to make sure our nation earns as much money as possible. We can’t do that if we shut down coal exports.

So what they are saying is completely in line where our policy is. We are saying you have to understand global demand, global demand for coal is a sign that the world is still buying it. If the world doesn’t buy it we won’t be selling in I but they are buying it and buying it in record amounts record prices.

Q: Your MPs are saying they support a coal-fired power station in central Queensland, Liberals are saying it is never going to happen. How is that an honest conversation?

Joyce:

We are undertaken the business case for a coal-fired power station in con That’s the process at foot. Now, whether in how that comes to a conclusion or whether it comes to a conclusion, by reason that we have basically used the money we was allocated to do it, is the discussion, so when you say are we going through the assessment of coal-fired power station and Collinsville, that is actual policy. There is a business case that will be undertaken on that. Barnaby Joyce answers questions from journalists at the Press Club in Canberra this afternoon. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Updated at 23.22 EDT