Delivering energy and infrastructure for all Australians

The Australian Open is over, which means the year has officially begun. The turn of the year invariably involves planning, having a break and housekeeping, but Australia Day and the Australian Open represent the last hurrah before the red meat of the year.

Right on cue, we see a blackout in Victoria. I said last year the family would return from holidays, Mum and Dad would go back to work, the airconditioners would go on and the lights would go out.

In Victoria, that is precisely what happened.

Premier Daniel Andrews is desperately saying “look here, look there, look somewhere else”. No, Daniel, you are the Premier and this is another example of Labor being unable to provide the basic essentials.

Mr Andrews is saying it is a “localised problem”. That is true in a sense: it is a problem localised to Labor states: South Australia last year, Victoria this year.

South Australia seems to have fixed the problem caused by closing its coal-fired power stations by bringing in temporary diesel generators. I’m not sure if that’s so much solving the problem as it is putting a very small Band-Aid on a very big wound.

Early in the new year, we began laying the steel for the inland rail — 165m lengths to build a corridor of commerce from Melbourne to Brisbane, invigorating the growth of Parkes where Pacific National is building a $35 million facility to complement the increase in rail freight for the area, the crossover point for the Perth-to-Sydney and new Melbourne-to-Brisbane route.

We want to build our own inland centres of growth, like America did with Fort Worth and China is doing with Khorgas.

It was seminal to the further growth of our nation to have steel produced by Australian workers at Whyalla in South Australia being laid by Australian workers at Peak Hill in NSW.

The new Minister for Agriculture, David Littleproud, and I have great sentimental attachment to that portfolio. The minister has just returned from India where he has been furthering our agricultural opportunities in that huge market.

Malcolm Turnbull has announced a major program of defence manufacturing, exporting to countries that uphold our rules-based approach to global conduct.

New dams and water infrastructure are being built in central Tasmania. Money has been allocated for water infrastructure to increase horticulture north of Adelaide, and also for stock and domestic requirements in the Wimmera; and we are hoping this year we can go further with new projects such as Rookwood Weir on the Fitzroy River in central Queensland. Townsville is on level-three water restrictions, with the Ross River Dam at historic lows and pumping from the Burdekin Dam starting in November — and last election neither side put forward a formidable plan of new water infrastructure for our largest northern city.

I spent some time driving the length of the Bruce and Pacific highways to get further understanding of what I believe is a national vision for a major highway that connects the top of our nation to the bottom, to build on and improve current road infrastructure and to complete duplication works. The next-priority projects will be to bypass the remaining bottlenecks such as Coffs Harbour in NSW, north of Gympie in Queensland and the Newcastle section.

We will continue to seal the third road going east-west across our nation from Winton in western Queensland to Laverton in Western Australia.

And what do the Greens and the left offer us? They want to change Australia Day. They dwell on philosophical arguments, which don’t seal a kilometre of road, won’t lay a metre of rail or build a megalitre of water storage — but will apparently make our nation a stronger place.

What you can rely on is they have an unending list of philosophical arguments and an insatiable thirst to bowl them up to the public, writhing and twisting with feigned fury as they fight for the next nebulous cause.

All we would end up with under their stewardship is a nation that twists and turns inside itself.

Ironically, we would lose the capacity to have any effect on projecting our values to anywhere else in the world. No one listens to the pauper in the pulpit; we need to be strong in all facets if we want people to take us seriously in what we say.

We can’t be overly distracted from the tasks that make us stronger, such as building the inland rail, building our export markets, our defence technologies, our roads, our dams, all while keeping the lights on.

Finally, we have to do all of this while doing our best to balance the books — a task that may not be high colour for the commuter in the traffic, but we don’t want our nation to take its card to the counter to buy groceries and see “transaction declined, see issuer”.

The Coalition has a mighty task but it is well down the path and the process of delivering it.

Barnaby Joyce is the Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Nationals.