What an idiot, page-20

Even Judith Sloan at the Oz took aim and potted him for how hopeless he is.

Let me run through some of the appalling policy positions he has pushed, to the detriment of the national interest and ordinary Australians:

• He supported re-regulation of the sugar industry in Queensland even though several hundreds of millions of dollars of public money was used to compensate farmers for the deregulation of the industry;

• He endorsed the building of the dubious, vastly expensive inland railway even though there has been insufficient scrutiny and cost-benefit analysis of the project;

• He equivocated about the building of a mine in his electorate while professing support for the resources industry more generally;

• He insisted the pesticides/agricultural chemicals regulatory agency be shifted from Canberra to his electorate even though the case was not established — an instance of pure pork-barrelling;

• The Murray-Darling Basin Plan is on the point of collapse but Joyce has been missing in action;

• He has been silent about alleged theft of irrigated water in the northern parts of the basin; and

• He takes credit for rising agricultural prices when answering questions in parliament, which is both witless and bizarre.