Want to know what Tamworth will be like in 20 years? Look at Toowoomba, Barnaby Joyce says

There were 60,000 people living in Toowoomba when Mr Joyce was living in Queensland two decades ago, he told a room full of business people at a lunch hosted by the Tamworth Business Chamber.

Now the city has a population of 145,000.

“Don’t think it’s not going to happen here, it will,” Mr Joyce said.

“But we’ve got to start planning now. We’ve started to look at all those mechanisms for setting up a city of that size, and it’s going to work a lot better than other cities in the past when they didn’t have that foresight.

“You’ve got to have a vision, if you don’t have a vision, nothing will happen. And then you’ve got to have the ticker, the cogency and a bit of mongrel about you to drive agendas.”

While it was officially a state of the nation address, Mr Joyce spent much of his speech talking about the state of New England and his vision for his home town.

To support Tamworth’s expected growth, Mr Joyce said the city needed more water – like the Dungowan dam upgrade, which will take the dam from 6.3 gigalitres to 44 gigalitres.

“The Chaffey Dam upgrade should get us to around 100,000 plus people, if we get Dungowan built, we should be able to push up to about 150,000 people,” he said.

Mr Joyce has already committed $75m to the project and turned the heat up on the NSW government to co-fund the project.

“We need the state government to be on board and push this agenda ahead, because in the end it’s their asset,” he said.

“If we lose government, that $75 million is gone. We will not get it and it will not get built.”

Mr Joyce said one of Tamworth’s biggest advantages was its location, sitting halfway between Brisbane and Sydney.

“Those are huge population bases – therefore we have to increase our roads going both north and south,” he said, pointing to the Bolivia Hill realignment and the Scone and Tenterfield bypasses.

On a national scale, Mr Joyce touched on driving down the budget.

“A nation’s budget has four main costs – defence, social security, education and health,” Mr Joyce said.

“If you want to control the budget and turn it around, and you’re not prepared to go into those spaces, you’re not going to get control of your budget.

“It’s a tough game. It’s always hard and you never get friends when you’re trying to turn around a budget.”