De-Anne Kelly (Dawson, National Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Transport and Regional Services) Share this | Hansard source

which is investing in clean coal technology. There is the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate—six countries that have got together, accounting for more than 55 per cent of global output and 49 per cent of global emissions, and are forging a partnership to look at a way forward. So action plans are in place, and later this week we will hear from the Prime Minister’s task force on emissions, with a practical plan, one that will not create bumps, as Senator Brown says, in Central Queensland and the Bowen Basin coalfields, destroying the futures and the opportunities of young people in our region.

I want to look very briefly at the unemployment rate in Mackay in 1995 under the previous government. Unemployment peaked in January 1995 at 13.9 per cent, an absolute shame. At the end of the last year it was down to just 3.9 per cent. The Allen Consulting Group report that looked at the question of supporting, signing and ratifying the Kyoto protocol said that one of the areas that would be hardest hit by complying with Kyoto was in fact the Central Queensland coalfields. They predicted high levels of unemployment. We know what it was when the coal industry was much smaller and far less significant in our area. Labor got unemployment up to 13.9 per cent. Frankly, I shudder to think what it would be if they continued to seek Green preferences—and we know they have done a secret deal, only it was not much of a secret because it was in the Courier-Mail, a bit like the secret campaign being run on the government’s climate achievements in that furphy of a suspension of standing orders.

But that is the reality for our area—Senator Brown calls us a bump. We know that the coal industry is in the sights of the Labor Party and the Greens in the future. I am certainly going to make it my task to see that the futures of young people and the prosperity in our region is not signed away in a cheap preference deal by a citicentric government focused on Sydney and Melbourne votes in the latte-set areas.

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