Peter McGauran (Gippsland, National Party, Deputy Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

It is entirely right and fitting that we have this debate on climate change here in the Parliament of Australia. The government welcome it. We welcome a debate about future economic prosperity as determined by the government in comparison with the Labor Party’s attitudes and policies on climate change.

However, there is another right, fitting and entirely appropriate place to have this debate and that is out in those regions of Australia that are most directly affected by any arbitrary, knee-jerk policy response by any political party. I could cite my own region of the La Trobe Valley in Gippsland—the brown coal centre of Victoria—which generates about 85 per cent of Victoria’s electricity needs. You could go to Wollongong, the Hunter Valley or the Bowen Basin—some of the great coal export regions of Australia—but also a number of those other resource based regional economies. Let us have the debate there.

I extend here and now an invitation to the member for Kingsford Smith, the shadow minister for the environment, or the member for Lilley, the shadow Treasurer, who just gave his contribution, to debate me. Come down to the La Trobe Valley and debate me on these issues. Let the people decide who has the better responses to climate change to protect jobs as well as Australia’s future economic prosperity. The Labor Party is not taking me up on the invitation. Why would the member for Kingsford Smith especially respond to such an invitation to visit a coal-producing area? After all, he was the one who only a month ago said:

The automatic expansion of the coal industry ... is a thing of the past.

That is what the member for Kingsford Smith believes about the coal industry of Australia. Do not worry about the thousands of direct jobs, let alone the tens of thousands of indirect jobs, at stake here. Callously, cruelly and for politically expedient reasons dismiss their concerns and inject a new level of insecurity amongst those job holders in the coal and resource sectors, especially in the La Trobe Valley.

I ask the member for Kingsford Smith: will you come to the La Trobe Valley and debate these issues with me? He studiously avoids eye contact, let alone responds to me. It is political cowardice for the member for Kingsford Smith—

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