Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, they did not. Inpex, which is 30 per cent owned by the Japanese government and has French energy giant Total as a partner in the project, could not afford to wait. Less is more; $20 billion less is not good. The processing plant for the massive Icthys LNG plant will be the biggest resources investment Australia has ever seen and one of Japan’s biggest overseas investments. It is a key element in forward planning for Japanese energy security and is expected to provide up to 10 per cent of Japan’s energy needs when it comes on stream, as well as marking a 50 per cent increase in Australia’s total LNG exports. The first shipments from the plant were expected in Japan in 2012. That schedule has now been pushed back to 2014 by ALP bungling, but Japan will tolerate no further delays.

So, no, they could not await the whim of some disinterested ALP figures. It is a high-stakes project and they required certainty. The company wanted to build their processing plant on the Maret Islands, near where they extract the gas, off the Kimberley coast. But, ultimately, the treatment they received from the WA government and the federal environment minister drove them to consider more extreme options, including spending an extra $700 million to pipe the gas to Darwin and build a processing plant there. The company have since said they have not made a final decision on the plant but have started preparatory drilling in Darwin’s harbour anyway. It seems likely the project will go to Darwin and likely that the ALP governments in both Canberra and Perth knew of this and tried to hush it up before the recent WA election. The new WA Premier, Colin Barnett, is seeking to secure the project for our state, but the signs are that it may be too late—and the federal environment minister could well still veto any plan to site the project in the Kimberley. The message to the global business community is that Australia will take their money but only on Australia’s terms. The message is that we are unreliable and unresponsive. The message is that we don’t care. This is the message being sent by Labor, and this is a disgrace.

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