Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Infrastructure is not about generalities or macroeconomics; it is about microeconomics and specifics. The federal government, in putting out their infrastructure priorities, have put out some $23,000 million—I will leave it to other people to argue about broadband. The second item is a true national energy grid. The parliament and the people of Australia truly owe a great debt of gratitude to Martin Ferguson, the minister in this area. I cannot speak for Western Australia or the Pilbara region, but all of Australia’s hard rock metals are in the northern third of Australia. Almost more than a third of the nation’s export earnings are coming from hard rock minerals that are in that top third of the county, and there is no baseload power station within 1,000 kilometres, nor is there even a grid system available in these areas.

The first item mentioned in the infrastructure package after broadband is the national energy grid and the first item mentioned is the north-west minerals province. As late as yesterday morning I spoke, on another matter, to one of the mine developers in the north-west mineral province of Queensland. He raised the issue of electricity and he said the electricity people have quoted him a figure of $1.4 million a month. He said, ‘That will be pretty good.’ I knew his reserves were about $200 million. If you have a seven- or eight-year mine life—which I think would be reasonable in this case—he is looking at $30 million a year in income and $17 million of that for electricity.

If you are not on the national grid, where power is generated at $37 per megawatt hour, but you are off the grid, then you have to look at diesel power, which is enormously costly in terms of CO2 and enormously costly in terms of money. But that is all that is left open to these people—or else to bring gas up from Central Australia, some 1,500 kilometres away, which is servicing this tiny north-western grid at the present moment. But, again, Mount Isa Mines have done a marvellous job in making sure that the state government is aware of the problem and also bringing it to the attention of the federal government. Steve de Kruijff is doing most of that work.

They are consuming about 200 megawatts 24/7. They run all hours of the day, every day of the year. That is about two million megawatt hours, and at $100 per megawatt hour that is $200 million—these figures are very rough and general—and if they have an income, which they have from time to time, of $2,000 million, then they are looking at somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent of their entire income going on electricity. This House constantly talks about carbon. Pushing gas all the way up from Central Australia into Northern Australia and then firing all of Mount Isa Mines with this gas—but not being able to fire any of the other mines in the area—shows the wasteful nature of it.

Joe Gutnick puts it best, I think. He said, ‘If I get the electricity capacity at a reasonable price, and if I get the rail capacity at a reasonable price, then we will open up Legend Phosphate,’ which is a big, mainly Indian group that will be worth $1,500 million to the Australian government. No-one doubts for a moment that this is reality. There has been a lot of talk in the media about Gorgon—$50,000 million. That is a wonderful thing for Australia, undoubtedly. But we produce that every three or four years from the north-west mineral province. It really is peanuts to us. We are producing, every year, $13,000 million for the Australian economy and we have not even got an electricity supply! The most elementary item of infrastructure is not there.

When I asked former Treasurer Costello about this in the House, he said, ‘If private enterprise wants it, then private enterprise will provide it.’ I would like to see Mr Costello, who has never been involved in the commercial world, go out there and try and get 20 or 30 users to agree to take that power exactly when your power station is coming on line. A multi-user facility of its nature cannot be operated by commercial interests. And the proof of the pudding is that it has not been done.

When we talk about infrastructure, with all due respect to the government, broadband is not infrastructure. Quite frankly, at $43,000 million, there is not one single permanent job there—with the exception of the Tamworth tunnel. That is very small beer. To spend $43,000 million of the public’s money and not produce a single permanent job is reprehensible, to say the least. What we provide for the government with this clean energy corridor—the north-west clean energy corridor, as it has come to be known—is an answer to that problem, because Gutnick has said that he will go ahead. That is $1,500 million a year. As luck would have it for the government, that transmission line proposed to go from Mount Isa back to the national grid north of Townsville provides a historic opportunity for them, because at Cloncurry there is 10 megawatts, with a little toy wonder—we appreciate that—photovoltaic operation by the state government.

There is a very big project to take out six million hectares of prickly acacia—an appalling infestation causing the destruction of our native flora and fauna throughout that area. They will take it and burn it and turn it into electricity and replace it with biodiesel trees, which is a magnificent project for Australia. There is 100 megawatts of clean, renewable electricity there, from Julia Creek to Hughenden.

The next town is Pentland, and that is where there is a project of national and historical significance. It is a solar biofuels project. It requires a small dam to take some water down to put an area under sugar cane. During the day the power to the boilers will be provided by solar energy, by solar concentrators, and then during the evening the fuel for the boilers will be provided by sugarcane fibre, which is left over after the sugar is extracted. The sugar will be converted very cheaply into ethanol. There will be over $1,000 million worth of ethanol per year, and there will be some $300-odd million worth of electricity generated as well. The Hells Gate Dam is a very tall dam. It is a very excellent site, a very small ponded area. Because it is so high, there is 100 megawatts of peak load power available there.

The clean energy corridor hits the coast just north of Townsville, near Ingham, where there are two—and, please God, soon to be three—sugar mills. North of that, at Tully, there is another sugar mill. Those four sugar mills, even if there are only three of them, should be able to provide some 200 megawatts of electricity. Instead of burning the sugarcane fibre to simply get rid of it, they can burn it to create electricity—as all the sugar mills do now but only in a very small way.

What we have here is Tennant-Cloncurry, 100 megawatts; Julia Creek-Hughenden, 450 megawatts; at Pentland, the Hells Gate, through the hydroelectricity, another 100 megawatts; and another 200 megawatts on the coast at those four sugar mills—providing 860 megawatts of renewable energy. There are only 40,000 megawatts of renewable energy in Australia. What we are providing here—and I do not want to go into the details of it—is effectively two per cent of Australia’s electricity needs from the North Australia clean energy corridor.

We thank the government and the minister in particular for looking at the project. It will require some government assistance—but very little. I add that North Queensland already has 200 megawatts of renewable energy through our hydro and sugar mills, and if the other sugar mills are converted there is another 400 megawatts there. So we will have 1,500 megawatts on the national grid. For those who are very strongly oriented towards a green and clean Australia, I am not a great fan of Mr Al Gore, but in An Inconvenient Truth, the greenies’ bible—and, I say as an opponent, a good and interesting book—his first solution to CO2 is growing ethanol. Sugar ethanol is infinitely better from a carbon point of view. As good as grain ethanol is—26 per cent benefit—it is infinitely better with sugar. I will not go into that today.

No-one here seems to worry much about the current account. I was not the Treasurer of Australia, but Mr Keating was Treasurer of Australia, and when the current account hit $15 billion he said on the John Laws program in 1986 that we were in danger of becoming a banana republic. John Howard reminded him of that in 1995, when it hit $23 billion. John Howard went on to say that of course the overwhelming economic challenge above all else was our continuing damagingly high current account deficit. No-one in this place seems to worry; they seem to think we get up every morning and there will be food on the table, houses will be built and we will get motorcars. They do not stop for a moment to think about buying something from overseas. We are net importers of just about all food in Australia now. We most certainly are for fruit, vegetables, fisheries and pork. All we are left with as net exporters, really, are beef and grain. In manufacturing, everyone in this House will agree that we import almost everything. Where are we going to get the money to buy these things?

I speak for undoubtedly the richest mineral province on earth. We have not yet touched 500 million tonnes of iron ore. We did not even look for it; we just stumbled across it when we were looking for other things. We have two per cent of the world’s uranium, which has not been touched. We have the largest vanadium deposits in the world—though of very poor quality. Almost all steel contains vanadium. It has not been touched. We have the fourth biggest oil shale deposit in the world. It has not been touched. There are only 24 commercial phosphate deposits in the world. We have four of them. Three of them have not been touched. That does not account for the 20 copper, silver, lead and zinc mines in the area that have not been touched, including Dougall River, which has $20 billion worth of reserves sitting there. They have not been touched. They cannot open this up unless they get infrastructure. The most important infrastructure to them is electricity at a reasonable price.

We provide for the government the opportunity to provide two per cent of Australia’s electricity cleanly and renewably from the North Australia clean energy corridor. We provide for the government four per cent of Australia’s entire petrol need as renewable, non-polluting and with no CO2. This is a wonderful opportunity for the government. The previous government committed to and this government has continued on with a program to close down 20 per cent of what is left of Australia’s agriculture production in the Murray-Darling. Surely it is immoral to close that down in a world where a billion people go to bed hungry every night. Surely there has to be some movement north, where all of Australia’s water is, to provide food from that area. We provide the government with the opportunity to make a small start on a program to resurrect agriculture in Australia, to come to grips with carbon dioxide and to be reminded of the great builders in Australian history.

Theodore built the sugar industry with government finance. The Holden motorcar factory was built with government finance from Ben Chifley. The Snowy Mountains Scheme was built with government finance from Ben Chifley. The Australian coal and aluminium industries were created by Joh Bjelke-Petersen with infrastructure provided by government finance. We stand here today, asking for an enlightened government that will do some true nation building that will put them in the same category as Theodore, Chifley and Bjelke-Petersen. I might add that the current account that John Howard said was $23 billion averages around $60 billion now. We have an opportunity to turn that around. (Time expired)

See this speech in context