Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Nowhere. Why is it happening? When it comes to telling the people of your policy position and truly putting it in hard language, I can remember Bob Hawke when in government calling the privatisation of government assets an ‘obscenity’—until the government ran out of money and suddenly it was in the national interest to sell off the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories and TAA. Admittedly, TAA went into Qantas, but then they sold Qantas. They then proceeded to sell tranches of the Commonwealth Bank, an icon of Labor ideology—and we sold off the last piece of it. The only bit of family silver left in the parliamentary drawer was Telstra—and, in a commercial sense, it was worthless because we had borrowed $96 billion against its worth in those days. The public voted for Hawke on the understanding that he would never sell anything—and I think the people of Queensland might have voted for Anna Bligh on a similar understanding. The Hawke and Keating governments spent the money from everything that Hawke sold and Keating finished off—and still they borrowed up to $96 billion.

The evidence is that, if you vote Labor, you will find all these sorts of tricks. I love the bit about giving the Australian people a bigger share of the mining industry—the tall poppy syndrome. I have already pointed out that as shareholders and compulsory superannuants they are the owners of those companies. They do share in the profits, even at that level. But, of course, there are the jobs. It is worth noting that there are now two scheduled flights a week between Cairns and Karratha—I think they are 737s, with 150 passengers. With 14 per cent unemployed in Cairns, the people on those planes ain’t goin’ to Karratha for the scenery. They are flying over there because they have a job they cannot get in Cairns. Already, day after day after day, people are announcing, ‘I’m sorry, we’re not going to go ahead with project A, B, C or whatever.’

Gorgon, the minister has told us, means 10,000 jobs in construction, and now it is on the way. There are 10,000 jobs in construction. How many jobs will there be in its operation? Maybe 1,000. As soon as the construction phase stops—or is delayed while the world’s investors make up their minds over whether they are going to risk future investment in Australia; Australia has only a fraction of the necessary money for these projects upfront because we cannot be trusted—those big jobs, the construction jobs, are just going to disappear. It will not be long before the two flights out of Cairns are the first to be cancelled. There are half a dozen flights out of Melbourne. There is a flight through my electorate—and it will still be mine after the election—from Kalgoorlie to Adelaide. The people that travel on that do not go for the scenery, I can tell you. They are not tourists; they are fly-in fly-out workers. The boom in Western Australia is spread across all of Australia.

I like horse racing. On Monday I picked up the ‘Thoroughbreds’ pages of the Australian. The headlines were ‘West Australian buyers still thin on the ground’ and ‘Proposed mining tax to hit Magic Millions Gold Coast sale’. Things are looking grim for the Gold Coast Magic Millions sale of tried stock and brood mares. Why? Because 60 West Aussie businessmen, who are typical attendees, are not coming, and one of them said that he had lost $5 million on his share portfolio and there would be no horses this year. That is the spread—

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