Barry Haase (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This whole debate is disappointing me a great deal, primarily, the motivation for it. On the surface of it you may take the member for Page’s motion and think, ‘Here is a woman with great concern for her electorate, great concern for the future of the Australian industry.’ I find that that is so far from the truth.

As we go into this debate we find more and more from the member for Page’s own lips and from the member for Capricornia’s own lips the fact that this debate is about keeping union jobs and serving union masters. I am so disappointed to hear that because I speak for a quarter of the Australian land mass. In that quarter of the Australian landmass there is not one full-time cattle abattoir.

Members of the government need to get out and about, open their eyes, take theirs heads out of the sand, do some travel and find out what the real world is all about. It is not about tree hugging. It is not about bleating as the member for Freemantle did about the poor citizens of Fremantle that have got to look at stock travelling through their electorate—for God’s sake. It is about my pastoralists making a quid. It is about the members that live in Freemantle maybe realising why they live there in the first place—because it is a port. They all want to live with the kitsch and the cappuccinos of the port and they forget that it is a port.

If we get dinkum about that we will realise that no one with a quid in their pocket and a right mind is going to start an abattoir in north-western Australia. There is not a population centre that can staff it, for starters; we have got a mining industry that is burgeoning and draining employment away; and we have a government that does all it can to get in the way of employing 457 visa employees and skilled workers from other countries. If you put your money into an abattoir in north-western Australia you would be stark-raving mad.

The other reality is that we have a government that is supposedly very concerned about carbon emissions, carbon footprints and food that is travelling the least distance. To send cattle 2½ thousand kilometres from the Kimberley to an abattoir in Western Australia is going to add thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide in diesel emissions and add $100 to the cost of transportation of that beast.

I do not expect members of the government to understand that, because understanding is not something they are big on, but when they come into this House with a motion that proves their stupidity and clearly shows their ignorance then I have a difficult time with that.

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