Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Lyne for his question. I also thank him for his consideration of the minerals resource rent tax and for his understanding of the shape of Australia's economy today and the great potentials which lie in the future for our country. Realising those potentials means that we need to better tax the area of the economy which is turbocharged and to share those benefits with other areas of the economy, but it also means that we need to address important questions about how we are going to work through issues associated with water, soil and food, with coal seam gas and with major coal projects, and also how we are dealing with the tax work which was spoken about at the recent tax forum, including concerns about royalty increases by state governments.

To go quickly through those areas, as I indicated to Labor members who raised with me community concerns in their own area about coal seam gas and large-scale coalmining, coal seam gas is going to be an important fuel for our future. What we can do as a federal government is value-add in our traditional roles of scientific leadership, coordinating the states and driving them to best practice, and that is what the government has agreed to do: to ensure that there is a well-resourced scientific body that can make the right assessments of Australia's land so that that dataset is available to everyone, including local communities, and a national partnership so we drive state governments up to coordinated best-practice standards. Local communities are empowered along the way, because that scientific information will be in their hands too. I think that that is an important development and one that has been the subject of intense discussion with the members for New England and Lyne and is a value-add to what the Commonwealth has traditionally done in these areas of planning.

In addition, the member for Lyne has raised with me how we can ensure that across our nation our water, soil and food production for the future is in the right balance. With this being the Asian century, we have huge opportunities in front of us for food production. We are seeing the rise of middle classes in Asia to more than a billion people by the end of 2020, and they will want what we have—that is, they will want high-quality, clean, green food; they will want to buy premium wine; and they will also want to go to parts of Australia that have retained their natural beauty and be able to come here for tourism purposes. That does require us to make sure that we work in balance across those areas, and the government has agreed to create a cabinet-level working group on water, soil and food. We have agreed that the members for Lyne and New England will participate in that working group, and I thank them for their agreement to do that.

Finally, the member for Lyne has been a long-time advocate for dealing with the question of inefficient state taxes. He has raised directly the question of state royalties and, in light of the MRRT, the government believes that that should be looked by the John Brumby-Nick Greiner review which is working in the area of GST reform. So I thank the member who asked the question and also the member for New England for their support and for understanding today's economy and the future for Australia.

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