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

The honourable member for Herbert from Townsville mentioned the CopperString proposal. But, if the state and federal governments of Australia give us electricity and a port outlet in the gulf, then we can give back the Guildford coalmine at Hughenden; the three uranium mines—Westmoreland, Valhalla and resurrecting the Mary Kathleen; Roseby; Cannington; CuDECO at Cloncurry; Gunpowder, Legends Phosphate; Dougall River—copper, silver, lead and zinc in that case; Duchess; Ardmore, if you like to be technical; phosphate deposits in the Northern Territory; the three iron ore deposits at Constance Range; Ernest Henry; Monakoff E1 Camp at Kuridala, the old mining town being resurrected once again; and Merlin. That is 17 mines, bringing in $12,000 million dollars a year to the Australian economy. I have not included dozens of others which are on the mining map of Queensland. These are the most prominent ones that I am aware of. I have not included the other 10 here, and I have not included Julia Creek which, arguably, has the biggest vanadium deposits in the world and the fourth-biggest oil shale deposits in Australia.

We can deliver to you if you give us the infrastructure. We can deliver to you some $12,000 million dollars of revenue. If you build the CopperString line out to Mount Isa, we can provide for you the second-biggest wind farm in the world at Hughenden, Windlab. These people are not whistling Dixie or living in fantasy land. They have spent tens of millions of dollars on these projects between Charters Towers and Pentland, which will provide for you a duplication of a third of the Australian sugar industry, some 10 to 12 million tonnes of sugar a year from that project.

We can do all these wonderful things for you. We can provide some 25,000 jobs for you. All we are asking from you is assistance. We thank the federal government for their assistance on the CopperString line. We thank the federal government for their assistance in the Pentland proposal, and we thank the opposition, and the member for Herbert too, for their support for these proposals which are so vital for all of North Queensland.

As time makes my delivery rather disjointed, I will conclude by saying that, whilst we need most certainly the electricity—25 per cent of the cost of mining is the cost of electricity—unless we have the electricity there, we have to go not from grid system power at about $80 a megawatt but to diesel at $240 a megawatt— (Time expired)

See this speech in context