Ken O'Dowd (Flynn, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Let me get on with it, please! Do not take the resources industry for granted. It may not always be there. In only 2002 you could have bought a house in Blackwater for about $7,000 or $8,000—if you had the guts, but a lot of people did not, including me. The coal days were numbered then. That same house today would probably be worth about $500,000 or would be getting you at least $2,000 a week in rent. That is how things can change.

I had to laugh at the member for Hunter talking about how we go about borrowing money on big projects, as though we would not know. But it is all overseas money on big projects. When you are talking about $8 billion, $10 billion and $70 billion, it is not Australian money; it is overseas money and normally Chinese money. On a lesser scale, our banks even today borrow 30 per cent of their money from overseas to look after housing and small business. Small business is getting a bit of a hiding at the moment too, and they are finding it very hard to borrow money. Just ask the cattle man if he got to borrow money for buying stock. It is very hard to get money. You need very good cash flow and you need assets to back it.

The mining industry is faced with a lot of uncertainties today. We in Australia are the largest exporters of coal. Going back to 18 years ago, would you believe that our neighbour Indonesia did not export any coal? Today Indonesia is the biggest exporter of coal in the world. It exports well over 30 per cent and we have dropped to under 30 per cent. Our miners in Australia today face a lot of hurdles. It is not only the MRRT and the carbon tax. We are now looking down the barrel of these new shipping costs. We are an island nation, and of course we have to ship most of our products by sea. This really pertains to Rio Tinto in Gladstone, Weipa, Tasmania and New Zealand. If the shipping costs on top of each other break them down, not only does the Gladstone production break down but Weipa breaks down, Bell Bay in Tasmania breaks down and so does New Zealand.

So that is what the industry is facing today. There must be certainty. If you talk to big mining companies who look like coming to Australia—and I have recently spoken to a big company, the second biggest company in the world—they say, 'We can give you a list of 10 good reasons we could come to Australia, but we can also give you a list of 30 reasons why we shouldn't'. That is what we mean about certainty. They want certainty before they will come to Australia because there are big development costs involved in setting up, whether it be for gas, iron ore or coal, and this government has not been able to deliver it.

That was in the Prime Minister's statement. She is trying to run with the hounds and hunt with the fox. She is trying to run with the union but, on the other hand, she wants to keep in with those big miners—the Rineharts, the Twiggy Forrests and the Clive Palmers. Two weeks ago in this House, the government were saying what horrible people the big miners were. They were shockers; they were out there. Clive Palmer actually saved 1,000 jobs in Townsville, in the refinery. Gina Rinehart, one of the most successful women in the world—probably the most successful—invested her dollars wisely, worked hard and has been very successful. But they were no good. All the big industries that come to Australia, companies like Queensland Alumina in Gladstone and Queensland Cement, now Cement Australia, are the worst polluters in the world—and the government tell them that.

How do we give these industries coming to Australia confidence that we do want them? They create good jobs and they create well paying jobs. Our miners are the best paid miners in the world. Our gas workers are the best paid gas workers in the world. I wish someone from the other side of the House would go up to my area today and sort out the dispute between BMA and the unions, who are on strike in six coalmines. BMA have actually closed down Norwich Park in the last month. Five hundreds job there have gone. What are the government doing? Have they gone to sleep at the post? I think they might have.

As I have stated before in this place, Australia is becoming less and less attractive to investors, and this is what we have to do something about. We are all for the migration scheme itself. We are all for giving jobs. In fact, in my area we could not exist without the immigration of skilled workers and also unskilled workers. Unskilled workers play just as big a role in my area as skilled workers do. There is a citrus plantation in Emerald which employs 500 South Pacific islanders in a year. That plantation could not operate without those workers from overseas; I am talking about Tongans, Fijians and Samoans. They do a fantastic job. Without them it would not work.

Pig farmers currently bring in 457 visa holders to work in the pig industry. Mundubbera and Gayndah use Pacific Island workers and also backpackers. Backpackers play a very big part in our economy all around Australia. When I had a pub I used to rely mainly on backpackers for workers. I went to a very remote pub in my electorate, a place called Cracow. I walked in there thinking I was going to find the publican, but I found two Irish girls. They had been running the pub for 10 months and they looked like being there for another 10 months. That was the only staff that publican could get because in the meantime he had bought another pub not too far away.

It is essential that we have these migrant worker programs. To say we are against jobs is just wrong. We love to see people working. We love to see industry thriving. We like to get out of their way, get our hands out of their pocket and let them get on with getting the resources out of the ground and getting them sold overseas.

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