Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Hansard source

I rise on a matter of extreme importance to my home state of South Australia. It was a day of economic infamy yesterday in my home state, when BHP announced that due to increased pressure on them in relation to capital expenditure and the downturn in commodity prices they would not be proceeding with the expansion of the Olympic Dam mine up in Roxby Downs in South Australia. This, of course, has been the project that the state Labor government has been spruiking for some 10 years as the great saviour for the South Australian economy. In part, they were right to have been spruiking that, because the project itself in its construction phase alone would have created some 10,000 additional jobs in South Australia, with a huge economic flow-on, giving South Australia a real leg-up for the future.

Sadly, for months and months and months, BHP, Rio Tinto, the Minerals Council and other organisations, as well as some in the federal parliament, have been raising concerns about the increasing cost of doing business in Australia, making it harder for companies like BHP to go ahead with these investments to create the circumstances for prosperity in states like South Australia.

We saw the outcome of that yesterday, when the BHP board decided not to proceed at this time with the current project and indeed to recalibrate the project. It is very sad that Jay Weatherill, the Premier of South Australia, and his little sidekick, the resources minister, who have been assuring South Australians for months that this would not be the case and that this project would go ahead, have been completely blindsided by their federal colleagues and the appalling way that the federal Labor Party is managing the economy.

Jac Nasser, the Chairman of BHP, made very clear in May this year that there were four factors that were impacting on investment decisions in Australia, making Australia a high-cost economy. We hear these members over here on the Labor side, who have no care for the people of South Australia, and they sit there and put their carbon tax on, they put their mining tax on, they reregulate the labour market and they make it harder for investment to be made in South Australia and in our country, and this will be the legacy of your government. The legacy of the Gillard-Rudd government will be that there is less investment—this lack of investment in the mining sector. When big companies like BHP, who are worldwide companies, look to invest across the globe, cost factors in one of those countries impact, and they have impacted on us; they have impacted on South Australia. Long be the shame on the federal Labor government for delaying this project and for delaying the benefits that would have flowed to my state through this investment from BHP, all because of the Gillard Labor government and its policies.

See this speech in context