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

Spot prices—call them what you like; the price has gone up 30 per cent. You cannot deny that. But, if you listened to Mr Swan, you would think that commodity prices had really tumbled through the floor.

Look at the coal mining industry in my electorate: coal mines have closed down; coal mines have been put up for sale. BMA have only just put Gregory Crinum on the map to sell off. If this keeps going, all our mining personnel will end up working in places like Mongolia, Mozambique and Africa. Take Ken Talbot, who used to live in my electorate, and who was unfortunately killed in Africa in a plane crash—his whole team were over there investigating new mining ventures.

So if we keep on killing the goose that lays the golden egg, we will have nothing left. Our manufacturing industry is on the ropes. Retail businesses are not doing well. And, apart from that, it is the foreign investment in Australia that we must continue to attract. Otherwise, we will end up in a situation where we are left as a Third World country, and no-one here would like to see that happen. But if we keep taxing the mining industry, as our Treasurer intends to do, that is what will happen, and you can see it happening at this very moment. Add a carbon tax to a mining tax, and you get businesses like Rio Tinto—who, in Gladstone, employ 6,000 people—starting to look at their balance sheets and asking, 'Do we need this business or do we divest?' of things like the Boyne smelter.

That is what we are faced with as Australians. A lot of our good expertise in the mining industry has gone to places like Mongolia. When I was last speaking to the Ambassador for Mongolia he said: 'We love Australians; their expertise is helping us to expand our coal industry. You know', he said, 'we will soon be in a position to send our coal by rail into China and Russia; at the moment, we are doing it by truck.' So that tells you something about what is happening. Twenty years ago, Indonesia did not export one tonne of coal; now it is a bigger exporter than Australia. Indonesia exports over 30 per cent of the world's coal. We were over 30 per cent; we are now under 30 per cent. So you can make up your own mind. Even blind Freddy could see that.

Wasteful Wayne has wasted the dollars and is trying to get them back through the industry, but—

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