Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thought we were going to get something a little bit profound today and that we might get some insights into the needs of northern Australia, but what we got was a recitation of a set of statistics that anyone who has anything to do with the economic growth of Australia is well and truly familiar with. It seems that the member believes she has just discovered that we have Asia up there and there is this massive market. This has been a great process that has been happening in Australia since the Second World War—since the days of John Curtin. We have gradually come to realise that our geography is something that will ultimately determine our destiny. It is not the province of any particular government to say that they are the ones who have discovered this and developed it. If you look at the record of the Hawke-Keating years in focusing us on our northern neighbours you will see that that was a great leap forward. Every government since then has recognised that.

The idea that the previous Labor government or Labor governments before that had neglected the North is complete and palpable nonsense. I certainly, as the minister responsible for building ports and roads in Western Australia, was well and truly aware of the difficulty of extracting any money out of the Howard government to do any of the great big projects that we needed in Western Australia. As I have said before in this place, we were able to get funding from the federal Labor government for the North. The duplication of the Dampier Highway was a $110 million project, $90 million of which was the federal government's contribution. The rerouting of the Great Northern Highway into Port Hedland was a massive, much-needed project. The federal contribution to that was $191 million. $195 million was contributed by federal Labor into the expansion of the Ord River and a further $10 million was committed to advance the rollout of stage 3. Then we had Regional Development Australia, which invested $700 million to leverage programs of $1.9 billion. Many of those were in the north of the state. So the track record of Labor in having a focus on the North and in being prepared to provide that big infrastructure development is fair.

I enjoy being on the northern Australia committee. I want to compliment our chair, the member for Leichhardt, who I think is doing a good job. There is enormous potential, but we have to ensure that we follow the science. There is a lot of boosterism going on. A lot of really quite crazy projects, I have to say, are coming before us. The potential there is enormous, but we must be disciplined about this and look at the evidence that we are getting from the CSIRO as to what is sustainable.

We have seen enormous potential to develop irrigation. By not having massive dams on rivers but using a sustainable yield from the ground water we could see 120,000 hectares of new irrigated land that would enable us to not only lift agricultural and horticultural production but have our beef industry in the north of Australia be a much more vertically integrated operation, able to finish off cattle and have abattoirs there and really be the food bowl for Australia. But, as I say, there is so much boosterism that we need to be very, very careful that we work through this in a very productive way.

I also say that it is absolutely essential, if we are to get the proper development of northern Australia, that we make sure that we are bringing the Indigenous communities with us, that we are not slashing and burning their opportunities to get themselves into a sustainable position by slashing health funding and family services. (Time expired)

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