Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Whilst this motion is principally about the Port Kembla steelworks, it does go to employment, as the member for Throsby indicated, including employment in our resources industries and our value-adding industries. Similar to what was in the member for Throsby's motion, on the weekend we heard of 535 jobs going in the zinc concentrate business at Glencore's mine in Mount Isa. That is due, principally, to the cyclical nature of minerals and the low commodity prices. But as you tell people who leave their towns and lose their jobs, that is pretty much cold comfort.

What we in this country must come to realise is that the value-adding industries are, by nature, energy-intensive industries, and until we come to grips with the actual cost of our inputs we will continue to be under pressure here. What we must do is make sure that there are three things that go into making a business successful in value-adding industries: there is your wages component, there is your inputs component and there is your productivity component. We made a decision generations ago that we were going to be a high-wage nation and that we could still be a competitive industry. You can still be a strong industry with higher wages; you can drive innovation because you have that flexibility. We must look at our productivity and how we can drive our productivity into those things to become competitive and to make sure that we are competitive.

When a business like Wulguru Steel in my home city of Townsville can have steel girders imported from China and put in the yard next door to them for cheaper than they can manufacture them—and with an articulated frame crane to lift them across the yard—we know we have a problem. So it comes down to input costs and the costs of energy. What we must do is look at the way we are structuring our national energy market and understand that within our markets coal is not bad. We seem to be getting across this thing in this country where everybody seems to be walking away from coal. Eighty-six per cent of our nation's energy is still supplied by coal. We have got to the situation where we are regulating coal mines and making it awfully hard for coal mines to come up. You cannot smelt without coal; you cannot smelt without the energy and the power that coal and burning provides you. What we must do is come to the realisation that coal mining and the jobs and these things here are ultra-critically important to our steel industry, to our aluminium industry and to our cement industry—to all of those industries where we are value adding the cost of energy to bring those things in there.

In response to the 535 jobs lost on the weekend, local councils and civic leaders in my region have said, 'The federal governments and state governments must do more about job creation.' And yes, we must. We have the Carmichael mine in the north Galilee ready to go, but it is being held up by ambit claims on environmental grounds. And when we have the construction phase of the mine to come, with the export quality of low-ash, low-sulphur thermal coal to places like India for electricity generation, we can see the jobs that are created all the way from the port, with the stevedores and the waterside workers, out to the roads and all the way back along the rail line, all the way to Abbot Point. So whilst this motion is about the Port Kembla steel works, I understand that it does go to the greater concern that we have in regional communities about where our jobs are going and where our people are going to be employed.

That is the critical thing here, because what we are finding is that people like the member for Melbourne will jump up and down and say, 'We can't; we've got to stop these coal mines.' And yet his City of Melbourne is powered by the dirtiest of brown coal of our generation, from the Latrobe Valley. We want to grow our industry and, in places like regional communities like the Illawarra—which is on one of the most beautiful parts of Australia—and in the place where God goes for holiday, being North Queensland, we have to be able to have our chop at providing these jobs. We have to be able to get our heads around providing the social and critical infrastructure to make sure that we help people get the jobs that they go for in the future. It is simply unsustainable for a country like ours just to import steel and steel products and just leave our natural resources in the ground and not exploit them properly and enthusiastically. If we do those things right—if we make sure that our input costs are low and we make sure that our productivity is high—we can have high wages. We can have wages growth and we can have job growth, because that is what we need in the country. I thank the House.

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