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

I am pleased to rise to speak on this motion brought forward by the member for Dawson. The issue here is not so much about the EPBC Act, as far as I am concerned. For those of us who live and operate and work in northern Australia, it is about the system that allows certain projects to be targeted. This is where we come from.

Recently I had a minister in Townsville and we were talking about why we were developing northern Australia. The thing is that we sit there and say that we want to develop northern Australia. He said, 'We should be developing southern Australia.' I said: 'But you guys already have whatever you need. You guys, when you came here in 1788, cleared your land and built your cities under different sets of circumstances. What we want is to be to operate under the same circumstances.' He asked for an example. I said, 'Where are the bauxite deposits in Victoria?' He said, 'There are none.' I said, 'Then why have you got an aluminium refinery there?' The answer is that Victoria has the dirtiest of dirty brown coal fired power. They burn brown coal and they provide cheap electricity to the system, and that way they are able to provide that sort of industry—even to the dairy industry, which is thriving in exporting to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with massive amounts of fresh dairy going through there. The electricity provided in the Victorian system through burning brown coal is central to that.

What we need in northern Australia, especially in my part of the world, in Townsville, is two things: energy and water. We need it to be available, we need it to be affordable and we needed to be plentiful. Without those things, we cannot develop the north of Australia. We will never be a destination for industry—we will never be thought of as a destination for industry—without those things. That is why it is important to get that little bit of common sense around the use of the legal system to halt development. The thing that bugs the living daylights out of me and the thing that people in northern Australia do not like is when you have people in Victoria, on the north coast of Sydney and even in Mackay raising these objections. They do not know what is going on out there. They have a philosophical bent against something and are able to use the legal system to stop it. They are not held responsible for the costs of doing so.

The member for Moreton spoke about the Carmichael mine. This is where I want to take the Carmichael mine. With the Carmichael mine being our base tenant, if they are able to develop a baseload power station, we can then get industry up and running in Townsville. Using that as our base, we will open ourselves up to all the renewable energy projects in Australia—wind farms, solar farms—with the ability to connect into the system. We can talk about raising the Burdekin dam wall and hydroelectricity going from there. We can talk about irrigation for building Hell's Gate dam and the irrigation going into the system to provide extra areas for developing crops which will go into ethanol production. All that stuff is about renewable. Everything we do in this country affects our environment. It is how we manage those things. The member for Moreton went on and on about what we are doing with the CSIRO. In my first term, I went to a number of stop work meetings called by friends of mine who work at CSIRO about what the then Labor government was doing to the pay packets and the jobs at CSIRO.

Opposition is easy. I found that out in my last term. It is easy to sit there and poke your finger and say what work we should be doing. But when you are in government you have to make decisions and you have got to be able to live with them. I think what CSIRO are doing now is about how we handle the consequences of climate change, how we work within the system. No matter what we do within our environment it affects our environment. It is about what we do to manage those things. The very thought that something 400 kilometres west of the Great Dividing Range could destroy the Great Barrier Reef just beggars belief. These people have no idea of how far away these things are. They have no idea of what a decentralised state is. They have no idea of what the state of Queensland is. They sit in Victoria in front of their wood fires and with their brown coal fired power and tell us what we should be doing—please!

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