Michelle Landry (Capricornia, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank my colleague the member for Dawson for his motion. My electorate of Capricornia and the electorate of Dawson join each other in Mackay and run inland towards the western coal belt. In fact, it was only just before Christmas that the member for Dawson and I were in the Central Queensland coalfields discussing important issues that impact on local jobs.

As you have heard today, the motion being discussed focuses on the latest legal challenge brought by the Melbourne based Australian Conservation Foundation to stop development of coal and minerals in the Galilee Basin in Queensland. Ongoing so-called green lawfare is tying up progress on major developments, in some cases for years. Such action by radical green lobbyists, who don't even live in Queensland, is holding Central Queensland families to ransom. It also jeopardises Australia's reputation as a place to invest and do business. Today's motion further calls on the Labor Party to support legislative amendments to close legal loopholes being exploited by green groups.

In my own electorate of Capricornia, one example where green lawfare is costing jobs and holding back the economy is the case of the Adani coalmining project at the Carmichael mine, about 160 kilometres west of Clermont. This project has the potential to provide up to 10,000 jobs over its lifetime—jobs that are much needed for families in Central Queensland because in recent years up to 12,000 jobs have been lost on the coal belt.

Green lawfare amounts to somebody living outside the state being able to take court action to deliberately halt the project when it has no bearing on their own regional home base. By preventing jobs growth these people are essentially taking bread off the table of hardworking Central Queensland workers, who need an income to feed, clothe, house and educate their families.

Our government decided to protect Australian jobs by removing a provision from the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, otherwise known as the EPBC Act. This is the provision that allowed radical green activists to engage in vigilante litigation to stop important economic projects like Adani. As the Attorney-General has previously highlighted, the EPBC Act provides a red carpet for radical activists to use aggressive litigation tactics to disrupt and sabotage important projects. The Attorney-General expressed concern about the emerging trend by green groups and other organisations using the court system to sabotage important economic projects, sacrificing the jobs of tens of thousands of Australians in the process.

The activists themselves have declared that their objective is to use the courts to bring developments to a standstill. In their own report titled Stopping the Australian coal export boom these activists declare that it is their strategy to delay and disrupt and to reduce the financial viability of key infrastructure projects, including ports, rail and mines, through court litigation. When raising concerns about this, Queensland Resources Council Chief Executive Michael Roche said that legal loopholes had paved the way for anti-coal activists to delay billions of dollars in investment and thousands of jobs.

Labor too must stand up for the workers they claim to represent and not side with the innercity greens and the Australian Greens at the expense of the jobs of tens of thousands of Australians. In my electorate of Capricornia the Labor candidate is so weak she has not yet ruled out doing a preference deal with such Greens—a deal that would be a slap in the face for local coal workers and local towns.

It is also a fact that Australian black coal from Queensland is the most energy efficient in the world in terms of energy and kinetic output per unit of coal burned. Therefore, the most efficient outcome for the world's environment is to use more Queensland coal and less coal from other places such as Africa, Indonesia and the USA.

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