Ben Morton (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Our national anthem speaks of wealth and toil and says that our land abounds in nature's gifts. How true. What a lucky state Western Australia is to be blessed with so many natural resources and a population that is educated, entrepreneurial and hardworking, that can turn these gifts into a better life for many. The one thing WA doesn't have is a state government that understands or even cares about our resources industry. The WA Labor government just sees the extra money it can grab, whatever the dire consequences for jobs, families, businesses and investment. The WA Labor government has zero understanding of supply and demand or the enormous cost of acceleration and development. But that is the history of WA Labor, from the appalling waste and corruption of WA Inc to the incompetence of the Carpenter Labor government, which lost the INPEX project, which my state colleague Sean L'Estrange, the shadow minister for mines and petroleum, informed the WA parliament cost us in WA $24 billion in investment and up to 4,000 jobs at peak construction.

Added to that, there was a backlog of 13,000 mining and exploration licences awaiting approval. Labor was asleep at the wheel—lazy and incompetent, even when success was there for the digging. Today, the new WA Labor government is doing its best to deny Western Australians a chance to work in mining, to build businesses and to help everybody prosper, firstly, by trying to increase the gold royalty by 50 per cent, something that the premier, prior to the WA state election, promised he would never do. The Kalgoorlie Miner, on 29 October 2015, stated:

Mark McGowan says a Labor Government will not increase gold royalties, labelling the move a counterproductive method of raising revenue …

But, typically, Labor said one thing before the election and the opposite after. The WA Liberals opposed the increase. Labor has also banned fracking, despite more than 600 wells having been fracked in WA in the past 55 years. Again: ignorance, laziness, destructive virtue signalling. On uranium, finally, Labor has excelled itself. The Minister for Mines and Petroleum promised that the projects approved by the previous coalition government would proceed—the right and honest thing to do. Then he was mugged by the unions, who showed their usual total disregard for their members' jobs and the future and showed the minister who's boss. The West Australian, on 18 April 2017, reported that the AMWU state secretary, Steve McCartney, said that the minister had been misquoted and there was 'no way in the world projects would be able to go ahead'. Labor in WA is subservient to its pay masters and its puppet masters—always has been and always will be.

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