George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's interesting that the previous speaker, the honourable member, highlighted the government's half-a-billion-dollar investment in the reef, which we've just made to actually reduce run-off and fund further research into the reef. Contrary to reports from GetUp! and the Greens, the reef isn't dead and it's not covered in toxic sludge. It is very much alive, and it's being enjoyed by thousands of Australians and thousands of international tourists, who haven't been driven away by the extreme Greens' attacks on the reef's reputation. According to a Deloitte report, the Great Barrier Reef is credited with supporting 64,000 jobs directly and indirectly. In all the regions bordering the Great Barrier Reef the reef creates more than 19,000 tourism jobs. That's locally. As a comparison, the resource sector also creates about 19,000 jobs, but that's just in the Mackay region alone, with a further 12,000 created in the Fitzroy or Central Queensland region. The coal industry in Queensland generates thousands upon thousands of jobs. The reef is also responsible for some of those jobs, because workers move to our part of the world to take up jobs that flow from mining dollars, but they also come because of lifestyle, having fishing, diving and island-hopping opportunities. The reef also creates 680 local jobs in the fishing industry, a further 2,889 in recreational industries and 895 in scientific research.

I had the great pleasure of visiting the Australian Institute of Marine Science in the north of my electorate last week. It's Australia's tropical marine research agency, heavily involved in research based around the reef. The CEO there, Dr Paul Hardisty, showed me some of the projects they were working on, including research to find and breed hardier, more resilient corals that can stand different environmental conditions. The ultimate goal would then be to seed the reef with new and hardier coral after an impact causes coral loss. As we've seen through the history of the reef, the most destructive forces that affect the coral come from cyclones and crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks. As I said at the start, the Liberal-National government recently provided half a billion dollars for reef protection, including a $444 million investment through the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, a very reputable organisation that has been slandered a little bit in this place—it's bizarre, actually. The foundation has worked very closely with the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

Successive governments, both state and national, have invested billions of dollars in reef protection, because management of the reef is important—it's a national icon. However, its iconic status is the very reason why you get these extremists out there, using it as a weapon to fight an ideological agenda. GetUp! and the extreme green groups, for instance, make claims about water run-off from the Carmichael mine. Apparently, that is water run-off that's going to kill the reef—even though the mine is hundreds of kilometres and a mountain range away from the coastline, and even further away from the nearest reef. We do things differently up in North Queensland, I'll admit that, but we can't actually run water uphill—not naturally, anyway. The same extremists, supported by Labor and the Greens in this place, and supported by the taxpayer-funded ABC, use the reef to beat up the mining industry and also our farmers, particularly cane farmers, at every opportunity. They accuse miners of dumping toxic sludge on and digging up the reef, and they accuse farmers of covering the reef with chemicals and sediment—none of which is actually true. The extreme green groups use fake news to link farming with outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish on the reef. They don't mention the outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish over in WA, where there is no sugar cane farming, apart from a small section up in the top end. The truth is that mining and the GBR have existed for a very long time, and will exist for a long time to come. Farming and the GBR have existed for a long time, fishing and the GBR have existed for a long time—thousands of years—since the Indigenous people were doing it. It's easy for inner-city socialists to lecture people in north Queensland and tell them to shut down their industries that put food on the table. But the royalties and taxes go into the pockets of government, who actually build the stuff in the capital cities that those inner-city socialists want.

Under the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments, we had the extreme greens calling the shots, locking up a million square kilometres of some of the most under-fished waters in the world. On the one hand they're telling us they need to stop the GBR and the Coral Sea from being overfished; on the other hand they're telling us that the lock-out won't have a big impact because no-one goes fishing there. You can't have it both ways. If Labor and the Greens supported tourism on the reef, they'd support a tax change to open up superyacht industries. I look forward to them showing support for that, given they're going to be given an opportunity very soon.

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