Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

On behalf of Western Australians, I want to thank my friend the member for Paterson, and also the member for Hunter, for the coal that will be arriving from Newcastle into Western Australia. Even though we have a billion tonnes of coal in Collie in my electorate, the Western Australian government has managed to arrive at a situation where it's uneconomic to mine that, so we're going to import coal from Newcastle. Thank you very much to those two members.

I'd love to see the Prime Minister stand up in parliament and thank the coal industry and the coalminers for the fantastic work that they do. Coal is the currently the largest-earning mineral that we export out of this nation. I think you members should be very proud of your coalminers. I know the member for Paterson is a coalminer's daughter, and I'd love to see those coalminers recognised for the great work they do for this nation and the amount of income they bring in.

But I digress. We're here today to talk about critical minerals. Of course, critical minerals are, by their very nature and name, critical to some very important current and future industries. The development of electric vehicles is one. For defence technology it's becoming more and more important to have access to those critical minerals for our defence manufacturers, not just here but amongst our very close allies in the United States and other parts of South-East Asia. Critical minerals are needed for solar panels and transmission lines. The current government has a plan to build 28,000 kilometres of transmission lines. I'm sure that if they were going to go through my electorate there'd be plenty of local farmers who'd be unhappy about that, but we'll see how that ends up and how many kilometres they get done in the next eight years. All the technology that we use in the current day and age—obviously, microchips, phones, TVs, computers—relies on these critical minerals.

As previous speakers have mentioned, there is currently one major supplier of critical minerals, and that is our good friend to the north—China. As much as we do and should maintain friendly relations with our neighbours in the north, it is not strategically smart to rely on one particular supplier of a product. Investment in critical minerals is not just about a commercial outcome and an economic outcome for our nation; it is also a very strong strategic investment.

I will touch on a couple of those minerals that we will require going forward. According to the notes I have here, lithium demand will increase by 368 per cent by 2030—I think that's a significant underestimation of the increase in demand, as we see more electric vehicles taken up—copper demand will double by 2050, aluminium demand will double by 2030 and nickel demand will increase by 67 per cent by 2030. All of these minerals are produced very efficiently in my electorate of O'Connor by hardworking miners who are very proud of the work that they do and the contribution that they make to this country. I'm very proud of them and I thank them for the work that they do.

Under the coalition, we recognised the importance of critical minerals and we invested a considerable amount of funds to incentivise and bring on projects. In April 2022, the Morrison government announced a $1.25 billion loan—and I emphasis here: a loan—through the Critical Minerals Facility to develop Australia's first integrated rare earths refinery at Eneabba, which is in the northern part of the wheatbelt in Western Australia and in my very good friend the member for Durack's electorate, and I'm sure she'll mention that.

In the time I have left, I want to talk about the Lynas Rare Earths project, which received $14 million from the Commonwealth government. The important thing about incentivising the Lynas Rare Earths project to relocate from Malaysia to Kalgoorlie—the member for Durack's birth town—and redirect that manufacturing process onshore is that we've not only created jobs and investment in Australia but secured the supply of those critical minerals going forward. It's a great policy, and I'm very sad to see the Labor Party cutting that program by $50 million.

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