Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to use this opportunity today to highlight the Rudd government’s continued support for the coal industry in Central Queensland. Yesterday the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government announced that the government has granted major project facilitation status to Waratah Coal’s proposed Northern Export Facility Infrastructure Project. This is a $7.5 billion project to develop a new coalmine in the Galilee Basin, near Alpha, as well as associated rail and port facilities. In May this year the President of Waratah Coal said:

I don’t think the CPRS is going to have enough of an impact to present insurmountable problems …

We have not seen that comment featured in any of the Australian Coal Association’s recent ads and it has not stopped the Coal Association’s scare campaign on the impact of the CPRS on the coal industry.

This morning we saw yet another example of what I talked about in my speech on the CPRS and the reason that the president of the coal miners union, Tony Maher, called the coal association campaign on jobs deceitful. On one page in the Australian there was the usual full-page ad from the ACA spelling out doom and gloom, and then when you turned to the business pages of the same paper you saw the real story of what is happening in the coal industry in Central Queensland. The headline says ‘Canberra fast-tracks Clive Palmer’s $7.5bn Queensland coal project’. The article states:

The company has said previously that the project will create 6000 jobs during construction and 1500 once it is operating.

There is also a story about Macarthur Coal, which has seen its profits fall due to a rising Australian dollar and unexpected demurrage payments. Demand for their coal is in fact increasing.

It was the same in the Morning Bulletin in Rockhampton last week. The ACA scare campaign was alongside stories describing a new deal between Stanmore Corporation and Wesfarmers that will see the Curragh mine at Blackwater expanded, creating up to 300 construction jobs. As I have previously mentioned, the Queensland Department of Mines and Energy lists some 50 Central Queensland coal development projects in exploration or early development stages. The miners union has released a report showing that at least 10,000 coalmining jobs will be created by 2020 under the government’s proposed ETS. The report goes on to say that $6 billion has been spent on new coal-mining developments since late last year.

So I would say to my constituents: by all means, read the ads if you want to, but do not skip the articles in the same newspapers that tell the real story of the coal industry—growth in investment and mining jobs. There is a commitment by the Rudd government, reported on page 2 of the Australian today, to compensate the gaseous mines that need assistance to meet their higher carbon liability under the CPRS and protect their viability. The real story of the coal industry is there for all to see in these reports. The ACA needs to get onto the real job of representing the companies to negotiate a successful outcome on the compensation fund for those mines.