Melissa Price (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Treasurer. Will the Treasurer inform the House of the importance of the budget in creating jobs and opportunity in northern Australia?

Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Durack for the question. We are helping to build the great North. We are putting the 'great' into the North of Australia, and we are doing it with real money: $1.2 billion of additional money announced by the Prime Minister and various ministers today, in addition to the $5 billion infrastructure facility that I announced at this dispatch box on budget night. That is in addition again to the $5 billion of infrastructure we spent in last year's budget in northern Australia as part of our $50 billion infrastructure plan. This plan, laid down by the Prime Minister and the coalition government today, is a fair dinkum plan about opening up a new frontier for Australia.

The member for Durack's electorate alone is one of Australia's great exporters. If you compared it with countries it would be one of the leading exporters in the world, because from the member for Durack's electorate you are seeing rivers of gold come to Australia through iron ore exports. In fact, each year in the member for Durack's electorate we export so much iron ore to China that you could build a Sydney Harbour Bridge from Sydney to Perth and back to Sydney every year. That is how much iron ore that we are sending—550 million tonnes a year.

That is about the opportunities that are going to come about through the opening up of Asia and the trade agreements that we are building; with the free trade agreement with China yesterday, with previous trade agreements with Korea and Japan, we are opening up new opportunities for Australian business. In particular, we are developing the opportunities here in Australia. The North of Australia, the great North, only has a population of one million people. But when you meet some of the cattlemen up there who have properties that are larger than the entire state of the Netherlands—that is how large the properties are—with hundreds of thousands of head of cattle, and they are being exported every year, you start to appreciate how important it is to have the infrastructure that is going to build that part of Australia. Our $5 billion Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility will help to build the railways, the ports, the airports and the pipelines that are going to be the massive traffickers of enterprise and opportunity for Australia and for the generations ahead.

This is one of the most exciting initiatives that I have been proud to be a part of in the coalition government. Through the hard work of the member for Leichhardt, the member for Durack, all of the members, and through the vision of the Prime Minister, we are building a stronger and more prosperous nation, and we are not letting any opportunity pass.