Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If you were putting a pool in at your house in Canberra—let us say a pool, although I do not know why you would—and you had to have a pool fence, would you accept that someone in Townsville could object to that fence? Of course you would not. But this is exactly what we are seeing with the objection to the Adani Carmichael Mine—that someone hundreds and thousands of kilometres away, for whatever reason, can raise an objection to something that is so vital to the prosperity of our region and the people in it.

Make no mistake: the environmental conditions around the operation of and transport around the Adani Carmichael Mine, outside Townsville, are the strictest ever in Australia. Why is that? Is it just pure luck? Is it green activism? Or have we grown as a nation—just as the previous speaker was talking about—with science? Have our science, our knowledge and our environmental protection grown over the hundreds of years in which we have been operating in this country? Would you expect that we would still be operating under laws from the early 1900s in 2015? No, you would not.

The more than 300 conditions around the operation of Abbot Point, which were laid down and adopted by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and the Australian Institute of Marine Science, are backed by the science of what we can do here. The wetlands about which all the green groups were up in arms were actually man made. These people who are making these objections to our region know so very little about our region and our people. These big projects are not about India; they are not about how we look internationally. These big projects are what we need to develop our small businesses. Whilst it is vital for Adani to get this mine going so that they can lift hundreds of millions of people in India out of poverty, it is about the builder in Townsville, and it goes all the way down to the school tuckshop in Townsville. Those are the sorts of things that we have to do. Those are the jobs. That is where our prosperity as a region, as a people, as a state and as a city comes from.

If we can get the macro right in these things—and we are getting the macro right—then we have to deliver on the micro. The people who are using these technicalities and section 487 of the EPBC Act are doing it because they have a philosophical opposition to coalmining. The initial objection was around the reef, and that was taken care of. So now they have moved to endangered species, which are all well and taken care of but are not in a briefing note somewhere along the line, and that is enough to do that. The people of Townsville want to make sure that our region will be taken care of.