Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to share with the House some good news not only for my constituents but for the constituents of every electorate of Australia. Last week we heard the numbers from the Australian Bureau of Statistics that showed our coal exports had hit record levels for 2017. In fact, they were up by 35 per cent on 2016. Our numbers for last year smashed the 2011 record, up by 20 per cent. What this means is that there are higher royalty payments flowing into the Treasury, there are higher company tax profits paid and there are greater wages for those employees—50,000 of them directly employed. This is great news for our economy. It is the wealth that is created from those coalmines that pays for our schools, that pays for our hospitals, that pays for aged care, that pays for our kids with disabilities and that pays for our pensions.

Yet there is so much of an anti-coal attitude that spreads across this parliament from people who do not realise that this is one of our nation's greatest competitive advantages, that it is one of our greatest sources of wealth and that it pays for the things we so desperately need to pay for. It is amazing: those we hear the greatest anti-coal rhetoric from are the very same people that want more government revenue spent on things. If we want more government revenue, we have to encourage— (Time expired)