Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

So you were born in Ravenshoe. Senator, you were born there when it was a thriving town, a town that was happily working. People were employed in real jobs and were harvesting some magnificent timbers.

I remember going there when Senator Richardson shut all that down and threw people out of work mercilessly. I remember seeing this sign—it will live with me until the day I die: ‘Richardson says these forests are pristine and need to be saved. These pristine forests have been logged for 100 years.’ Yet neither Senator Richardson nor the greenies, the political activists in the city, could tell the difference, because the harvesting had been done so carefully—it was so well managed—that there was no damage to the rainforest. Tourism boomed then, as it does now; it has got better of course. It has got better because time has moved on and we are a more affluent country and we are able to save our money and travel a bit more. But that little town of Ravenshoe is just one of the towns that for the last 10 to 15 years have really become welfare towns. It is just getting out of it now. To a certain degree that situation was enhanced by the mismanagement of the former Labor government, who gave some compensation to a mill in that town but the compensation ended up not in Ravenshoe but somehow in Northern Rivers, New South Wales. Despite my best efforts in estimates committees in those days, I was unable to get the then Labor government to explain how money had been transferred from there down to northern New South Wales.

That is just one example of such policies being initiated. Senator Richardson made it quite clear in his book Whatever It Takes that he had no interest at all in the environment. He had a very good sense of politics so he could understand that the cycle was turning a bit and that people in the cities were starting to think about these issues. Senator Richardson quite unashamedly said later on in his book that here were some votes to be got, so ‘Don’t worry about the people who will lose their jobs and don’t worry about the communities that will be sent down; let’s think about the votes in Sydney, and by raising this we’ll stay in government’—and they did.

It happened again when Senator Faulkner was the Minister for Environment, Sport and Territories. He wanted to stop a development at what was called Port Hinchinbrook. It was of course on the mainland across the way from Hinchinbrook Island, but the Labor Party and their friends in the green movement, for political purposes in the capital cities, desperately tried to stop that development—the world would have come to an end! It was the same with the Cairns skyrail. Do you remember the magnificent skyrail project in Cairns, Senator McLucas?