Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Bob Brown says that we have to stop coal exports and that we have to do it within three years. But it would be absolutely irresponsible to shut down Australia’s $25 billion export coal industry, which supports 30,000 regional jobs and is the backbone of many regional communities in Queensland. Coal accounts for around 80 per cent of Australia’s power and is Australia’s single largest export commodity.

The Australian Coal Association estimates that 130,000 families are directly or indirectly dependent on the coal industry. Even more families would lose their livelihood if energy intensive manufacturing industries were forced offshore by power generators no longer having access to coal. Senator Brown said that to suddenly ban coal exports would be massively dislocating—he has got that right—but that we have got to do it and we have to do it within a period of three years, a term of government. Senator Brown treats mining-dependent families with utter contempt. They can be moved, reallocated or dismissed. He does not say where to or how. The Greens’ policy is that the transition itself would be funded from the mining industry. How that is going to happen while they are going out of business is anyone’s guess. The only thing that Senator Brown does not want to move is trees. He would go to jail for a tree while sending mining families to the bankruptcy courts.

Peter Garrett has refused to reject a ban on new mines in the Hunter Valley, saying that the expansion of the coal industry such as we have seen in the upper Hunter region over the past decade is a thing of the past. How long will it be before other mining industries also come under attack from a Labor Party prepared to back the anti-mining policies of the radical Greens and include a left-wing, anti-mine protester on their front bench? The coalition government supports mining and mineral processing as valid and valuable contributors to regional employment in particular and to the national economy in general. The government will continue to work with the mining industry to ensure a future in Australia.

Australia’s mining and mineral processing sectors have directly contributed more than $500 billion to Australia’s wealth over the past 20 years and are responsible for significant infrastructure development. Since 1967, the industry has built 26 towns, 12 ports and additional port bulk-handling infrastructure at many existing ports, 25 airfields and over 2,000 kilometres of railway line. Rather than put aside our enormous natural advantage in coal resources, the Australian government believe we should work on ways to reduce the greenhouse consequences of using them. To this end, we have so far invested $275 million in the Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund in four projects. That represents an investment of around $1.75 billion in developing low-emission coal technologies. As a result of this investment, it is expected that clean coal power will start being fed into the electricity grid from the year 2009.

Labor plus the Greens equals a dangerous political equation in our parliaments and our economy. There should be no room in Australia for political deals with extremists who are soft on drugs. A Senate in which Labor and the Greens combined to have the majority would be a very dangerous thing for Australia.