David Johnston (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Resources and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

The Rudd government, in the short time that it has been the government, has lived by the mantra of ending the blame game with the states. In my home state of Western Australia, we have the most dysfunctional and incompetent state Labor government in our state’s history. And what do we hear from Prime Minister Rudd? Absolute silence. This is what ending the blame game has evolved into: absolute silence. The price for that silence, as one scandal after another unfolds, is that Premier Alan Carpenter sits back and allows Canberra to reach into the pockets of Western Australians and Western Australian resource projects. The $2½ billion tax grab from the North West Shelf gas project is the most partisan financial assault upon Western Australia in living memory, and Premier Carpenter has defended Canberra against the best interests of Western Australians—a position, until this point in time, never countenanced or seen before.

This tax drive-by shooting, as I style it, will increase domestic gas prices and business gas prices in Western Australia simply because—and this is the thing that most senators from the eastern states have no knowledge of, do not understand—there is not a business or project in the whole country, the whole of Australia, that could take a whacking like this without passing on this pain. Taking $2.5 billion out of one project in four years, you have to pass that on. So WA will be paying for Labor’s largesse that is almost exclusively focused on the eastern states.

All we hear about in this place is water, eastern states transport, rail in New South Wales. That is what we hear. What do we hear about Western Australia? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.