Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

And no offence to others who might have similar nicknames! In the case of those others it is of course a term of endearment. But I do not think Mr Bill Ludwig, the AWU heavyweight in Queensland, was meaning it in so friendly a way when he was speaking about Professor Garnaut because I think Mr Ludwig—unlike his son, who is a minister in the Rudd government—does seem to understand that the ETS will cost jobs in the Australian agricultural industries in which there are a lot of AWU members. It will cost jobs in the sugar industry, in which there are a lot of AWU members. It will certainly cost jobs, as I have just mentioned, in the meat-processing industry. Where is the clamour from the so-called guardians of the working man who sit opposite us? Not a word do we hear from them, and they are going to subject these people to being thrown onto the unemployment scrapheap. As this report points out, agricultural industries are price takers and they are also at the end of the food chain. If the cost of transport is higher because of the ETS, which it will be, then farmers just have to bear it, lump it. They are the ones that are really going to be impacted by climate change.

The climate change report goes wider than that and deals with the impact of the changing climate on Australia. That is of course something that the coalition, including me and many others, are watching very closely. That is why we think Northern Australia has a big future as the north gets wetter and the south of our continent gets drier. That is why the coalition have put such a lot of effort into making forward plans, not for next year or the year after but for 10, 20, 30 or 50 years time. That is why we have had that visionary approach.

While I and my colleagues are trying to work out how we can open up new agricultural lands in North Queensland, regrettably the state government in Queensland is doing everything in its power to stop the development of agricultural industries in the north of Queensland. There are very sound proposals for water storage on the Flinders River up near Richmond and Hughenden. They could open up vast new areas of productive agricultural land and they would be guaranteed water as the north gets wetter. But what does the Queensland government do? What sort of vision and leadership does Premier Anna Bligh show? Absolutely nothing—stop any thought, stop any proposal and stop any activity that might look at the sustainable use of water storage along the Flinders River near Richmond and Hughenden. That would provide food not only for Australia but for those 80 million new people that are coming into the world every year, mostly in Third World and underdeveloped countries, and who desperately need our food. We are getting no leadership from the Queensland government on this and we are getting little support from the federal Labor government. The report of this committee does highlight some of those activities that will affect the agricultural industries with climate change. (Time expired)