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

I wish to raise with the Minister for Climate Change and Water a matter of some importance to people in North Queensland and, particularly, Townsville. We awoke this morning to find a headline in the local paper ‘Yabulu closure threat’. Yabulu is a major nickel production plant in Townsville that creates a lot of jobs for North Queenslanders. It is particularly important in these times of high unemployment in North Queensland. The chief operating officer of Yabulu nickel refinery, a Mr Neil Meadows, said that the refinery’s current assessment of the way it was treated under the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, amounting to a 30 per cent subsidy, ‘meant it could be hit with tens of millions of dollars a year in additional charges’. The Townsville Bulletin reported further on Mr Meadow’s comments:

‘‘That could tip it over the edge on what it was a year ago,’’ Mr Meadows said.

‘‘On the current nickel prices and foreign exchange rate, it is only breaking even.’’

The way Chinese nickel pig iron production was affecting prices, he did not see boom times ahead any time soon.

The nickel and cobalt refinery is lobbying Canberra for status as a stand-alone industry to gain the top subsidy rate of 94.5 per cent for high-emission activities.

Yabulu apparently produces high emissions—1.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year—because it processes a cruder form of laterite ores, whereas rival companies produce less than half the carbon footprint with sulfite ores. Yabulu imports much of its ore from the Philippines where a similar refinery has been mothballed but which could reopen to process the ores should Yabulu close. The Townsville Bulletin reports that Mr Meadows goes on to say:

‘‘This is a classic example of an Australian operation which is at threat of the work going overseas …

This is an argument that has been regularly made. The Townsville Bulletin reports:

The office of Climate Change Minister Penny Wong did not return the calls from the Townsville Bulletin yesterday …

So it was unable to get a response from you. I am particularly concerned that here is a direct example of a job-producing activity in North Queensland and that, further north in Queensland, unemployment is something like 17 per cent of adult males. It is a little bit better in Townsville but only because this refinery, the copper refinery and the zinc refinery in Townsville continue to operate. All the way along, I have been vitally concerned that Mr Rudd’s CPRS would make those three refineries unprofitable. I have raised the zinc question a number of times and I have been told by members of the government, ‘Oh, that’s not right, they’re not going overseas,’ but here we have a refinery that employs, according to the headline in the Townsville Bulletin, 1,200 people. The headline says ‘PM asked to intervene to save 1200 jobs’. You can imagine what the loss of 1,200 jobs would do to the Townsville economy.