Bill Heffernan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Excuse me, if I had time I would take you through it and you would learn something. But why haven't we done this stuff? Do you know what Clare Martin said to me as the task force chairman? I am sure she will not mind me saying, so I can tell you what she said—and what Beattie told me too. She said, 'We're not interested in developing Ord stage 3 because we haven't got the wherewithal.' That is what Clare Martin said to me. And so Ord stage 2, which is being developed, was part of a deal for Ord stage 3. Poor old Eric Ripper did not even know when he was trying to do Ord stage 2 expressions of interest—that would have been a white shoe brigade operation—and there was still a ban on GM farming, which means it would not have worked, that the drainage had to go out through the Keep River. He had no understanding that they would have had to deal with the lead mine there, because that is a serious problem for the development of the Ord.

Clare Martin was not interested, but we are. We need infrastructure that will value-add at the same time to the mining industry, to the tourism industry and to the agriculture industry. The great opportunity in the north is for our Indigenous people because they own most of the country. This is silly stuff, to put people on the Northern Development Taskforce to find ways to shut it down. They have shut the cattle industry down. The 'don't ask, don't tell' issues with the live export trade is that we do not have the culture that some of these Asian countries have where you have to pay for every signature you require on a piece of paper with what they call 'facilitation money', which is code for bribing. These are serious issues.

We have a vision for the north. It will be real and it will include—if there is no development opportunity for the north and north-west of Australia, why is a Chinese company at the present time negotiating to buy ten 10,000-hectare parcels of land up the coast there to create a series of fish farms? The reason they are doing that against the background of problems with the fishing industry in Asia, which is completely contaminated, is that they want to have a secure supply of farmed fish for the future. There are umpteen ways that we can value-add to them.

We should take the politics out of this because if you did it on the politics, because there are not very many votes up there, we would all sit down here and tell the next generation of farmers to go jump. (Time expired)