Mark Bishop (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Last time we were addressing the Defence Legislation Amendment (Woomera Prohibited Area) Bill 2013, as I look back at my notes, there had been an extensive discussion as to the adequacy or otherwise of the level of consultation engaged in by the government about a similar bill sponsored by the previous government, now withdrawn, as I understand it, by the current government, and the level of consultation in this bill, which is similar in a lot of respects to the previous bill. Indeed, from memory, something in the order of 23 senators alone from South Australia had spoken on the bill so there is a level of interest in the bill from that state.

I do not want to go to the detail or the minutiae of the bill today. It has been extensively reported in the relevant Senate committee report, and the content of the bill, for those who have an interest in this topic, is both widespread and well understood. I do not propose to discuss the content of the bill itself, but I thought I might in my contribution this morning address the bill in the context of the mining and resources development in Australia.

It is well known to economic historians that the exploitation of natural resources—minerals, oil and gas, forests and the like—has been and continues to be and will continue to be one of the great drivers and creators of material wealth. There is nothing novel or revelatory about that proposition. It is certainly understood by economic historians, it is certainly understood by those who are involved in the industry and those who observe the industry, and it has been known since the dawn of civilisation. Indeed, the exploitation of natural resources has been one of the principal drivers of great empires since the dawn of time.

Three of the great wars fought by the Romans over hundreds and hundreds of years were about access to minerals and other natural resources in particular. Indeed, the final pacification of Spain under Pompey the Great was about access to gold and iron and salt. The invasion of England under the reign of Emperor Claudius was about tin, iron ore, coal and forest, particularly over in Wales, and the final conquest of Croatia, called Dalmatia in those days, under the Antonine emperors, was also about natural resources, iron and gold. And you only have to look at the rivers of blood that were expended in acquiring empires in South and Central America by the Spanish and Portuguese from the 16th century onwards to understand the importance of access to minerals—gold, silver, iron, lead and coal and God knows what else. So there is nothing new. Put simply, much treasure and much blood has been expended on the perceived need for currency and raw materials to access cutting-edge technology, whether it be swords or other forms of material used for aggressive purposes. There is nothing new, in summary, about the need to access and exploit natural resources.

I have been flying across the Nullarbor for the best part of 40 years—in my early days, perhaps 10 or 20 times a year; in my time in parliament, 40 or 50 times a year—backwards and forwards to the east coast. On those long flights across the Nullarbor, sometimes taking up to seven or eight hours, I have had cause to reflect upon the difference between the states of South Australia and Western Australia, having been born and raised in South Australia and having spent all of my adult life in the west. From time to time, as I have looked down from the plane window, the question I have thought about was: why do some lines on the map dating back to the 19th century so differentiate and distinguish two adjoining states? As you go to the far west of South Australia and the far east of Western Australia, the flora and fauna, the soil, the desert and the weather are similar, if not identical, on both sides of the border for hundreds of miles east and west and hundreds of miles north and south.

In 1982 South Australia and Adelaide had a population of around 1.1 to 1.3 million. The population was significantly larger than for Perth and Western Australia. The gross state product of South Australia in those days was significantly higher than that of Western Australia. So the question becomes: why has that been reversed? Why are things so different now?

Why is Western Australia's population 2.5 million to 2.8 million and, in the not-so-distant future, going to be greater than that of Brisbane, while South Australia's is relatively stagnant at about 1.5 million to 1.7 million? Why is the gross state product of Western Australia more than triple that of South Australia? It is a very important question, and there are a lot of consequences—political, material and industrial consequences—that derive from a response to that proposition.

The answer is clear, simple and obvious. Western Australia, at least since the 1950s—under Albert Hawke's Labor government, Sir Charles Court's government in the seventies and eighties, and successive governments of both persuasions since that time—has welcomed, embraced and sought out the development of minerals and resources in that state. It did not matter whether it was the Hawke government in the fifties or the current government in the second decade of the 21st century: both have been unconditional in seeking out development and maintaining Western Australia as a place for investment and development in mining and resources.

South Australia, by contrast, chose a very different path—firstly in the thirties under the government of Sir Thomas Playford but essentially followed by all governments since that time up until the present. That path that was embraced by Sir Thomas Playford and his government in the thirties and forties, followed by others, was one of an embrace of manufacturing industry, industrial protectionism and high-cost industries that lacked production scale because of cost.

So, as the final remnants of the opening up of Australia's economy from the 1980s, occasioned by the Hawke-Keating governments, play themselves out with the closure of the motor vehicle industry along the east coast of Australia, I suggest that this bill, sponsored by Senator Farrell, is to be welcomed with anticipation, glee and hope. It should be welcomed as a potential new foundation for the state of South Australia and as an opportunity for South Australia to be not an economic colony of Victoria but a serious mining and development state in its own right.

This bill, when you go to its heart, sends a statement of intent. The bill challenges the mindset that many years ago made the decision that this area was to be considered to be in some respects wasteland, in other respects the home of some Indigenous people and in other respects hundreds and hundreds of square miles of land to be reserved to the Department of Defence for exclusive use for their own purposes. It welcomes into those lands the opportunity for exploration and discovery of what a lot of people presume to be mineral-rich swathes of land.

This statement is made by Senator Farrell as a sponsor of a private senator's bill, but really the bill is consistent with the attitude of the previous government and, as I recall the comments of then opposition senators, now government senators, in the deliberative phases of the bill when it went through committee stages, is welcomed by them as well. It really suggests that South Australia—or certainly a number of elites in South Australia—has come to the view that it is time to join the states of Western Australia and Queensland in becoming a home to the mining industry and all the consequences that flow from that. So that is a welcome development.

In the few minutes that remain, I want to remind the chamber of the comments by Senator Johnston, who now, of course, has been elevated into the cabinet as Minister for Defence. I have looked back at Senator Johnston's contribution in the early stages of this bill, and he addressed issues of time, delay, consultation and protocols. He made the point that the government was opposing the bill at this stage, firstly because it wanted to redraft the bill in light of certain changes that had been brought to its attention. Principally his argument was that the government wanted to get it right. There is nothing particularly wrong with that sentiment, but it is a very early pointer to another defence bill that both the Minister for Defence and you as chair of the relevant subcommittee, Mr Acting Deputy President Fawcett, will recall. That was the Defence Trade Controls Bill of the last parliament. Senator Johnston would well remember the amount of work that the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Legislation Committee had to do over a period of almost 18 months to get that bill right. It must be put on the record that all of that forensic work engaged in by the committee—rejecting submissions by the Department of Defence; seeking out further advice and evidence from industry and technology players, universities and the like; and sending Defence back time and time again to engage in further consultation and to redraft particular provisions in the bill—was done in the face of the stringent, intense and continuing opposition of the Department of Defence.

I was much reminded of the lengthy process we had to go through as committee members—it was almost like pulling teeth to get information about the Defence Trade Controls Bill—in the contribution made in this debate by Senator Johnston, a person who has had a lot of exposure to the Department of Defence both as a minister in the previous Howard government and then for six years in opposition. As that contribution was made, I thought that perhaps the wool was being pulled over Senator Johnston's eyes in the context of this bill and that the protestations by the Department of Defence were not really as strict or a strong as they might have been.

It must be said that it is not readily or widely understood that the modern mining resources extraction and development industries are not merely about digging a hole in the ground, getting the product out onto a train or a truck, flogging it off to port and sending it offshore. It is not only about digging holes in the ground, and those who use that phrase (1) are mistaken and (2) generally do it in a pejorative and insulting manner.

The modern mining industry, as is inherent in this bill sponsored by Senator Farrell—this bill foreshadows a growth and development certainly at the exploration stage in those areas of land covered by it, the land up in the far north of South Australia—is more about welcoming that industry into the heart of South Australia. As the bill also recognises, the modern mining industry is about a lot of things: it is about engineering; it is about construction; it is about the use of seriously advanced high-tech equipment; it is about the manipulation and proper use of advanced software by highly skilled and trained technicians; it is about processing and analysis; it is about the service industries that follow such as accountancy, transport, communications, infrastructure development, finance, capital investment.

One of the very interesting things that is currently occurring in Perth is the growth of a localised capital-raising industry. As we all know Perth is now a very, very wealthy city in a wealthy state, and there are a large number of people who are well off. People who are well off tend to have surplus capital, and they tend to want to consolidate it and reinvest it so that the capital grows stronger. One of the interesting things that has occurred in the past two or three years is that a range of the investment banks out of the US, which have had their principal offices in Melbourne and Sydney, but principally Sydney, are now, instead of being fly-in fly-out workers and coming over to Perth to raise capital—coming over on Monday and leaving on Friday—establishing full-time offices in Perth to raise equity. One of the spin-offs of the growth of the mining industry in the last 10 or 15 years in that state has been the growth of ancillary and support industries.

In the area of capital raising and equity raising, now that you have stand-alone, serious offices employing dozens and dozens of people to do those jobs, you see the benefits of an expanding state and an expanding industry. Raising hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, as some people in this chamber would be well aware, are not simple tasks. They are tasks that involve a lot of risk, they are tasks that involve a lot of price, they are tasks that involve extraordinarily lengthy negotiations to get the amount of capital raised and the repayment times right. And that capital-raising industry, equity-raising industry, is growing well in Perth because of the wealth that has been created and consolidated in that state over the last 20 years.