Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Minister for Resources and Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great privilege to be in a position to contribute to replying to the Governor-General's address. I have that privilege, of course, because I was fortunate enough to be re-elected a senator for Queensland at the last election, and it is a great privilege and honour to be elected to this place. Just coming back into this place after some four months away, sitting in these chairs and looking up at the galleries to the schoolchildren and other people coming through, it does come home to you a bit more what a privilege it is to sit in this place and what a great privilege we all have as senators elected to this chamber.

I would like to particularly congratulate the new senators elected—like Senator Duniam, who I am following today. There is a lot of change in the Senate, and it is good to see some new faces on the first day of school, so to speak, and to get to know all these people who have been elected for their respective states.

Last night I helped launch the campaign of a local Liberal Party member of the Legislative Assembly here who is running for election again. The election is in a month's time. This is Alistair Coe, someone who I am sure Senator Gallagher would be familiar with. He read his first speech and he spoke very eloquently about how this role that we are all elected to, as elected officials, is a role of public service—of civil service. I suppose, for him, being elected in Canberra, it is particularly hammered home, because this is a town that is meant to be dedicated to the public, through what we do in this place and what is done in the various departments and agencies that reside here in Canberra. It should be principally about providing a service to the Australian public, and I hope I can do that in the role I have, as a senator for Queensland, and also the role I have the great honour of having been appointed to, as a minister in the Turnbull-Joyce government—again, playing that role with my department to try and provide a service to the Australian people.

In doing so, we in this government want to make sure we achieve the objectives and goals that we put forward to the Australian people a couple of months ago: to make sure that we can improve our budget situation, to leave to future generations of Australians a better and stronger Australia and a better and stronger fiscal situation, so that they can then make decisions and have the flexibility to decide how to run their country as they take it over in the future, and to make sure that we continue investing in our nation. I want to talk a little bit about our plans to invest in northern Australia, in particular, in my role as a minister for northern Australia, and our plans to create jobs right through this country, because so many parts of our country need to maintain that strong economic growth and that opportunity to have a job, to be able to get up in the morning and take pride in what you do, to provide for your family, to give economic security to those you love, and to be able to plan your future—to buy your own home, start your own business or have a go, in this great country that we are lucky enough to have.

And of course we must protect that country as well. There is nothing more fundamental to any of us than to secure our country and the Australian way of life that we are so lucky to have; we are all privileged to be here and live here. We need to do that in the face of great threats from those who would like to overturn our way of life and the freedoms that we all enjoy—and we saw that on the weekend of course. We must also make sure that we secure the borders of our country, because if you are going to be a country you have to have borders; if you are going to have borders, you need to decide who is going to be in this country and who is welcome to share this great privilege we have of being Australian.

Last week that privilege was hammered home by the news that we have just ticked over into 25 years of uninterrupted economic growth. So we have achieved a quarter of a century without a recession. We have had some quarters of negative economic growth but no two quarters in a row, so we have not had a technical recession for 25 years—a quarter of a century; a generation. This is the second longest period of uninterrupted economic growth on record, behind the Netherlands after they discovered oil in the North Sea. It is a fantastic result and a testament to the strong economic leadership that has been provided, largely, over those 25 years, and also a testament to the difficult reforms that we put in place, stretching way back particularly to the Hawke-Keating governments.

Sometimes I think we get complacent and lazy in this country and think that those 25 years of uninterrupted economic growth only came about because we had a mining boom, when people clearly forget that the mining boom really only started in about 2002-03 and did not really get going until the mid-2000s. Before that, we had to go through the East Asian financial crisis, the dotcom bust in the United States, and September 11, of course, and the financial upheavals that led to. Throughout those periods, without a mining boom—indeed, with some of the lowest terms of trade we have ever experienced as a country—we achieved strong economic growth. That was then only increased thanks to the mining boom, to the God-given gifts we have here: the little black rocks in Queensland and the little red rocks that I saw last week in Western Australia. Those commodities then helped us to continue that growth.

But the lesson of the last 25 years is: there is no need to panic. There is no reason why we cannot continue that strong economic growth, just as we did in the nineties and early 2000s. Yes, our terms of trade are lower now, but they are still much higher than they were in the 1990s when we achieved strong economic growth. We are a proud, innovative, strong and prosperous country, and we can continue to have strong economic growth, providing we have strong economic leadership across our country and we do right the things that we need to do, like balancing our budgets—what seem to be simple or easy things—and making the difficult decisions to run our country in a professional and stable way. Then we will have the benefits that we have been able to achieve over the past 25 years.

That need for economic growth, that need to continue on the path of a stronger economy is extremely important to the people I represent in Queensland. I am very proud to have been re-elected as a senator for the great state of Queensland. I am particularly proud to reside in Central Queensland and to focus on the people there. It is a very big state, the most decentralised mainland state in our country, with people spread right across it.

We in the Liberal National Party of Queensland try our best to represent the entirety of that state by having senators all around it. I am based in Rockhampton. My colleague Senator Ian Macdonald is up in Townsville. We have Senator Barry O'Sullivan down at Toowoomba looking after Western Queensland. We have Senator George Brandis in the south-east corner and Senator McGrath on the Sunshine Coast as well. It is a great spread around a great state and it is very important that all Queenslanders are represented.

It is regrettable that the other major party in this place—the Labor Party—no longer has senators north of Brisbane. Senator Jan McLucas missed out on preselection last time. She was based up in Cairns. It is a great shame because we should all try, in this place, to represent all Australians. There is another reason for the Senate to be looking after regional areas. The major cities, by definition, have strong representation in the other place, because that is where most of the seats are in the 150-member House of Representatives. That is where the people are. Here in the Senate we should look after the gaps. We should look after the places where there is less representation than in the other place.

In my area of Central Queensland there is no more important or pressing an issue than jobs. The biggest issue that came up in the campaign—indeed, through my full two years as a senator in the last parliament—was the need for jobs, for some stimulation of our economy. The area has been hit hard by a change in those terms of trade, by a reduction in commodity prices, particularly by a reduction in coal prices, which has put off investment in many mines that would have gone ahead. It is an important point to make that we are exporting record amounts of coal, much more than we were before the boom. Employment in the mining industry is about double what it was before the mining boom, even after the reduction in employment over the past couple of years, but the change has had a big impact on Central and North Queensland.

Unemployment rates are particularly high in Townsville, approaching 10 per cent, on the ABS figures. Cairns has had elevated unemployment for some time, given the high Australian dollar and the impact on the tourism industry, but it is starting to improve. Mackay is at about seven per cent. Where I am is not much below it, at about 6½ per cent in Central Queensland. More importantly, we have had a lot of people leave, so those unemployment rates do not reflect the true situation. When people leave to another region they are not captured by those unemployment numbers. Townsville has had more than 10,000 jobs lost in the past year. It has had about a 10 per cent reduction in employment levels there in the past calendar year. It is doing it very tough. That is why there is a need for strong government to have strong plans to provide jobs and new opportunities in North and Central Queensland. That is what we are focused on.

I have the honour of being the minister for Northern Australia and I must, at the start of this discussion, recognise the great work of senators and members of the other place who did the work before I came to this role. I was appointed in February this year, but the government announced in the middle of last year its white paper to develop the North. Even before that, it had done a lot of work in opposition to develop this agenda. I need to pay tribute to Senator Ian Macdonald for the work he has done over many years to elevate the North, to bring it into focus, and to Warren Entsch, the member for Leichhardt, in the other place, who has done a lot of work and has been the Chair of the Joint Select Committee on Northern Australia.

These people did a lot to bring the Northern Australia development agenda to our nation's forefront. That has led the government to have a plan with more than $6 billion to invest across the North, to drive this area of economic opportunity for us. This is not a welfare program. It is not saying that people in the North deserve some money or need something. This is a nation-building project that will benefit our nation. Already, the North punches above its weight. Already, it contributes to around 11 per cent of our GDP, despite being only about six per cent of our population. Its GDP per capita is more than double the rest of the country.

A good business would look at those areas of the country and say, 'Where are we making money? Where is our business doing really well and beating the KPIs and making a return on investment?' A good business would say, 'Let's invest in them. Let's go to those places and give them more money, more funding and more opportunity so we can grow our business where we are already making money.' That is exactly the situation in northern Australia. It is an area of our country where we are making money. We receive enormous returns from mineral wealth, agricultural wealth and tourism assets. Like any good business, we should now reinvest in the assets of that area. We can become a stronger and more prosperous country all around by doing it.

We have some great cities down here in southern Australia. I grew up in one. I grew up in Brisbane, in Sydney and in Melbourne and was over in Perth last week. They are fantastic places that we should be very proud of. But I want to make sure that when I finish my career or leave God's earth we can look back and say we have created better cities right across our country. That is what we should be doing as a nation. We have so much opportunity. There is no reason that places like Darwin, Townsville, Cairns or Mackay cannot become major centres. Even over in Senator Reynolds's place, I would love to see Karratha, Broome and Kununurra become major centres. They are beautiful places with huge opportunities. We need to have a commitment, which other governments and leaders have had in the past, to develop places like Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. They are places where we did have a strategy. We looked as a government, and through different leaders, to develop them. We had great people like Lachlan Macquarie. If he turned up right now he would probably ask, 'What are you doing with the rest of the country? Why aren't we looking at plans for those places as well?' That is what we are trying to do with our northern Australia agenda.

Under this agenda we announced—and I was privileged to partly announce—nearly $1 billion worth of investment across the North in roads, dams and sporting infrastructure, right across northern Australia. I just want to mention a couple of them. One of them in my area is a weir on the Fitzroy River. The Fitzroy River catchment is the second-largest water catchment in our country after the Murray-Darling. Look at what we have done with the Murray-Darling and all the wealth we are going to create there. There are massive amounts of wealth just waiting to be tapped into in the Fitzroy catchment, and we are going to do something about it. We announced that we want to build a weir there which could double agricultural production in the Fitzroy, create 2,000 jobs and drought-proof the towns of Central Queensland, and we are looking forward to working with the Queensland state government to see that happen.

We have announced roads right across the north. We have announced a plan to seal the Outback Way over the next decade, including an initial investment of $128 million over the forward estimates. We only have two routes that are sealed from east to west in this big country of ours and, by sealing the Outback Way, we will create the third sealed route across our nation, across our continent. If we are going to develop this northern Australian agenda we need to think more east-west, rather than just north-south. We often think about the Pacific Highway, the Bruce Highway and how we connect up this eastern seaboard of ours, where most of our population lives, but to really develop the north, our inland and rural areas we need to think about how we are going to connect our nation from east to west. That is what we will be doing through the sealing of the Outback Way.

We have more plans, too, for water in particular. We have announced funding to reinvestigate, to do some preplanning, on things like the Hells Gate dam up in Burdekin and raising the Burdekin Falls Dam, which is one of the last major dams we have built in this country. We are looking at water options for Darwin, which are very important. Also, over in Western Australia, we are looking at opportunities to further develop the Ord River system and the Fitzroy system—not to be confused with my Fitzroy in Central Queensland.

I want to touch briefly on the Ord—I was lucky enough during the campaign to go to Kununurra for the third time. It is a wonderful oasis. I always marvel at the fact that we sometimes have people in this place who call dams environmental disasters and say that they should not build dams, yet there we have the biggest dam in our country, Lake Argyle, which is now a Ramsar listed wetland and protected under environmental legislation, under the EPBC Act.

Every time we want to do something to the Ord now we need to get environmental approval, because this man-made lake has become an environmental asset. Well, if dams are so environmentally damaging, then why is the biggest dam in our country listed as an environmental asset? It is an asset, because it is a great water body—it attracts birds, it attracts fish, it is a wonderful, wonderful place—and the things that are happening there are wonderful, too. There is a company up there that is currently developing around 12,000 hectares, and I was lucky enough to see their second-year crop of chia that is in the ground, growing beautifully. They are looking to expand into other broadacre crops like cotton and possibly sugar one day, which would provide further jobs downstream in ginning or milling facilities and would be a great boon to Kununurra and this untapped and undeveloped region of our nation.

Just across the border there are plans for a major aquaculture facility in the Northern Territory which could provide massive amounts of protein, particularly to Asia, through farming fish and, again, could create thousands of jobs in this area which has been beset by underdevelopment and economic disadvantage, particularly to our First Australians. If we can get on and do some of these projects, it will create enormous opportunities for them.

Which brings me, in the limited time I have available, to the resources sector, which I am fortunate enough to represent in this government as well. I want to spend a little time talking about what the resources sector does for our First Australians, our Indigenous Australians. I was over in the Pilbara last week, and all of the companies over there in the iron ore industry have strong Indigenous advancement programs. I particularly want to call out the Fortescue Metals Group and their chairman, Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest—who would be well known to people in this chamber—and what they are doing and achieving. They have nearly 25 per cent Indigenous employment in some of their mines up there in their region, which would be about the proportion of Aboriginal people in those regions.

It is an excellent result—a result we cannot match here in Canberra in the federal government, despite our efforts to do something about employing Indigenous Australians. But our resources sector is out there doing that, providing economic opportunity for our First Australians. It is one of the reasons why so many mining projects—not all, but many, mining projects—have fundamental support from Indigenous Australians, such as in my area with the Adani coal project, which has been supported by all the native title groups in my area. Indeed, one of them had a meeting in Maryborough earlier this year, and the vote was 294 to one in favour of the Adani coalmine project. You do not always hear that in the national press but you cannot get much more comprehensive than a vote of 294 to one. Our resources sector is going to be key not just to providing those opportunities to our First Australians but to all Australians, because it is now a sector that is bigger than it was before the boom.

This idea that the boom is over and the mining sector is no longer important is absolute rubbish. It is now bigger than it has ever been as a share of GDP: it is up around nine per cent now and it was six per cent before the boom. It employs double the number of Australians that it did before the boom. All the investments that we have been lucky enough to attract over the past decade or so have made this sector permanently more important, and we are a government that is now focused on making sure we remain an attractive destination for investment in our mining sector, for jobs.

We are out there with Geoscience Australia, investing $100 million in exploring for more opportunities in this country. There are huge opportunities that still remain untapped and unexplored. As surprising as that might be, look at what the iron ore industry, which was only founded 50-odd years ago, has done for our country. We can create more industries like that with governments that are committed to economic growth, committed to jobs and committed to those sectors of our economy that produce wealth for all Australians.