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

One of the consequences of those lower prices I mentioned—although they have come off lows—is that the first thing that gets cut is exploration for new resources. In this environment, companies will typically cut back on exploration, and exploration investment is down more than 30 per cent in some of our resources sectors. That is why the government is responding to fill that gap—or at least partly fill that gap—by doing some of our own exploration, which we already do through Geoscience Australia. They do fantastic work.

In the budget before the election we announced that we had put another $100 million into this environment, in the Exploring for the Future program, to look at areas of our country that are unexplored that might have the next big new find. That happened in the Browse Basin in the 1990s. Geoscience Australia found those resources with only a $3 million dollar initial spend—now that is a multibillion dollar project for our nation. That is what we hope to achieve, and that is why the government are supporting the sector by trying to find new resources and to create just as much of a boom as we have had. (Time expired)