Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is always a pleasure, might I say, to speak on an MPI on a subject put up by the Greens. It makes it very simple. Very little research is required, because the response you can give to their contribution is the same very time. This anti-development party, anti-employment party, is a party will go to extreme lengths to prevent the development of economies in regional and rural Australia in particular, where resources and, in this case, the Adani mine will be developed. Of course, the Greens were supported by the metro-based Labor senators from the state of Queensland. Every one of the colleagues on the other side have an office in Queen Street—nobody has an office in regional Queensland—and they want to do things that will impact on the economies of communities that are thousands of kilometres away from where they are, places they rarely visit.

Let us have a look at the impacts of the policies of the Labor Party and the Greens in their efforts to date. They have been particularly successful. We have lost 14,000 jobs in Central Queensland in the coal industry, not directly from coal employees but from businesses and others who are there whose whole welfare in life exists around the development of the coal industry. I look to places like Emerald. If only my Labor colleagues were present, though I have one of our Queensland Greens senators here. Emerald is a small community that is west of Rockhampton. If you are ever inclined, you should go up the Cap Highway until you get to Rockhampton and then turn left—there are no other deviations—and you will find yourself in the centre of the township of Emerald. It is a fine place. I used to own a property not far from there—a farm that we had.

I bet you London to a brick that you will never go to Emerald. But, if you do, I bet that you wear a false moustache, because you will not want the good people of Emerald to recognise you—with 600 vacant houses in the community and unemployment rates nearly double that which you enjoy out the window of your office and where you live. Communities like Emerald have gone into depression because of the efforts of the Greens and the Australian Labor Party to prevent the development of industries in regional Queensland.

It is a remarkable thing for a party like the Labor Party, who live on the back of union support, to be anti-union with respect to the development of these 14,000 jobs that are on the table in Central Queensland. It defies logic. Slowly but surely, and sadly for them, the coalition are becoming the party of the workers, particularly as you get into the resource industry. They are looking to us now. They are looking to us to nourish their lives. They still put money into your coffers and the coffers of the Australian Labor Party, but that is slowly changing. In my home state a couple of private unions have performed. People are voting with their feet; they are moving across. I think the nurses union is getting 80 or 90 new memberships a day in my home state.

I invite you—and I am happy to put it onto my tab; our offices can liaise—and I invite all the senators from the Labor Party and any senators from the Greens, particularly the Queensland senator, to join me. We will have a good couple of days. We will kick back and we will have the odd stubbie in Blackwater, Emerald and Alpha, and places. These economies are depressed and they will remain depressed until we stimulate them with the proper development of this Adani mine resource.

We have 400 kilometres of rail line to be built that they are suggesting that somehow the government is doing for this company without any form of return. The cost-benefit analysis has been done. The stimulus that it will give to Central Queensland and all the way through to the port at Bowen will be enormous. It will have a flow-on effect that will last for decades. Generations of people will have job opportunities up there as a result of this investment. For Senator Chisholm to cast aspersions on the Minister for Resources and Northern Australia, Senator Canavan, and somehow suggest that his support and the processes involved in trying to get this project up have happened in the shadows and that no-one is following the script is complete and absolute nonsense.

We know that units of the Greens party in Australia have taken these people to court. These Newcastle based environmental activist groups funded by corporate money from the United States have been taken to court. Every single facet of this project has been thoroughly and transparently examined not only in the court system but in the public. I can tell you the jury has come in—the jury of Mackay and the jury of Townsville, where unemployment is almost at 10 per cent when the national figure is 5.9 per cent. These are depressed economies that want this project to happen.

If you think about it, there is not a business or a service in Central Queensland, all the way from Townsville down to Gladstone, that does not have a real interest in this. This is a massive part of our home state. I remind you that no senators other than our party, the coalition government, have senators in these areas. We have Senator Macdonald in Townsville. We have Senator Canavan in Rockhampton. That was done deliberately so that we could spread our representatives across the state so that we could get on top of what our communities want in terms of development and progress for their economies.

It really is insulting to hear Senator Chisholm and our friends in the Greens come into this place and endeavour to influence decisions that will impact on the hundreds of thousands of people and families in this massive area of my home state without one thought for their welfare. Senator Roberts raised a good point. There are those in this place who are absolute bleeding hearts. They would like to see us develop tofu farms and injured animal hospitals all the way through Central Queensland rather than invest in something that will provide a job. They put a lot of time and effort into saving the blue-winged parrot and a possum that I cannot pronounce, yet there is not one regard for the hundreds of millions of people in India who are endeavouring to pull themselves out of poverty.