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

No, I'm not going to be here, but neither are you, and neither are you, Senator Hanson-Young. I suspect that Senator Hanson-Young will be ringing me up for a job. She can do a bit of back-burning on the farm; I'll have a bit of work for her there. She can catch a few possums so we can all get our protein levels up.

The fact of the matter is the Greens can't get the electorate to support them. They can't get the electorate across the country to support them. They can't get the Senate to support them. In the electorate, certainly in my home state of Queensland, there is an absolute wake-up to them. They can't get the Supreme Court to support them, and there have been 12 actions—not one or two or three or four but 12 actions. Their problem is the fact that they are not an honest cohort of people. They are a dishonest political party. For example, the other day we heard Senator Waters talking about the ILUA. We know that the Wangan and Jagalingou people in Queensland voted—listen carefully; I'll give you a second to pick your pen up—294 to one to sign the ILUA for the operation of these mines in the Galilee Basin. But if you go to the Hansard for Senator Waters's contribution the other day, you'll hear a different expression on it. Her contribution to it indicated that the native title, the people of that area, did not support the development of the mine.

They know what we know, they know what the Queensland electorate knows and they know what the national electorate knows—that the development of this mine and the movement of this coal will have zero impact on carbon emissions in the world. For the closing of the mine to have an impact, they would have to prove—and the proof, as presented by Senator Williams, is to the contrary—that these mines would stop, that these power generators overseas would stop. We know that is not true. What we do know is that they would rely on inferior coal that emits more carbon into the atmosphere than the high-quality coal that will come out of the Galilee and what already comes out of the Bowen Basin.

The fact is that when colleagues from the Greens party make their contributions they really think that everyone is as dumb as dog-doo. They just sit there, listen to this persistent drone that comes into their ears and think, somehow, that if they say it often enough, if they make misrepresentations frequently enough, people will adopt it as being the truth. The electorate and the chamber haven't been tricked on this.

One of the things that always amuses me with the contribution from the Greens is the fact that they ignore what might be the alternative for 186,000 jobs that rely either directly or indirectly on the coal industry and the 40,000 or 50,000 more that will come with the development of Galilee.