Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I don't get up every time and mention Mr Wood or Wotif or $1.3 million. If they're able to get someone to donate $1.3 million to them, good luck to them—as long as it's disclosed and we all know it. But I don't say that he has bought their organisation lock, stock and barrel and that he tells them what to do. I don't say that. I could, but I don't. But for them to get up and say donations from minerals companies, exploration companies and the like to the major parties is corruption is I think a very low standard of debate. We don't need that low standard of debate in this chamber, and we don't need Senator Macdonald's allegation of lies and the rest of it. I doubt that that will change in the short couple of hours we have left before the end of this parliamentary sitting year.

I do agree with Senator Macdonald's contribution with respect to where this coal may end up and what it may do. There are still 31 million Indian homes without electricity. Base-load power is nuclear, hydro or coal. They're the three cheapest alternatives. It's probable that in a large country like India they've got a bit of nuclear and a bit of hydro, but they look to be needing a lot of coal. As a base-load power generator it's cheap. It's 50 per cent cheaper than gas. If Australia's investment in coal-fired power stations is falling—because they're all antiquated, would cost too much to revamp and people are looking at new technology in gas-fired plants—so be it. The market will make that decision. Intriguingly, this federal coalition government seems to be the most interventionist Liberal government in history, to be actually contemplating—not a big stick—a giant stick. That was Senator Cormann's contribution: a giant stick of intervention. More to the point, this is a grave sovereign risk.

The Leader of the Opposition, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition and the shadow spokesperson for foreign affairs are clear and unequivocal, on the public record, that we would not change properly constituted arrangements if we were lucky enough to be in government in the near future. There couldn't be anything clearer than our position. If he looked at the size of the contribution that coal makes to our economy, Blind Freddy could see that interfering with a properly constituted market-delivered project would send a catastrophic message to those who are currently invested in coal exploration or coal excavation and export. It would be catastrophic for our sovereign risk. Don't take it from me; take it from a former secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Mr Varghese, whose famous saying was: 'Australia can neither bully nor buy its way in the world.' Australia needs rules based order. It needs WTO rules. It needs rules around sovereign risk. It needs to be an exemplar to attract investment into this country. If we were to pull levers ad hoc, in the manner that the Greens are suggesting, it would be absolutely catastrophic for the export income of this country, not to mention catastrophic for Queensland in terms of jobs.

Whatever the Greens actually believe, and that's sometimes very hard to put your finger on, they should believe that people who lose their job won't vote for them. This tactic of encouraging people to wear a button and say, 'Stop Adani,' as if that's going to be the talisman of a healthier world, couldn't be further from the truth. I want my grandkids to grow up on a clean planet. I grew up in places where when we burned coal it came straight down again and landed on the building, where people came out of coal mines and took two days to get clean, where pit ponies would come out of the mines blind and we used to ride them. You may have heard of those stories, Mr Acting Deputy President Williams. But we're a lot cleaner and we're a lot better now, and we will not move away from coal in the short term. There will be levers pulled that make sure that perhaps we don't build a coal-fired power station in Australia—that's fine.

We know that there's been a slight diminution in the exports of coal; it's down 3.6 per cent in 2017-18. But it would be absolutely catastrophic to take advice from the Greens political party in such an ad hoc, ill-considered and ill-thought-out manner—to put in jeopardy our second-biggest export and to put in jeopardy all of those jobs that are in that sector by singling out one proposition, which has to meet the hurdles of the marketplace, the state approvals, the environmental approvals and any federal approvals that are required. And there will be not a cent of taxpayers' money in it. That's the Labor Party's commitment: not one cent of taxpayers' money. If you're going to do this, it stacks up on your own: you build your own railway, do your own sums, do your own costing, get your own finance and, if it all stacks up, then you go ahead and do it.