Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of answers given by the Minister for Finance (Senator Gallagher) to questions without notice from Senators McDonald and Ruston.

We have another Labor government and we have another Labor tax. It's another Labor tax that's been flagged over these past few weeks to our mining industry—our mining sector. Senator McDonald asked about that. We heard the normal weasel words we heard way back before 2010, that there are no plans today for a tax on the mining industry. But that doesn't mean, of course, there won't be a plan tomorrow.

There has been a campaign over the past few weeks to leak out to prepare the ground for attacks on Australia's mining industry and attacks on Australians' jobs. There has been complete disarray from this government about what they are going to do and how they are going to handle the skyrocketing energy prices that Australians are facing this Christmas. My wife just told me about our latest electricity bill, which has gone up by 15 per cent. I know a lot of other Australians will be facing that in the months ahead, and that's challenging for all Australians.

This government promised Australians only six months ago, at the election, that they would lower their power bills by $275 a year. They didn't just do it once or twice or three times. It wasn't a footnote in their policy. It was said 97 times by now Prime Minister Anthony Albanese that they would lower power bills by $275. They haven't done that. As we saw in their first budget, power prices are actually due to go up by 56 per cent over the next two years, completely breaking their promise.

Now they're in a desperate huddle to try and find some other solution to distract people's attention. They don't know what to do in that huddle. They're all doing different things and breaking out in different ways. We have the Minister for Industry and Science, Mr Husic, out there saying that gas companies are greedy and need to be somehow penalised—I think. It's unclear exactly what Mr Husic wants to do to them. We have Ms King, the Minister for Resources, saying, 'Oh, no, it is all fixed.' She has fixed it. She has signed a MOU with the gas industry and it will all be fine next year. And we have had the Treasury officials come to Senate estimates and say that we do need to intervene in gas markets and they themselves gave credence to this idea of a tax.

The problem we have here is, even if the Labor government get scared off introducing a tax, this is destroying confidence in our economy, it is destroying investment in the economy and that is not what we need right now in a time of high inflation. We need to attract investment to get our economy going, because we produce more. If we are more productive then that will help bring inflation down. It will create more goods for all that too much money that is out there. We saw last week the Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe give a speech about this, and he highlighted that investment in our resources sector is at a very low level right now. It is running at three per cent of GDP. Resources accounts for seven per cent of the GDP, the actual output, so investment in resources is much lower than its share of the economy, which is quite strange right now, very strange, given that the actual price for our resources is at a record high.

Most people probably remember the previous mining boom that peaked in about 2011-12 when iron ore, coal, gas, copper and gold—almost all commodities—were at record highs. We had a massive amount of money coming through the Treasury here in Canberra. We had record investments in resources at that time. Investment in resources grew to nine per cent of GDP, with $200 billion in our gas industry and the massive expansion of iron ore and coal industries across Australia creating thousands of jobs. We had problems in regional Queensland because there was too much going on. You could not get a house and rents were through the roof but they were probably good problems to have, really, in hindsight.

Now we don't have that problem; we have the opposite problem. We are not attracting investment and that is because this government is not giving the people the confidence to invest despite these very high prices. We have coal prices sitting at $350 a tonne. The previous record was about $180 a tonne, so the prices are sitting at a level double the previous record right now. Why aren't people investing in the industry? Because there is no confidence here. They don't know what the government policy is. The government don't know what their policy is. They are arguing with each other. They are talking about taxes and regulations and all these types of penalties that may be imposed on someone. You are not going to invest and you are not going to create jobs if you have no confidence in what the policy settings will be in the years ahead when you have to pay that investment back. So I implore the government to get their act together before Christmas. Before Christmas, give a present to the thousands of Australians who rely on the resources industry for their jobs, for their livelihoods, and let us know what you are doing so we can take advantage of this record opportunity to invest.