Susan McDonald (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Resources) Share this | Hansard source

This urgency motion could not be more urgent, because we stand at a precipice of decision-making in this country. We are a country that is completely reliant on the income from mining. The Albanese Labor government's failure to understand the urgency of continuing to bring new mining projects online, and instead to delay, to obfuscate and—I am concerned—to kill mining by stealth, is incredibly concerning not just to us today but to future generations of Australians who will be denied income streams from royalties, from well-paid jobs in the regions, where Indigenous families live and where other families live, who all want well-paid jobs and access to services. All this is denied to them when we lose projects like this one.

Regis Resources is just the latest casualty in sovereign risk that is being imposed on investment in this country. There are investors, both Australian and from overseas, who are now rating Australia as more risky than Indonesia, Africa and South America, where they see more stable decision-making processes. We should be exceptionally worried about this, because Regis Resources spent four years assessing the mine proposals, going through state approval processes, going through the federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act approvals, which included an assessment of Aboriginal cultural heritage. This was a mine that had been assessed under all of those avenues, and yet, at the eleventh hour, thanks to the Environmental Defenders Office funding legal advice, we have seen this company—another in a long list of companies—have their approvals delayed or denied.

Critical minerals, rare earths and other important commodities like gold are important to Australia. They're important financially, they're important for the jobs and they're important for regional services. But guess what? They're also important for the modern, increasingly electrified, world that we are going to live in. These make up the componentry parts of every modern element that we use, and we require five times as much copper as we have mined to date. We require more gas, more metallurgical coal, more of every commodity you can think of, including a range of new ones in rare earths that we're not familiar with. These are important, and the rest of the world is looking for supply chains to supply them.

Australia needs to get with it and manage supplying these commodities as well as managing the environment and cultural heritage. We can do these things. We are one of the most-experienced modern mining nations in the world, and yet, under Labor, we will stop that happening and we will be the poorer for it. We will be pious and we will feel incredibly proud, but we will be poor—and that will be cold comfort, because we have enjoyed a first-world lifestyle based on the revenues from mining and well-paid jobs.

This would have provided 580 jobs in construction and 290 full-time jobs based around Orange—that is, jobs where the construction workers, the mine workers, wouldn't have to leave the region, wouldn't have to fly away from their families, wouldn't have the associated workplace health and safety mental health issues and disconnection from their families. It's in the region—hooray! But it will not be, under this government. Under this government, that project will never go ahead because they want to call a tailings dam—an integral part of the mine plan—some sort of waste dump. What a complete lack of understanding of mining.

This is a government that seeks to deliver for the Greens. They don't want to deliver for regional people. They certainly don't want to deliver for Australians. We should feel incredibly worried about the economic failure of this government and the failure for regional people.