Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That was a presentation from a city based senator. I suspect he does not know what country Australia looks like. If he did and he got out into the country, he would find there are huge employment opportunities in rural and regional Australia. I suspect that Senator Hutchins, with all of the questions he is asking, might well ask the New South Wales state government, a Labor government, what it is doing to promote industry in rural and regional Australia—precious little, I will tell you. But the federal government is very much at the forefront and we have the best employment figures—not just in Sydney; not just in Melbourne—right throughout this country, including regional Australia.

I always mention, as I have several times in this chamber, how in the little town of Charleville in south-west Queensland the problem is not a lack of jobs; it is a lack of people to fill those jobs. Thank heavens for the section 457 visa because we are able to get Vietnamese families into Charleville who can keep up with the demand for the products from the goat processing factory and the kangaroo and wild pig processing factory.

This was not my purpose today. I was going to speak about another matter of particular importance to rural and regional Australia: the inability to attract professionals and tradespeople to those areas. For some reason, I got bounced off the list of speakers. I am not quite sure who runs these lists, but there seems to be some confusion. So I will not speak about that today because it would take more than the few minutes that are left to me to do that. In this very truncated time, I want to congratulate the Rabbitohs, the South Sydney rugby league organisation, for their Souths Care project. A number of people, led by Peter Holmes a Court and David Peachy, were around the parliament in the last couple of days promoting this initiative to encourage young Indigenous people, particularly from rural, regional and remote parts of Australia, into a worthwhile future.

The underlying goal of this organisation—and I particularly mention the David Peachy Foundation’s good work—is to encourage young Indigenous people to stay at school and move further forward with their lives. In doing this, along with a number of other organisations—I particularly want to mention Peter Sjoquist, the guy who organises the CrocFests around Australia—they have a commitment to going into remote parts of Australia. I was at the CrocFest at Weipa recently. I did not see Senator McLucas there, strangely enough; in fact, there were very few Labor people there. There were a lot of Liberal state people there, the National Party candidate for Cook was there and I was there.

It was a great event at Weipa, and I do not want to politicise CrocFest. They also work towards trying to encourage young Indigenous people to stay at school longer, because that is where their future lies. I congratulate the South Sydney Rabbitohs, David Peachy and everyone who is contributing, along with the Commonwealth government funded agency, NASCA, to help young Indigenous people.

Briefly, I also want to congratulate Ian Macfarlane—that is, the minister, not the Reserve Bank governor—on the energy package that the Prime Minister announced recently. The issue of ethanol is always a complex one, but I know Ian Macfarlane, the Liberal minister, has been working very hard on that policy. He has come up with a great policy in a difficult area. I am delighted that a couple of the majors, Caltex and BP, have agreed to increase the number of outlets for E10 blend. I have been using E10 blend for some three years in my vehicle, and it is running as perfectly as it has ever run and it is a great fuel. In that small way, I hope I am making a contribution towards increasing the use of E10 blends—that is, increasing the use of ethanol.

I was distressed to find at estimates this year that Comcar had not been using ethanol, mainly because they could not get the right outlets and the supply. I am assured that Comcar is nearly all on E10 blends these days and, bit by bit, more people, like Comcar and me, are using E10, and in this way increasing the use of ethanol in fuel.

It is very easy to stand up publicly, criticise and get headlines about how much you support the industry, but it is much harder to get the work done and get sensible ideas through. I want to pay particular tribute to Joanna Gash, the member for Gilmore, for her work on the E10 issue. Joanna Gash is not on the front pages every day or in parliament making speeches, criticising the government; she is out there doing the work with the minister and the Prime Minister to get this E10 blend more widely used, to make sure that there are good alternative energy sources within Australia. Jo Gash looks after not just the energy aspects of Australia’s industries but also all of those people in her electorate who rely on ethanol and E10 for their jobs.

This whole push towards ethanol and E10 would have been made much easier if the Labor Party had not adopted, for political purposes, a stance of criticising ethanol and E10 a couple of years ago. The impact of the Labor leader publicly criticising the use of E10, telling lies about what it would do to your car—I have been using it for three years and it has not impacted on my car at all—and denigrating ethanol and E10 a couple of years ago has done untold damage and harm to the ethanol industry. I hope that people will understand that. I think the Labor Party have changed their minds at the moment. If they have, I congratulate them on it, but never again should they use actions like that as part of a political campaign.