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

I listened with interest to Senator Murray’s very careful and erudite presentation, as most of his contributions are. But I have one comment in relation to his last comment: I wish. The thought that a Labor staffer writing in a paper would suggest that a Labor government would do as he suggests is pretty well contrary to the experience we have seen with federal Labor governments. Indeed, Senator Murray, if you look around any of the states at the moment you will see some appointments to judicial office which are only made because of the question of who is known and not what is known. My state of Queensland has provided some fairly good and high-profile examples of how the Queensland government has appointed members of the magistracy more, it would seem, because of their membership or association with the Labor Party than for their judicial merit. History has shown that their judicial merit is not always particularly useful.

Today in my presentation to this debate on matters of public interest I want to reflect on what a wonderful place Australia is. One of the great things about going overseas is that you always have a better appreciation of Australia when you come back home. Our country is a wealthy country with a magnificent people, if I might use that term. The geography and the scenery—the natural attributes of this country—leave most other continents of the world behind. Look around this country. We have magnificent beaches, forests, snowfields, harbours, rivers and inland parts of Australia. It is a magnificent country. It is so wealthy. Our people are perhaps our greatest wealth, but there is a lot of natural wealth here and a lot of wealth that has come from the land. What we have produced in ideas and in things that have been manufactured over our history have shown that Australia is really a great place to be and a very lucky country.

But it is a sad fact—and I am not sure what can be done about this—that there really are two major classes of Australians. There are Australians who live in areas of this country where they have access to everything—to hospitals, taxis, trains, lawyers, decent roads, theatre, sporting events, cultural activities; anything that a person living in this modern world might want is available to some Australians. There are the other Australians who do not have the same sort of access to the amenities of life. Of course, the divide is between those Australians who live in the capital cities and perhaps even some of the major provincial cities and those who live in country Australia distantly removed from those capital or major provincial cities.

As one who lives in a country town in Australia, I do not know that I would want to change my position at all. In the many times I am forced to go to Sydney, I love the bustle and the hustle and love having a look at the harbour, but I would hate to live there. The traffic getting to and from work would simply drive me crazy. But there are many amenities that country people do without simply because of the geography of the nation. It is something that I think governments have to strive to address. It is always going to be difficult to address politically, because the mere numbers require that in the capital cities where there are lots of people you get lots of members of parliament who want to do the very best for their own people and they are the people who make up governments. People not in the major centres of population do not have the same voice in state or federal parliaments as those in the more populated areas. That means that it is difficult for parliamentarians who represent the more remote parts of the country to get their message across.

Having been in this parliament in the time of the previous Labor government and under our government, it is quite clear that our government has paid a lot more attention to people in the country and has tried to be fairer with the way that the largesse and benefits of this nation have been divided. In the Labor days, of course, it simply went to the majority in the capital cities. Not only did Labor do things which suited the capital cities but they were very quick to take away benefits or wealth from country areas because it did not really affect the city people but it gave them a good feeling.

An example that springs to mind in relation to that particular matter is the ‘environmental’ legislation that former Senator Richardson, the then minister for the environment in the Hawke and Keating governments, brought in about the harvesting of native forests. There were—and Senator McLucas will remember this—people in many towns in Far North Queensland, up where Senator McLucas comes from, who were simply thrown out of work at the time not for any sensible environmental reason but simply because it gave people in the cities a good feeling to say, ‘Look, we’re saving the rainforests,’ although they had never seen them.

Rainforests had been logged for over 100 years but people in the cities thought they were pristine rainforests and they had to be saved. It did not matter about all the jobs in country Australia that were thrown overboard. It did not matter about the communities that were almost devastated by that and are only now, 20 years later, starting to recover. The Labor people in the city did not understand that you could have a sustainable forestry industry in these areas and you could have tourism—and that indeed happened. I remember going back in those days to the little town of Ravenshoe, which Senator McLucas would know well.

Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Aged Care, Disabilities and Carers) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was born there.

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

So you were born in Ravenshoe. Senator, you were born there when it was a thriving town, a town that was happily working. People were employed in real jobs and were harvesting some magnificent timbers.

I remember going there when Senator Richardson shut all that down and threw people out of work mercilessly. I remember seeing this sign—it will live with me until the day I die: ‘Richardson says these forests are pristine and need to be saved. These pristine forests have been logged for 100 years.’ Yet neither Senator Richardson nor the greenies, the political activists in the city, could tell the difference, because the harvesting had been done so carefully—it was so well managed—that there was no damage to the rainforest. Tourism boomed then, as it does now; it has got better of course. It has got better because time has moved on and we are a more affluent country and we are able to save our money and travel a bit more. But that little town of Ravenshoe is just one of the towns that for the last 10 to 15 years have really become welfare towns. It is just getting out of it now. To a certain degree that situation was enhanced by the mismanagement of the former Labor government, who gave some compensation to a mill in that town but the compensation ended up not in Ravenshoe but somehow in Northern Rivers, New South Wales. Despite my best efforts in estimates committees in those days, I was unable to get the then Labor government to explain how money had been transferred from there down to northern New South Wales.

That is just one example of such policies being initiated. Senator Richardson made it quite clear in his book Whatever It Takes that he had no interest at all in the environment. He had a very good sense of politics so he could understand that the cycle was turning a bit and that people in the cities were starting to think about these issues. Senator Richardson quite unashamedly said later on in his book that here were some votes to be got, so ‘Don’t worry about the people who will lose their jobs and don’t worry about the communities that will be sent down; let’s think about the votes in Sydney, and by raising this we’ll stay in government’—and they did.

It happened again when Senator Faulkner was the Minister for Environment, Sport and Territories. He wanted to stop a development at what was called Port Hinchinbrook. It was of course on the mainland across the way from Hinchinbrook Island, but the Labor Party and their friends in the green movement, for political purposes in the capital cities, desperately tried to stop that development—the world would have come to an end! It was the same with the Cairns skyrail. Do you remember the magnificent skyrail project in Cairns, Senator McLucas?

Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Aged Care, Disabilities and Carers) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Labor didn’t oppose that. Labor never opposed that.

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

It attracts tourists from all over the world. Yet back in those days Labor tried to shut that down on the back of urgings from the radical green movement, because they wanted their votes. They wanted their second preference votes so they tried their best to shut that down.

Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Aged Care, Disabilities and Carers) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator McLucas interjecting—

Alan Ferguson (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! Senator McLucas, I see your name is next on the list. You could perhaps wait until your turn comes without interjecting.

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

The world was going to come to an end if the skyrail were built! The world was going to come to an end if Port Hinchinbrook were developed! Yet here we are, five to 10 years later, and the skyrail is a huge tourist attraction—and has it had any impact on the environment, on the rainforests, there? Not one bit, not one iota, except that it has allowed ordinary mums and dads to see the rainforests. You do not have to be an out-of-work radical green ‘environmentalist’ to walk through the rainforests and enjoy them; you can now do that in a cable car up the top with no impact on the environment. It is the same with Port Hinchinbrook, a marvellous development that attracts a lot of people, gives a lot of people enjoyment and is an amenity for that town. The world has not come to an end. The mangrove trees are still growing. Senator Faulkner, another Sydney based environment minister, might be surprised to know, given some of the things he said in this chamber at the time, that the mangroves have continued to grow, as we all told him they would.

The point I am making in all of these things is that governments, in the decisions that they make, should be very careful about what impacts those decisions will have on people living in country areas. I think it is very important that if for good and serious reasons governments as a whole take decisions which impact upon people’s livelihoods—and I do not think the instances I mention fit into the category where it is actually necessary, but some of the things done with the Great Barrier Reef were serious and sensible things that needed to be done—those people must be compensated by the government, in other words by every other Australian, for the loss of their employment, their income-making ability. It is essential that that happens. Our government was good in that respect in relation to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park zoning plans. It has not been quite so good, I understand, in relation to some marine parks in the Tasmanian area, and that is something that I will be following through. But it is essential, as a principle, that where governments do take these steps for the proper purposes of the environment those affected must be compensated by the government. (Time expired)