Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There is no better way to create jobs in this country than by building infrastructure. Yet we see the Albanese Labor government cutting funding for infrastructure projects in the latest federal budget. However, they want higher immigration. So, if you want to cut wages, there's no better way to cut wages than to have high immigration while at the same time cutting infrastructure works, because that will impoverish the country. The best example I've ever seen in my lifetime of a government that built infrastructure that created jobs was the Liberal-National government of the sixties and seventies under the auspicious ease of the former treasurer Sir Leo Hielscher, who opened up the coalmines in Central Queensland, opened up the Weipa bauxite deposits in North Queensland, opened up the Gladstone Power Station and opened up the smelter. He did all of those things—and built a number of dams, I might add. If you want to create jobs in this country, you have to build infrastructure to create the jobs. Those projects that were built many years ago, this week, delivered the biggest surplus in any state government's history.

I'm speaking today to warn the Labor government not to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. That, of course, is the national resources in this country, which all state and federal governments have been benefiting from for many years. What we should be doing is using those natural resources, like our coal deposits near my home town of Chinchilla, where we have 400 million tonnes of coal and what the Finkel report said in 2017 was the cheapest coal-fired power station in Australia. But what the other side of the chamber want to do is waste billions of dollars importing renewables whilst turning their back on our own industries here in Australia that provide billions and billions of jobs into government coffers and provide cheap and reliable energy. We should be pro-jobs, not pro-nouns.