Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I stand corrected; it was on the back of a beer coaster. My apologies, Mr Deputy Speaker Kelly, if I inadvertently misled the House there. That is a project that started out as $4½ billion on the back of a beer coaster and it manifested itself up to a $70 billion project. Our minister for Communications, Minister Turnbull, has done a magnificent job in pulling that back into a somewhat reasonable project. We are all guilty of it in this place—we tend to try to score points. I guess that is what this MPI is all about.

Today I want to talk a little more about things that touch the people in my electorate, the things they really care about not, so much the point scoring that goes on in this place but the things that affect lives. I want to touch on some of the achievements of this government in economic policy areas since we won government in September 2013. Probably in my electorate the most important policy initiative has been the restoration of the live-export trade.

People underestimate the damage that the decision by the previous government did to the psyche of people across regional Western Australia and across regional Australia more generally. It was not just the economic damage that it did to their livelihoods. It was the message the government gave them—that they did not care about them. They did not care about their industry, they did not care about their families and they did not care about their jobs. Ultimately, they did not even care about the livestock that these people cared for, because it created some massive animal-welfare issues for those people to deal with. If they had been in the car industry or some other unionised industry, there would have been an industry-recovery package or an industry support package.

People in that industry got no support whatsoever from the government. I am very proud to stand here as part of a government that has restored that live-export trade. I have some numbers here.

An incident having occurred in the gallery—

We have a system where cruelty to animals is—

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