Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Minister for Resources and Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

As I was saying in answer to the first question, this is not just a mining project. This is about opening up by an entire new coal basin, the first coal basin to be opened in Australia for more than 40 years. That will create massive amounts of economic opportunity for other mines to open up in those areas and for the service industries that service mines—be they legal, accounting or others—to be located in regional Queensland near those centres of wealth. That will create jobs right across our economy, which is very important if we want to develop our nation.

Later this year, Adani will announce where the hub for their fly-in fly-out operations will be, and Rockhampton and Townsville are competing for that. Mackay is still interested, I know, too. And that will mean even more families will move to regional Queensland as well, and that is a great thing for our country because that will take pressure off Sydney and Melbourne and other areas of our country where perhaps we have too much congestion. We have other areas in our country to develop. We have enormous expanses of land in North Queensland. We would love to have more Australians, but we need to have jobs to attract the Australians there. This project will deliver them in their thousands.