Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I take pleasure in joining the member for Wentworth and the member for McMillan in pushing the government’s case in this matter of public importance. Labor knows that ratifying the Kyoto protocol will not achieve anything in itself. Signing a piece of paper will not magically reduce carbon emissions, but what it will do in this country—and you heard the member for McMillan say what it would do to his electorate—is dramatically cut jobs in towns like Gladstone, in my electorate; Mackay; Blackwater; Biloela; Emerald; and in fact in the whole Central Queensland area.

Let me sketch an outline for you of what it would do in my area. Industries would pack up and move offshore. Thousands of jobs would be lost from the Central Queensland region, which is currently experiencing a boom. Families would be paying at least twice what they are paying now for their electricity, and fuel prices would go through the roof. The average Gladstone family could expect at least one job from each household to be lost, while the cost of essentials like power and fuel, as I said before, will skyrocket—all because the opposition wants this no-brainer, easy-sell, quick-fix solution to change, with a choke hold around the Central Queensland coal industry as the one and only benefit.

Bear in mind that the aluminium industry, and potentially the magnesium and nickel industries which may come to Gladstone in the near future, depends heavily on cheap coal-fired power. Central Queensland and Gladstone’s advantage is cheap coal-fired power. Destroy that and you destroy all the industries that are downstream from that. I noticed the member for Richmond in here before. This debate should be a salutary lesson to her, and I hope she is listening to this in her suite. Has she told the people of Richmond, for example, that wind energy, which a lot of her constituents favour, is four times more expensive than coal or that solar is six times more expensive than coal? Is she going to tell her constituents that we should be putting wind turbines on St Helena, west of Byron Bay? Or is she going to do what I have done: settle down and tell them truthfully face-to-face the consequences of what is going to happen if we do not do these things?

This is not speculation; it is straight out of the mouth of the opposition environment spokesman, the person who led this debate today. He is on the record as saying:

The coal industry needs to understand, and I think it does understand, that the automatic expression of the coal industry such as we have seen in the past, is a thing of the past.

I do not think the people of Gladstone would like to hear that. What about all the people down the line from the Surat Basin, where there are somewhere between six and nine coal mines? What about the Premier of Queensland, who has pledged to defend the Central Queensland coal industry? What about the Premier of Queensland, who has promised a railway line from Gladstone down to Toowoomba? All these things are at risk if you follow Labor’s line. Even former Queensland Labor Treasurer Keith DeLacey has come out against the opposition’s irresponsible policies by saying that they would ‘inflict enormous and unnecessary pain not only on the coal industry but on the entire economy’.

The second piece of scandalous Labor policy is their proposition to have a mandatory cut in emissions of 60 per cent. That is a massive cut and it would come at a massive cost. In fact, if Australia were to cease all economic activity, our global greenhouse gas emissions would drop by less than 0.1 of one per cent, and that would be replaced by outputs in China within 10 months.

So, before we start putting our hands on our chests and saying that we are going to follow this, let us have a good think about it. We should be working toward sequestration of gases, and we should be telling the people of Central Queensland the truth: we should be telling them that overseas countries that have ratified the treaty are not meeting their targets, and we should be telling them that the nonsense that Kim Beazley preached when he was in Gladstone— (Time expired)

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