George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Six thousand people responded; 94 per cent were against. But, as big and as ugly and as economically destructive as the carbon tax is, it is just one method this government is using to bring the economy to its knees. Everything this government touches it stuffs up. As the Leader of the Opposition says, it is like the Midas touch in reverse; in fact, it is actually worse than the Midas touch in reverse because the government even manages to stuff up the economy with what it does not touch.

The one time they should have done something—the one time they should have stepped in—they did not. Qantas and the flying public needed the government to act and they did not act. They sat on their hands and did nothing. They were probably too scared to do anything because they know what happens when they do act. But doing nothing just punched another big, fat hole in the economy. It punched another big hole in business. In the Whitsundays, in the electorate of Dawson, times are already tough—as tough as they were during the pilots strike of 1989. They are suffering from the high Aussie dollar and the legacy of the summer of natural disasters. The Whitsundays relies on tourism and, by allowing the situation with the Qantas industrial dispute to get so out of control that the national carrier's entire fleet was grounded, this government knocked the stuffing out of even more Whitsunday businesses. QantasLink flights, thankfully, continued into the Whitsundays, but I have to tell you that there were a lot of empty seats. No connections means no passengers, and no passengers means no business, and that means someone is out of pocket—a family is out of pocket. How much more damage does the government want to do to the economy in the Whitsundays? They cannot wait for the carbon tax up there, I can tell you. They cannot wait!

Then there is the damage that has been caused to job-creating investment proposals in North Queensland by the rigid regulations of the environmental protection and biodiversity conservation approvals process. I point to one very big example of the damage: the multibillion dollar Abbot Point multicargo facility project. This project, which has the capacity to generate thousands of jobs and see an increase in population and services into the town of Bowen, has been held up by the federal environment department, awaiting EPBC approval, since December last year. Literally nothing has happened to what will be one of the biggest projects of all in Northern Australia. Each month the project proponents are told, 'Next month you will get the approval,' or 'The approval is coming; it is coming.' Well, so is Christmas—for a second time round for this proposal. Next month the project will have sat there stagnant for a year because of the federal government's delays.

Here is a little update that has been given by the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities; it came out during the Senate estimates. A bureaucrat from there, Barbara Jones, Assistant Secretary of the Environment Assessment Branch, said:

The proponent, North Queensland Bulk Ports, provided a final EIS document to the department on 6 December last year. The department is still considering the content of that document and assessing it.

The department has been assessing it for nearly a year. The proponents were advised that the application would be finalised in February—nine months ago—and it has been held up because of the onerous demands to offset perceived environmental damage. I have to tell you that that has Bob Brown's fingerprints all over it. The state government has already addressed the issue, and the proponents have agreed to a 100 per cent offset to all perceived environmental damage—100 per cent agreed. That was the original issue, and the agreement—you would think—would be the end of the issue.

But industry sources have told me that the department has now got UNESCO involved—UNESCO; would you believe it?—because the project is off the coast of the Great Barrier Reef. Now we have some bureaucrat in some United Nations office sitting over there in Paris with his little red pen, probably daydreaming about a holiday in the Bahamas or somewhere, and he is more concerned about that or what he is going to have for lunch than he is about creating jobs in North Queensland. The department basically confirmed this at Senate estimates. While they would not use the word 'referral' because of the connotations it has, they said that they were basically notifying UNESCO bureaucrats in Paris about job-creating projects in North Queensland.

Who is running this country? Is it the Labor Party, who quite clearly could not care less about business, investment or the economy? Is it the Greens, who want to completely shut it all down? If a Labor government is taking its economic policy from the Greens, it is just a matter of time before there is no economy in North Queensland—and the rest of the country will not be far behind.

See this speech in context