Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—It has been a great adventure to travel with this committee and to meet the brilliant characters whose imagination and hard work have made northern Australia such an intriguing place. I acknowledge that we have some great nor'westers in the gallery today. We have Mayor Kelly Howlett, Deputy Mayor Gloria Jacob and CEO, Mal Osborne, from the dynamic town of Port Hedland—a place which is contributing so much to the wealth of the nation.

Australia does need to pivot north for a whole variety of reasons. Firstly, we have in the north of Australia a very substantial Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population that needs the opportunity to be brought into the economic life of Australia, to provide an opportunity for their current and future generations to be full participants in Australia's economic life. We need to work hard to bring an end to the endemic disadvantage and what we might call an economic apartheid that is still evident today. Secondly, we need to develop the north because it allows us to develop new markets and opportunities for our nation. These opportunities arise from the proximity to Asia and from the fact that we share a climate zone with hundreds of millions of neighbours to our north. This gives us the opportunity to use our educated community and our access to research and technological innovation to find cutting-edge solutions to agriculture, health, resource development and construction in the tropics and hot savannah.

Our committee's task was to hear in great detail from right across northern Australia the vision of local communities for the north and to provide an open filter to bring those ideas together. It would be fair to say that we did not have the resources that would enable us to do the cost-benefit analysis or necessarily prioritise the submissions to provide that rough filter and bring the projects together. We certainly saw some submissions that were quite extraordinary in their aspiration. For me, some of the most important contributions stressed the importance of detailed research—not to stop development but to guide, in the most creative way, the investment in research that is critical for us to fulfil the potential of the north. It is true that we might not be the food bowl for Australia, but we certainly can put more food on the table and we can advance the capacity of our Asian neighbours to feed themselves through the pioneering work that has been done in agricultural and horticultural innovation.

There was a very great focus on the need to develop the water resources, but we stress that, whilst there were many different ways in which the community felt that could be done, we were very clear that this needed to be always predicated and built on a solid foundation of scientific research. I was particularly very taken with the work that has been done in places like Kilto and Gogo Station, where we saw the fine grain mosaic—the use of groundwater brought into the food chain to allow us to not only produce agricultural crops but to feed that into the development of our livestock and local value-add opportunities. I was also very pleased to see the great submissions on projects like the Pilbara interconnected grid—a fantastic project that will reduce the energy cost and will make the Pilbara a place that will be very viable for a whole diversification of interests into the future.

As the chairman said, if we are going to be serious about this, if we want the white paper that this feeds into to be something other than another shelf filler, we are going to need to ensure that there is a well resourced department of northern Australia with its own minister and its own resources. I thank the chair for his very generous and collaborative leadership. I think it would be fair to say that we had a committee that came to the task with some very divergent perspectives. Our chairman's generosity of spirit and leadership enabled us to find some common ground, and I want to thank all my colleagues. We have had some absolutely fantastic times—particularly with the two Warrens. It must be something in the water or in the name.

Mr Morrison interjecting—

That is right; it would be a great one, and it is great to have been a passenger. I have survived it and have become battle hardened. I also thank the secretariat. I understand that it has been a wild and sometimes rough ride, but we do appreciate their efforts and, in the end, we have been able to bring together a very solid report.

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