Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

For the Gateway Western Australia project in Perth, there are another 1,300 jobs that are working on that particular project. We have committed $1.2 billion to the NorthLink project in Western Australia; the Great Northern Highway, $390 million; the North West Coastal Highway, another $220 million. These are all job-creating projects that will deliver important infrastructure for Western Australia for future generations.

The honourable member asked me, 'Are there any obstacles to this job creation?' Well, there is an obstacle, and that is Labor. There is an obstacle—that is, Labor. We have already heard today that when Labor were last in government, 200,000 jobs were lost. Many of those jobs were lost because Labor introduced a carbon tax and introduced a mining tax. You might have thought—when they looked across at what has been achieved under this government, with 340,000 jobs created after the abolition of the carbon tax and the mining tax—that they would have learnt a lesson. You would have thought that they would have learnt a lesson, but they have not. They have not. They are promising to bring back the carbon tax—a bigger carbon tax than ever with more jobs lost than ever! More jobs will be lost because of Labor's plan to bring back a carbon tax. They are going to bring back the mining tax as well. How will that help the economy of Western Australia? A failed tax, but they are going to bring it back bigger and worse than ever, destroying more jobs in the Australian economy.

So it is not bad enough that they are giving their tacit support to the Green tactics of legal exhaustion and legal sabotage of new mining projects—and probably the next one of those will be in a state like Western Australia; they are actively proposing policies that will destroy jobs and will continue their appalling record in employment, which they had when last in government.

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