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

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes:

(a) the importance of a robust and clear legal system that allows for timely judicial review and certainty for investors and the community alike;

(b) the latest legal challenge brought by the Melbourne based Australian Conservation Foundation to the development of the Galilee Basin is another cynical attempt to abuse due process;

(c) ongoing ‘green’ lawfare is holding Queensland families to ransom and jeopardising Australia’s reputation as a place to do business; and

(d) that rather than protecting the environment, the replacement of the Galilee Basin’s lower emission coal by higher emission coal from other countries could instead cause an increase in global emissions; and

(2) calls on the Australian Labor Party to support legislative amendments to close legal loopholes being exploited by ‘green’ groups.

This motion is of the utmost importance to the people of North and Central Queensland. It recognises that thousands of North Queensland families remain jobless because a small group of people do not like the industry the state's biggest job creating project operates in. A small but very vocal group of extreme greens have formed an army of ecoterrorists using any means they can to impose their own ideological agenda on Australia. One of those means is abusing the legal system, which is supposed to ensure the rule of law is observed to protect citizens' rights and freedoms—a legal system that now unfortunately is a weapon used to wage a war against capitalism, against jobs, against progress and against development. That strategy has inspired the term 'lawfare', and that term means using the law to wage warfare on jobs.

In Queensland, Adani's Carmichael mine project would employ thousands of people to build the country's largest coal mine, to expand the port at Abbott Point in my electorate and to build a railway line connecting the two. Those thousands of jobs would have been filled by now were it not for the actions of the extreme greens. Their campaign of lies, misinformation and frivolous legal action has successfully delayed those jobs for the past three years—a time that has seen 20,000 jobs or more lost from Queensland's resources sector. If these were the actions of a competitor company or a competing country, that competitor would probably be in very hot water indeed. Because these extremists pretend to be environmental activists they get off scot free. Because they make this false connection to the Great Barrier Reef their gross tactics are accepted by many. But holding the reef to ransom is like putting a gun to society's head and saying 'Give me what I want or the reef gets it.' That is an act of ecoterrorism. Their lies, misinformation, slander and the frivolous legal action attacking a company for the sake of furthering an ideological cause can only be described as terrorism if you look at the criminal code.

The actions of the extreme greens have nothing to do with environmentalism but they have everything to do with the ideology of socialism. They do not want to fix climate change—they want to use climate change alarmism as an excuse for wealth redistribution, as an excuse for deindustrialisation, as an excuse to close down the mining industry. They do not want someone who has worked two jobs for 20 years to have more money than someone who cannot be bothered getting up off the couch to collect their dole cheque. They want those hard-earned savings handed over, and the easiest way to do that is to impose a big fat carbon tax on the wealthy. It does not matter that they are trashing jobs, it does not matter that they are trashing the lifestyles of many families; it does not matter to the extreme greens if their actions are trashing Australia's reputation amongst investors, amongst suppliers, amongst customers, and they do not see it as trashing our children's future either—because, they say, there is going to be equality. Our kids can be equally poor and jobless, I suppose. Their claimed justification for the lies, misinformation and lawbreaking that they undertake in the name of their ideology is wearing thin. They are clutching at straws.

The latest legal challenge to the Galilee Basin brought about by the Melbourne-based Australian Conservation Foundation claims that this development will destroy the reef. They have built an image, which has been grasped in the minds of many of the latte sippers in the south, of draglines digging up the reef to mine coal. But the coalmine is hundreds of kilometres from the nearest salt water and even further than that from the Great Barrier Reef. The extreme Greens claim expanding Abbot Point, the port that will export this coal, will kill the reef, but the truth is that dredging operations at Abbot Point are going to be 40 to 50 kilometres away from the Great Barrier Reef. The spoil that is going to be dredged up is going to be disposed of on the port's own land. That is what the extreme Greens insisted happen and that is what is being done. Yet they still oppose it; they still claim it is going to harm the reef. This last-ditch scam—that is the only word I can use: 'scam'—from the extremists is to claim that burning the coal is going to increase global emissions and therefore the reef is going to be destroyed. When you actually have a long, hard look at it, the reality is quite the opposite.

If the Carmichael coalmine project goes ahead this is what will happen. Thousands of Australian families will have jobs. Those workers will have the protection of Australia's strong labour laws and safety regulations. The high quality coal that will come out of that mine will be mined under the rigorous environmental regulations that we have in Australia, especially for this project. Most importantly, Indian coal-fired power generators will burn Australian coal instead of foreign coal, say, coming from Indonesia, where the ash content is higher. Australian coal is much higher quality than foreign coal and will produce fewer emissions than coal that has a high ash content. So the net impact is actually a lowering of emissions.

If the climate alarmists honestly believe the emissions are going to kill the reef then they should be out there picketing support for the Carmichael mine project. That is the reality. India are going to burn the coal. They have built new generators and they are going to be building more. They are going to use those generators to bring hundreds of millions of people out of energy poverty, which is something else that the socialists should be barracking for. That is the reality. No matter how hard the extreme Greens wish it, they cannot change that reality with social media campaigns, a tax on the coal industry or demonising hardworking coalminers in North Queensland and Central Queensland. They cannot change the reality.

I know the extreme Greens and their fellow travellers and movements like Socialist Alliance and Socialist Alternative have this idea in their heads of some utopia where everything is rainbows and lollipops. I know that the Greens, particularly the Australian Greens, have this pipedream about spending trillions of dollars on health and education systems and having the most generous welfare system on this planet, but with all due respect I say to the Greens: the world you want cannot be conjured up with pixie dust and unicorn bottom burps. It will be built with jobs, not unemployment. It will require economic growth, not economic vandalism. It will be built with technological advances. That must be funded. Wasting trillions of dollars on killing economies around the world will not help. It will not help technology, it will not help the climate and it certainly will not help the thousands of families in North Queensland and Central Queensland who desperately need jobs right now.

There used to be members in this place who would compromise their socialist dreams for the sake of getting people into jobs. Unfortunately, I have to say that from what I have seen so far—and I do not want to be too critical—the Labor Party have not done anything with regard to this project and the jobs it will create, because even though the unions give them money and the unions will benefit out of this, it is going to be the Greens who dictate policy because of preferences.

The Labor Party need to understand that, while the Greens might dictate policy to them through the preference system that we have in this country, those policies are actually destroying jobs, reducing the number of workers that could become union members and drying up funds that need to be in Central Queensland and North Queensland to stimulate good, strong, sustainable local economies. In the end, if we keep with that, there will be no Labor Party. There will just be the Greens. They will overtake the Labor Party because their ideology will reach out to the hard left. What they will do is dry up all the jobs and all the hardworking union members in industries like coal.

With this motion today I am calling on the Labor Party to do the right by workers, to do the right thing by jobs in Central Queensland and North Queensland, and to support legislation, to support the government, in restoring fairness and common sense to this whole situation. I call on members opposite—and I know we have got the very good member for Moreton here, sitting at the front desk—and I call on the member for Moreton to support legislation that is going to curb lawfare and to support efforts against these acts of ecoterrorism that this movement keeps on pushing at us. I call on him and other members opposite to support jobs, get Australia back to work and to create the wealth that will fund the high standards of living that we want to have in this country. We need these jobs desperately and I hope the Labor Party gets on board with the government to get these jobs.

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