House debates Matters of Public Importance
Energy
Tony Pasin Barker, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister Assisting for Fisheries and Forestry
3:53 pm
To any steelworkers from Whyalla who might have just been listening to that contribution, that was the member for Griffith. Where is Griffith? Griffith is an affluent inner-city electorate in Brisbane, along the Brisbane River—certainly no steelworkers, or very few, I would hasten to suggest. Unfortunately, what they would have heard was not what they wanted to hear. What they wanted to hear was the once proud Labor Party standing up for them, their industry and their jobs. Instead, what they heard was, 'You're just a casualty of the ideological war we're perpetrating on the Australian people.' That's what they heard—the once-proud Labor Party who stood up for workers now turns their back on workers. These may well be workers in regional South Australia—and that might not matter to you—but it matters to me. It's not in my electorate, but it's significant.
The other thing that matters to me is that—in a country where we export phenomenal amounts of coking coal, where we have available to us phenomenal amounts of coking coal and where we have iron ore exports that rival the rest of the world—we will no longer produce structural steel. We have flown the white flag on the capacity to build or create steel.
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