I was quite taken aback by the last speaker and by how wonderful and marvellous it is for Western Australia and how good it is—and we're not allowed to have it. It was quite fascinating. Only Western Austrade is allowed to have it; the rest of us are not. Every country on earth has a reserved resource policy for gas. Once again, Australia and New Zealand are the two free-market countries. Everyone else on earth is wrong, but the Australian and New Zealand governments are right. Well, I very much doubt that.

Why I have been so obsessed with it—and I don't apologise for being obsessed with it—it that Mount Isa is the fourth-biggest industrial centre in this country. No. 1 is Port Kembla. No. 2 is Newcastle Port, which is owned by China. It is worth absolutely nothing to Australia, because the people in this parliament gave the biggest port in Australia to China. Shame! But I won't go sideways on that; I'll refocus. No. 3 is Gladstone, which is one of the three biggest power stations in Australia. It generated the cheapest electricity in the world because it was run on free coal. The state government called us bushrangers. I suppose they were right. We just took the coal for free. Too bad about the big corporation! They were making plenty out of the coal that they were exporting, so we took it for free. Because of the massive scale—it's one of the biggest power stations in the world—the labour costs were negligible. There were huge economies of scale, and, of course, it was built with government finance, so there were negligible repayments. So we had the cheapest electricity in the world, which enabled us to get, arguably, one of the five or six biggest aluminium smelters in the world at Gladstone.

Let me return to Mount Isa, because that's the fourth-biggest industrial centre in Australia. It relies entirely on gas for its energy, for its electricity, for the heat for its mineral processes and for the chemistry it requires. We should have the biggest phosphate plant in the world. The fertiliser is diammonium phosphate. That's two parts ammonia, which is natural gas, and one part phosphate. The whole of the Northern Territory-Queensland border is alive with phosphate. It's everywhere. So we've got miles of phosphate, and, of course, we've got miles of gas, but big corporations have sold it overseas. The important point to make here is that we sold the gas for 6c a unit and we buy our own gas back at $16.60 a unit. Who is running this country? We import all of our petrol. We export our oil for $8,000 million. We import our petrol for $62,000 million. Who is running this country? The answer, of course, is 'nobody'.

Let me return to the gas. I give praise to the Prime Minister. We're the fourth biggest industrial centre in Australia, and we're closing down. The phosphate plant has announced its closure, and the copper plant has announced its closure. It's a silver, lead and zinc operation, but it's nowhere near as big as the other two. Mount Isa, the fourth biggest industrial centre, is closing down. Two days later, the Prime Minister announced the reserved resource policy on gas on the east coast of Australia. We put on record our thanks and appreciation of the excellent and immediate—but there was no price. So two weeks later I went back to Prime Minister and said, 'You've given us a reserved resource policy, but we got this huge price.' That is being discussed now as a matter of public record. The government has put on the record that they're discussing that issue now. We're heading in the right direction. We just haven't quite got there yet.

The first public activity that I was ever present at was an address by the acting head of Mount Isa Mines, which was then the third biggest mining company on earth. He said that industry follows cheap power and that so long as we've got cheap power we will have a great industry in Mount Isa. That was fine when we had the gas for $6 a unit. I speak with authority because I was the minister that signed that agreement, and I thought it was a bit steep at the time. But it was a 20-year agreement, so really it was a pretty good deal. Now it's $16.60, and there aren't brutal bastards like myself around to just do it. Where we stand at the present moment is: God bless the government for giving us the reserved resource policy, but we need a price that we can live with.

It's the fourth biggest industrial centre in Australia. That phosphate plant should be doing $5,000 million a year, which I understand Western Australia will be doing. Maybe my information is incorrect there, but that's what I've been informed. We are doing $800 million only and we need to—but we can't ramp up unless we've got a price for the gas. We've got the phosphate super cheap—huge, unlimited reserves. We have got the gas. We thank the government for that, but we haven't got a price. That's where the situation lies at the present moment. We hope that the government moves forward with aggression on negotiating a price.

The big boys on the block in fertiliser, Russia and the United States, are getting their gas for $6. We're paying $16.60. Obviously, we need $6. The companies that got this gas got it for nothing. This is an Australian resource. They took it up. I'm not knocking them for that, but now they're making a squillion dollars out of it. If you take it up for nothing and you're selling it for $16.60 a unit when the rest of the world's paying $6 a unit—this is obscene, the current situation.