Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is addressed to the Minister for Trade. Would the minister update the House on the impressive international trading performance of the coal industry in Australia and its importance to communities in every state? Are there any threats to this industry, especially in Gladstone and the Central Queensland coalfields?

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I see you care a lot about jobs for coalminers!

Government Members:

Government members interjecting—

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, he’s laughing!

Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for Hinkler, who has a deep and abiding interest in the jobs of coal workers. The coal industry is particularly important to his electorate, as it is to many other electorates around Australia. Queensland alone exported $14 billion worth of coal last year. That is a very significant contribution to the Queensland economy. I mentioned a couple of days ago that one in eight of Australia’s export dollars comes from coal—and in Queensland that figure is very much higher; perhaps as much as one in four—and so we rely very much as a nation on the coal industry for our wealth and for our growth and for the progress and development, particularly of much of regional Australia. Our clean coal is making a significant contribution also into reducing greenhouse emissions and, if it were to be replaced by coal from China or other parts of the world, the problems that the world would face in relation to greenhouse issues would be much greater.

In this context it is almost unthinkable that there could be threats to the future of this industry. It is almost unthinkable that there would be people who would want to close that industry down, and yet Senator Bob Brown has made it absolutely clear that in his view the coalmining industry should be phased out in three years and all the coal fired power stations also closed down in that time. But today he has gone even further to compare Australia’s coalmining industry with heroin dealers. Senator Brown said that Australia is like a heroin dealer feeding the habit of the world’s dependence on coal. For Senator Brown to compare Australia’s 30,000 workers in the coal industry with heroin dealers I think reaches an absolutely new low. That is a disgrace. Let him go to the people of Gladstone and tell them that he is likening them to heroin dealers.

As I said before, we could just dismiss that as being the whacky comments of the Greens, but of course we know that Labor is vigorously pursuing a preference deal with the Greens. They badly want to be on the same truck and on the same platform with the Greens when it comes to the next election. The honourable member for Kingsford Smith well and truly let the cat out of the bag when he said that the expansion of the coal industry, as we have seen in the Hunter Valley over the past decade, is a thing of the past and dismissed coal jobs as merely ‘hypothetical’.

That is even causing some alarm, we read, in the Labor Party. Senator Evans, the opposition resources and energy spokesman, apparently told the shadow ministry earlier this week that they should be aware of repeating the Latham blunder on the forestry industry, and another Labor member is bemoaning how badly the member for Kingsford Smith’s comments have gone down in the Hunter Valley. I do not know who the unnamed member was, but I am sure the member for Hunter would be very concerned about the comments of the member for Kingsford Smith in relation to the coal industry. The reality is we have got the Greens demanding an end to this industry, calling coalminers the equivalent of heroin traffickers, and we have got the Labor Party actively pursuing their preference deal at the next election. This kind of behaviour is a serious threat to the coal industry, an industry which has served this country very substantially. It is high time Labor disassociated itself from these bids to win over the Greens to endeavour to establish a preference deal with a party with this kind of attitude to one of Australia’s great industries.