Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for giving me an extra 30 seconds, and I'll make good use of it. On Friday evening, at around about seven o'clock Western Australian time, when my farmers, miners, prospectors and small landholders were settling in for dinner and perhaps to watch a little bit of footy, some of the best news that they've had in a very long time came through in the form of an article in the West Australian announcing that the Western Australian Labor government, the Cook government, had done a spectacular backflip on the Aboriginal cultural heritage legislation.

Deputy Speaker Goodenough, you'd be very well aware, as a proud Western Australian—and I know you are—of this legislation and the sort of pain, uncertainty and grief that it was inflicting on the Western Australian community. It was going to introduce an extraordinary layer of bureaucracy for farmers, in particular, in my neck of the woods, but of course miners and prospectors as well. Anyone with a block of over 1,100 square metres, in order to dig a hole more than 50 centimetres deep or to remove more than 20 kilograms of soil, which is about a nine-kilo bucketful of soil, was going to have to go through this extraordinary process of due diligence, which was going to increase the complexity of doing simple tasks like building a chook pen or planting a lemon tree in their backyard.

It was going to make running a farm almost impossible. You would get up in the morning and, depending on the weather, you might say, 'Today we're going to go and repair that fence that needs a bit of work.' Of course, you would not have been able to do that, because there would have been a several-month process of getting approval for it, as a tier 2 event, so opportunities would have been missed. It was certainly going to damage the operational efficiency of miners, prospectors and farmers, among others.

There are many people who are sceptical about the reasons the WA government have backflipped on the Voice. Within seconds of that article going up, many of the commenters were pointing out that the Voice has been travelling very badly in Western Australia. People are speculating that the vote may well have a three in front of it. In my electorate, I wouldn't be surprised if it has a two in front of it. Many people were blaming the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act for the very poor reception of the Voice in Western Australia. That's yet to be seen; we'll see whether that is actually the case, and how genuine the Premier, Mr Cook, is.

Remember that when the Leader of the Opposition in Western Australia, Shane Love, suggested just six weeks ago to Mr Cook that the implementation of this legislation be delayed for six months—just delayed, not scrapped, as they have now done—Mr Cook rolled out the old Paul Keating favourite, the old quote about the dog returning to their vomit. He accused Shane Love of dog whistling to calls of racism from his C-grade backbench. It's yet to be seen just how genuine Mr Cook is about rectifying this terrible legislation that they have introduced, but one thing that he could do in the short term to assure Western Australian growers, miners, prospectors and others that he is genuine is to perhaps sack his minister, Mr Buti.

Mr Buti has shown industrial-strength incompetence throughout this process. We've had hundreds, if not thousands, of people turning up to information sessions to explain how this is going to impact their businesses. We had 650 farmers turn up to a public meeting in Katanning to express their dismay. We had 30,000 signatures on a petition collected by the Hon. Neil Thomson MLC. Mr Buti completely ignored all of that. He never turned up to one meeting. He never showed any interest. As recently as last Wednesday, he said that the rollout was going smoothly. So Mr Cook could show some good faith to the productive workers of Western Australia by sacking his minister, because to suggest that he is in any way, shape or form suitable to review and implement some more workable legislation is a complete and utter fallacy.

One very last suggestion for the Premier, in my last few seconds, is that if it is indeed true that the federal government lent on him to backflip on this, then he should be leaning on them to backflip on live exports. (Time expired)