Ross Lightfoot (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

What surprises me about the argument that the opposition mounts over the criticism that it offers of the government for not rapidly ratifying the Kyoto convention is the obvious omission of the considerable unemployment that ratifying the Kyoto convention would have brought upon the workers in this country. I think it is just another case of the Prime Minister taking up what has been the usual role of the Australian Labor Party in past decades and becoming the champion of working-class people.

The government certainly believe that the emission of carbon is a significant contributor to global warming. But, as the Prime Minister has said, we are not so much sceptics as realists. The reality of it, if you have a program that wants to stop the mining of coal in Australia, is that we are the biggest exporters in the world of both thermal and metallurgical coal. They are of the highest possible standards that you would find anywhere on earth. They contribute enormously to the coffers of Australia that not only allow for what we believe is full employment but also allow for an extraordinarily high standard of living.

The coal does not come from Western Australia, as do a lot of our exports goods that contribute to this unbelievable standard of living that we in Australia sometimes take for granted. In fact, the coal comes from the more populous states of New South Wales and Queensland. Victoria has brown coal, which is seen as the bogeyman of all electricity generation. Victoria, under a Labor government—as all the states and territories are—is the major contributor of CO and other nasty gases in Australia.

The government believes that, if you are going to replace something as fundamentally important as coal to the Australian economy, you must have a plan in place. The coalition government’s plan is that uranium could play a major role. I have visited several power plants throughout the world. I do not mean that I have just gone up to the gate and had a look; I have been into the reactors themselves, in countries such as the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Argentina and the United States. I have been into the power station at Calvert Cliffs, for instance, in the United States. Calvert Cliffs has two 1,000-megawatt uranium derived power stations. The production at Calvert Cliffs is on the edge of Chesapeake Bay, which is arguably one of the most environmentally sensitive areas of the United States. It produces electricity at about 3½c per kilowatt hour in United States currency. It is near Washington, District of Columbia—not the state—and Maryland and other populous states of America, but people see nothing wrong with that. The farmlands go right up to the concrete wall of the outer perimeter of the power station. If you are going to deny the production of uranium, which is cleaner, greener, safer and economically more viable than any other form of power generation, as well as ask not to have CO emissions from coal-fired power stations, you are leading Australia down a disastrous economic path.

I do not know what is wrong with the opposition sometimes, but I lose faith in ever having a real alternative, viable government, not that I ever want one but it would be nice to know that in the case of some of the sorts of political catastrophes that are going on at the moment—with the state government in the west and with the state government in New South Wales and with the state government of Queensland, and no doubt the others will pick this up—there is a viable government to replace these people at least at a federal level. But there is not. You cannot possibly have a government that caves in to the green movement; we all know that they are left-wing existentialists. You cannot have that without alternative, viable people at the helm of this nation. We are the ones that will do it. (Time expired)