George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

As those of us who live in Queensland know, the thing about the Australian Labor Party is you cannot believe a word they say. Notwithstanding the superficially plausible account of these events that came from Senator Claire Moore, let me remind those listening to this broadcast of the facts. The facts are these: there was a major development proposed by Rio Tinto of a $4 billion bauxite project on Cape York called the Embley project, which was objected to by the Wilderness Society and the Australian Greens. It would have created jobs for thousands of Indigenous people, but the Greens did not want it because the Greens want to deindustrialise Queensland just as they have deindustrialised Tasmania. So they promoted a series of fatuous, flimsy, insubstantial objections to the Embley bauxite project.

First of all they discovered a species called the bare-rumped sheathtail bat and they said, 'This project, which will give jobs to thousands upon thousands of Aboriginal Australians, has to be stopped out of deference to the bare-rumped sheathtail bat,' and that was found to be insubstantial. Then they discovered a new species of freshwater crab—with no doubt an even more exotic, perhaps comic, name—that nobody had ever heard of. And, finally, they came up with the expedient 'increased shipping in the Barrier Reef'—shipping that has been passing through the Barrier Reef for decades, indeed since the 19th century—that will damage the Barrier Reef. And at last, the minister who had to exercise the discretion under the EPBC Act, Mr Tony Burke, a minister in the federal government, announced that an environmental impact study would be expanded to include the Embley project, and the project would have to be put into mothballs. The Greens got their way. The Wilderness Society got its way and, as we have learned from the Senator Boswell, the application was a one-page application. How absurd that a major development bringing jobs to thousands of people in Queensland, in particular Indigenous people, could be stopped on such a specious, vexatious ground. But it is worse than that because, as everybody who lives in Queensland knows but Labor politicians are too ashamed to admit, the Queensland Labor government is corrupt. One of its ministers, Mr Gordon Nuttall, lies in a Queensland prison today because he was corrupt. And lo and behold, on the very day that the suspension of the Embley project was announced as a result of the vexatious claims of the Wilderness Society and the Greens, do you know what was also announced? That the Greens would be giving their preferences to the Labor Party in the Queensland state election. And not just preferencing the Labor Party; they would be preferencing the Labor Party in the key seat of Ashgrove, the seat where Mr Campbell Newman, the extremely successful former lord mayor of Brisbane, is the Liberal National Party candidate—the seat that is the focus of all attention at this state election.

So join the dots, Mr Deputy President. I am sure the listeners will. The Greens demand an absurd outcome as a result of a series of flimsy and insubstantial applications; eventually Mr Tony Burke gives the Greens what they want; and, lo and behold, on the very day of that announcement the Labor Party secures Greens preferences for itself in the critical seat of Ashgrove. I do not have to draw the conclusion because anyone listening to this broadcast can draw it themselves. That is what Queensland Labor is like. (Time expired)