Alan Eggleston (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

No matter how hard Senator Moore tries—and it was a good effort, I must say—to camouflage and throw up detractors, she does not deal with the issue of why the ALP state leader, Mark McGowan, has banned Prime Minister Gillard from Western Australia for the duration of the Western Australian state election campaign. This is an incredible state of affairs. It is unprecedented for a Prime Minister to be seen as such a political liability by a state division of a party—in this case the Labor Party—that the Prime Minister is banned from coming to the state—in this case Western Australia, which is driving the Australian economy. You would think that, if the Australian Prime Minister wanted to go anywhere, it would be to the state which is earning all the export income and generating all the money for Australia's development. But the fact is that the Prime Minister has been asked to stay away from Western Australia because she is such bad news there.

Senator Moore made a great effort in talking about Shorten coming to Western Australia. But isn't it interesting that he just flew in and out and did not stay there as you would expect any senior minister to do? You would expect a whole range of branches to have functions for him to come to, but he sneaked in and out as quickly as possible so he was not seen in Perth or anywhere else around Western Australia. It tells you that the Western Australian state Labor organisation knows how badly this federal government is on the nose in Western Australia.

It is not hard to understand why the ALP in WA does not want the senior federal ministers in Western Australia. It comes back to the fact that Western Australia is driving the Australian economy and to the fact that our economy is based on international investment in the resources and mining sectors. Over the years Western Australia has received huge investments, running into hundreds of millions of dollars, because WA governments from the time of Sir Charles Court—who founded the Pilbara iron ore industry and the North West Shelf oil and gas industry—have made investors welcome in Western Australia and because the state has had a low sovereign risk profile. But the federal Labor government has destroyed Australia's reputation for low sovereign risk, and it has done so in part through the very taxes which Senator Moore referred to: the minerals resource rent tax and the super profits tax, which Prime Minister Rudd sought to introduce. These taxes have scared the international mining industry. They know that Western Australia, though it was once a very friendly place to miners, is no longer so because of the overriding power and influence of the present federal government over taxation. So the international mining industries have walked. There is no doubt that they are investing very heavily in other parts of the world, such as West Africa. It is said that most of the Australian and international companies who have invested in West Africa have their head offices in West Perth. That tells a story all by itself—even Australian money is leaving Western Australia because of the sovereign risk represented by the Rudd and Gillard governments.

This government is anti-investment and antimining, and in due course we will see the consequences of that.

Another reason which cannot be overlooked is that Julia Gillard tried to use Western Australia's GST—