Senate debates

Wednesday, 13 March 2013

Matters of Public Importance

Urban Planning

4:39 pm

Photo of Ian MacdonaldIan Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you to the Labor Party senator—banning of guns in Australia and all those sorts of things. But, if you go through any serious environmental forward steps in Australia, you will see that they have been introduced by a Liberal and National Party government. Why? Because we had the sort of economy that allowed us to pour millions of dollars into the Natural Heritage Trust and to do things for the environment, for country towns and even for regional cities. But the Greens and the Labor Party do not understand that. They think you just tax, tax, tax investors that have lots of options around the world—Australia is not the only kid on the block with good mineral resources. What the Greens and their Labor allies want to do is to tax the mining industry out of existence so that the wealth that Australia gets from them, and the wealth that allows us to build infrastructure and look after the environment, will disappear.

Only the Greens and the Labor Party could introduce a minerals resource rent tax that does not raise any tax, but that is another issue. The fact that they are doing this—the sovereign risk issues that continually come because of a Labor government that is hanging on by its fingernails with the support of the Australian Greens and is so dependent on the Australian Greens that they will do any of these crazy left-wing proposals that the Greens click their fingers at—is the problem that all Australians understand. I do not want to predict future elections, but I ask you to look at past elections, and clearly people in my state of Queensland, in New South Wales and in Western Australia have understood that you do not make Australia strong by making our major industries weak. That is the issue that the Greens should really be looking at, rather than this airy-fairy stuff they come up with.

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