Senate debates

Wednesday, 14 November 2018

Matters of Public Importance

Manufacturing

4:56 pm

Photo of John WilliamsJohn Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think, Mr Acting Deputy President, the truth is starting to hurt Senator Carol Brown. I don't think she's enjoying what I'm saying, but she's going to have to sit there and listen carefully and take every word in, because what I'm saying is the absolute truth.

So you've put the cost of doing business up. I see it all the time. I've seen it at an abattoir in Inverell. Where they used to pay $40,000 a week for electricity, they're now paying $70,000 a week because of things such as the renewable energy target, which, thank goodness, the coalition did reduce from 41,000 gigawatts to 33,000 gigawatts—and it should have been reduced more. There's nothing wrong with renewable energy, on one condition: it competes on a level playing field. We see the wind towers being built now in the plain between Inverell and Glen Innes. That's fine, but there's one problem: for every wind tower that spins eight hours a day, 365 days a year, anyone who's hooked to the grid—the pensioner, the widow, the business, the family—pays $700,000 a year to that one wind turbine before they buy one watt of electricity. I think that is very unfair.

What they did in South Australia was put these windmills everywhere. Where I grew up, at Jamestown, the hills are covered with them. Of course, because of the subsidy, they can sell electricity cheaply. What did they do? They sent the coal-fired power station at Port Augusta broke. It was literally blown up. What happened then? The lights went out. The lights went out because the stupid subsidies sent the reliable source of electricity broke.

We have the crazy attitude of many in here that Australia is going to dominate the world, rule the world and change the world. They had a column in the Australian Hotel a few weeks ago—The Australian newspaper, sorry; though I have been to the Australian Hotel before today, I can tell you—that highlighted the number of coal-fired generation plants being constructed around the world. Guess what they're going to burn in those coal-fired generating plants? They're going to burn coal. Do they burn the more efficient coal from Australia or do they burn the second-rate brown coal from Indonesia, China or wherever? The Greens and many others will say: 'Don't have a coalmine in Australia. Don't burn more efficient coal, with higher energy and less CO2 production. Burn the rubbish coal and, hence, shut down the mining here and take away our wealth and our jobs.' That is the crazy hypocrisy of this whole situation. As Dr Finkel, our Chief Scientist, said, we can cut out all our emissions, 1.3 per cent of the world's CO2, and it will have virtually no effect on the planet whatsoever, but we're paying for it and paying dearly. I return to the cost of doing business. If we want to keep manufacturing here, we need to keep the costs down, and electricity is one.

You don't want to see foreigners working here. Mr Acting Deputy President, it was 15 September 2008, a while back now, when I made my maiden speech to this chamber. I said then that some of the young ones in Australia who are fit and capable of working need a touch on the backside with a cattle prod—not literally, metaphorically—to get them off their butts and get them to work. When I was a young fella, if you didn't work it was a shame. You were shamed in your community. We didn't have enough land for me to work when I threw in my scholarship at university in and came home to the farm, so I took up shearing sheep. It's not an easy job. There's probably none tougher. I remember my first day shearing. I worked my butt off for eight hours and crawled out on all fours. I had shorn 32 sheep for the day. I thought, 'What a great future I have in this industry!' Anyway, I got better as time went on. I then went driving trucks.

So the young ones, the healthy ones, need to get to work. Our abattoir at Inverell employs 800 people. It was started by the great man John McDonald and his family, who kicked off the abattoir after it had closed down about 20 years ago. Locals were employed. They actually ran a bus out to areas of unemployment such as Tyngin. People came to work for the first couple of days. Then they didn't come to work. Australians came to work and—guess what?—they failed the grog test. They failed the drug test. They got the spear. They were offered a job, they had a job and they wouldn't play by the rules.

So what do we have now? We have many Filipino and Brazilian workers there because we can't get others to work there. It is all right to say, 'Let's have the locals working,' but they've got to have a bit of a go. There's nothing wrong with working at abattoirs. It's a great industry that relies on exports and export income. It has great local jobs and puts great money in the local community. So it's all right to say, 'Preserve our jobs,' but the locals are going to have to work. In many countries, as Senator Gichuhi pointed out about where she comes from in her maiden speech, if you don't work, you don't get paid. Luckily we do in Australia, but that money should be there to help people along to the next job. For those who refuse to work, we have a real problem because some are simply not capable of working and we need to keep business costs down.

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