Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Minister for Resources and Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

One concerning thing around the figures that were released this week is that that record-breaking run I mentioned is about to plateau and, in the next three to five years, possibly start declining. So we won't be exporting more volumes ever year, year on year—because we have been relying on the significant investments that were made over the last decade, during the mining boom, and of course, unless new investments are made year on year, eventually you start to decline in terms of your production. We have had an investment boom followed by a production boom.

What we need to do now is support new investments in resources. We need to make sure that we don't have nine-year delays on projects, like the one the Queensland government has presided over with the Adani Carmichael coalmine. It's good that that's going now. But the Queensland government's now ranked, in the Fraser Institute ranking of uncertainty in environmental regulation, 49th out of 83 jurisdictions in the world. They are behind Russia, PNG and the Congo. That's why we're leading a charge in COAG to do benchmarking on environmental regulation around the mining sector—to make sure we facilitate investments in mining, not put more hurdles in front of them.