Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

We are always interested to see how sensitive Liberal and National senators from Queensland are when their selling out of mining workers through casualisation and labour hire is raised. And here comes Senator Canavan, the biggest sellout of the lot—the man who likes to raid his fancy-dress drawer, put on his coalminer clothes, smear a bit of dust on his face and come down to Canberra and sell out those very coalminers by backing in the big mining companies over casualisation and labour hire year after year. Senator Canavan and the National Party are so worried about jobs in regional Queensland that they have assisted the big coalmining companies to casualise their workforce and bring in labour hire year after year, and they do nothing about it.

Senator Gallagher's question to Senator Birmingham was all about the cost of the LNP's plan for dealing with climate change. We already know that that cost involves the thousands of jobs which have already been lost across regional Queensland and regional Australia as a result of this government's failure to put forward policies about climate change and renewable energy. We already have seen thousands of jobs that should be going into places across regional Queensland be sent offshore by the National Party because they just can't come to grips with the present, let alone the future. And we've learned over the last few days, from comments from various National Party members, that that is not the limit of the cost of the LNP's climate change plan. It's not good enough for the LNP to send thousands of jobs offshore rather than see them grow in regional Queensland and regional Australia; they also want to put in place a $250 billion coal fund. They want to give mining companies $250 billion of taxpayers' money to prop them up. These are profit-making companies to whom they want to give $250 billion worth of taxpayers' funds. That is $10,000 for every man, woman and child in Australia that they want to hand over to big profit-making mining companies.

Senator Canavan wants to impose a mortgage tax on every Australian rather than do something positive about creating jobs through renewables. He's been reported in the media as saying, 'If we just have to jack up mortgages by a few percentage points that's not a big price to pay.' He wants every man, woman and child in Australia to pay more for their mortgages—and again, Senator Scarr is embarrassed by his National Party colleagues—