Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) | Hansard source

Yes, that's right. They're risky investments. And, when you're out in the frontiers of our nation, they will be hurt by the tax changes the government has put in place, which particularly punish those investments with a strong risk profile. But they do contribute a lot to our nation—over half those nation's exports. The amount of people that live in the north, which is just five-odd per cent of Australians, kick way beyond their weight—about 10 per cent at least. These were the stats when I set it up. It might be more or a bit less than that—who knows. But about 10 per cent of our nation's wealth is created in the north. That's not just exports but entire wealth. If you like, each northern Australian is contributing double their proportionate amount to our nation's wealth and prosperity.

And it makes sense that you should invest back in those areas of your country that are making money. If you're running a business, you've got different lines of business, and one area of your business is making double in proportionate terms what the other line is, you'd probably look at that and go: 'Well, maybe we should invest more in that. At the marginal dollar we've got to invest, with a bit of capital we've got to invest, we should put more into that, because it's really making a big bang for our buck.' That principle is at the heart of why we pushed for this developing northern Australia agenda. The NAIF is just one component of it, but we could see this enormous, untapped potential in the north of our country of 40 per cent of our nation's landmass that remains to be developed. We should be very proud of the nation and of what we've done, but we shouldn't stop where we've gotten. We've got to go further.

As part of this, we established the NAIF to help with that extra investment. I just want to spend a bit of time looking at the record of what it achieved. I was going to start in Western Australia, as I said, because next year an investment the NAIF has funded at Karratha will help re-establish urea production in Australia. I've been banging on this for some time now. In 2022, under this government, our last urea plant shut at Brisbane. We no longer produce the most important fertiliser that goes to food production—urea—in this country. On the eve of the Iran conflict earlier this year, two-thirds of our urea needs, post this closure at Gibson Island of our last urea plant, were being imported from the Middle East. We had left ourselves, under this government's mismanagement of our energy system, very vulnerable to conflicts like we've seen in the Middle East. That has caused a lot of disruption for our nation's farmers, particularly early on in the crisis, when they were struggling to get hold of urea. If you could, it was at ridiculous, exorbitant prices. The government has taken a blank cheque and got some fertiliser in, which we support, but we shouldn't have to go around with a blank cheque to secure the supply of a basic commodity when we have everything we need here.

The NAIF has funded this project. The deal was finalised when this government got to power, but it started well before that. These deals take a while, usually, in germination. But next year, thanks to the NAIF, we'll have this back. We'll have this facility and this capability back. Admittedly, it's all the way over in Karratha, and it would be nice to have a urea plant over here in the east as well. There's no reason why we shouldn't if we develop the gas resources here. But good on the Western Australians for being generally pro gas and developing their resources and having them at hand with the assistance of the Commonwealth government here or the Commonwealth government funded NAIF to do that.

But right across the north there have been lots of very beneficial projects. Near my own town in Rockhampton, it's helped fund the re-establishment of the Mount Morgan gold mine, which was the biggest gold mine in the world at one stage. It helped build Rockhampton, my home town. It is going to produce gold and silver and tin, I think, as well—lots of different products—but the key thing is that the funding here has unlocked the potential to rehabilitate the tailings dams there, which are a big risk to the water supply of Rockhampton. If there is a large unexpected flooding event, there is that risk—it's a small risk but a risk—that those tailings dams could spill, and a whole lot of toxic materials could end up in the Don River and eventually end up in Rockhampton's drinking water supply. That's been of concern to the people of Central Queensland for some time, and thanks to the NAIF we have a solution here with this.

Heritage Minerals is doing a great job there. It's based in Rockhampton and is a great local company who have installed some innovative equipment, thanks to funding from the NAIF, to reprocess the tailings dams. They will extract and can smelt, as I said, the gold and that. It's good economic value. Jobs are being created in Mount Morgan for the first time in some time at that scale, and it takes away an environmental risk for our region. Fortunately, or thankfully, there are plans—they're not confirmed yet, but plans, potentially—for that gold, which should be starting to be smelted later this year, to go into the medals for the 2032 Olympic Games. It's another great story of the contribution of our mining industry and our heritage of the development of Mount Morgan, a very important part of our nation's history, which has a second life thanks to NAIF.

NAIF has also helped fund the Olive Downs coal mine and the infrastructure related to that as well—that's created massive wealth for our country, with thousands of jobs being created there—and a new meatworks at Moranbah. It's incredibly important to have some competition for our cattle graziers in that area not have to be beholden to the major chains. And, importantly, that meatworks does service kills. For those not in the industry, that means that a grazier can take their cows there and actually also get the product at the other end and brand and market their product, either overseas or here in Australia, with their own name and brand. If you go to the major meatworks, typically these days you're locked into having to sell over your product, and all the marketing and the branding will be taken over by the big players. So that's great. That's opened up things.

There have also been upgrades to airports across Darwin, Alice Springs, Cairns and Townsville, all helped funded through the NAIF, helping unlock tourism opportunities. In the Northern Territory, it's very important that we keep progressing the ship-lift program there, which is also funded by the NAIF, which will help build some infrastructure at the Darwin Port and give the Australian Defence Force, the Australian Navy, another option than Fremantle to help maintain and repair ships. At the moment, either those ships have to go all the way to Singapore, which they often do, or around to Fremantle, which can see them out of service for weeks at a time when obviously they're often used in the north, so this is a very important facility.

That's just a few of the projects. I forgot, too, going all the way around back to Western Australia, in East Kimberley, at Kununurra, the cotton gin there has also received support, and I believe it's a smashing success. Senator Smith might be able to update us more on that. I haven't been up to Kununurra for a little while. It's one of my favourite places in the country. It's a wonderful place. When I was minister, they were starting those cotton trials and doing very well, and so it's fantastic now to see that they don't have send that cotton all the way to Emerald to be gin. It's a long way from Kununurra, but we have a facility there now. So congratulations again to all those people in the NAIF.

As I hinted at before, we're doing this for the future of our country. These investments are in northern Australia, but they're being made to benefit all of Australia. We have all benefited from the development of our country. We can all sit back with pride and look at places like Sydney and Melbourne and Brisbane now to host the games. They're wonderful things that Australians have built over many years. I just don't want to see us, in a hundred years time, look back and think we haven't built new places, new monuments and new opera houses and opened up new harbours, ports and economic development. To do that, we've got to do what our ancestors did and be pioneers and go to the frontiers of our nation.

There's one thing that's not said enough but we should be very proud of. I do owe a debt to former prime minister Tony Abbott for coming across this statistic. His wonderful book Australia: A History is recommended reading for all of us—a very fair history of Australia. A wonderful, wonderful statistic he put there was that just a hundred years after the first fleet, just a hundred years after coming on a bunch of boats from halfway around the world, those people that settled and pioneered our country delivered, developed and built the richest nation on the earth. In a hundred years, they overtook all these ancient civilisations that had been there for thousands of years. In a hundred years, they developed, in per-person terms, the richest country on earth.

That is the legacy that we inherit and we must cherish and protect, and it's up to us to make sure that we make similar investments to keep at the top of the league tables for future generations of Australians. We will only do that by developing the parts of our country that remain undeveloped, and that's why we on this side will always support developing our north. We support the extension of the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility. Let's keep building in this country.