Tanya Plibersek Vetoes $1 Billion Gold Mine in NSW Take Note of Answers

As has become apparent, Australians will most likely be going to the polls sooner rather than later, and they need to ask themselves: Who do they trust to lead this country based on facts as opposed to ideology?

Who do they trust to put the interests of the Australian people and the national interest ahead of ideology?

I rise today to take note of the answers that were given to a question about Minister Plibersek’s decision leading to the failure of a project to create a gold mine which was going to be delivering jobs.

This is a government that said that it was going to be transparent and that it cared more about workers, but last week what did we see?

This was a project that had passed all of the federal and state planning approvals. It had the support of the environment department that Minister Plibersek oversees, and it had the support of the local Aboriginal land council near Orange, which is the statutory body with cultural authority under New South Wales legislation.

All those groups had said that the project should go ahead and that there were no cultural issues for Indigenous Australians, but Minister Plibersek was persuaded to rule against the proposal for this mine—a $1 billion gold mine—after listening to a dissident Aboriginal corporation that is registered with just 18 members, who only list their first names on the website of the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations.

This is a corporation that has had complaints made about it before because of a lack of transparency. Not only does this deny Australians jobs in that case, but it introduces sovereign risk at a time when we need investors to come to Australia to invest in projects that will help in growing our resources base.

If you look at Australia’s GDP, it is actually our resources that are a large part of what funds good health care, good education, roads, infrastructure, defence and a range of other things. But this is a consistent pattern we see, where ideology drives the actions of this government.

The cost of living is a huge issue for Australians, and so you would think that, with the constraints that drive up the cost of things like electricity, such as availability of gas, the government would be going all out to make sure that we got more gas into the system. And yet the Environmental Defenders Office have received more funding from this government so that they can continue their activities against resource sector companies like Santos.

Eventually the court system works, and so in January this year the courts found that the EDO actually tutored their witnesses and relied on conflicted evidence, and so the case was thrown out. So eventually the Santos development of a new gas field in the Barossa field can go ahead, but it’s at great cost and great delay, which ultimately will be passed on to the Australian people.

The Albanese government are prepared to fund that, but they’re not prepared to challenge the decisions that were made on similar grounds when the waste repository at Kimba was knocked back by a court.

Everyone was flabbergasted because that decision changed the whole basis of freehold land and the rights that an owner has to dispose of their land as they see fit.

But, on this issue of mining, if we see sovereign risk rising in the areas of energy and mining, we also see sovereign risk rising relating to our ability to be a reliable partner to our alliance partners, to like-minded nations, when we talk about things like critical minerals.

For those who aren’t aware, goldmines are often the same places where we see reserves of things like antimony, which is a critical element in semiconductors and EVs and for defence and modern technology.

If we can’t get investors to invest in things like the Hillgrove deposits and others because of this sovereign risk, then we will not be able to be a reliable supplier of the critical minerals that are needed to overcome the kind of coercive supply we see coming out of the Chinese Communist Party.

When we go to the polls, Australian people should ask: who do we trust to govern transparently and in the national interest?