Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility Amendment Bill 2026
Senator CANAVAN (Queensland—Leader of the Nationals) (19:36): It's a great privilege and honour to support the extension of the Northern Australian Infrastructure Facility, a proud achievement of the former Liberal and National government. We welcome and we will support the government continuing this important organisation's going on. It's a particular personal privilege to be here to support this because it was 10 years ago, almost to the date, that I as minister for northern Australia helped introduce and see through the establishment of this organisation.
This is now the second five-year extension of the NAIF before us this evening. Ten years ago, we established it for five years. We thought we'd give it a trial.
It was a key part of the government's developing Northern Australia Agenda. There were a lot of naysayers at the time. I remember a lot of critiques of the NAIF in its early days.
Like when setting up any organisation, there was a lot to do, and I want to thank all of those who played a role then in putting that together. Its success has been proven by its longevity, its continuation, the almost no criticism or almost silence of criticism—there was a little bit there from a former speaker, which I might come to if I have time—the no controversy and no scandals.
It's just an organisation getting on with its job. I congratulate all of the NAIF staff, everyone in the department of industry, as it was when I was around—I think it may have been moved to the Department of Regional Development today—and to all of the department officials who had a big role in getting this ready. It came together pretty quickly in only about six months or so for development of the legislation.
As I say, that legislation has largely stood the test of time. There have been a few tweaks over the years, but overall the organisation is pretty much what was established a decade ago. The government did commission another review of the NAIF before deciding to extend this organisation for another five years.
That review did come back and had a glowing report about the effectiveness of the NAIF, the support for the NAIF from the people of the north and what it's doing to help develop our great country. The review, interestingly, was so glowing that it recommended that the NAIF should be made permanent. As I said, we established this for five years—understandable for a new organisation with some, as I said, criticism.
I thought, 'We'll give it five years and see how it goes.' It could make loans well beyond five years, but its actual inception, its ability to originate loans, was restricted to its first five years. But it was a success, and it was extended during the COVID pandemic. Now, again, this review says not only that we should extend it; the review recommends it should be made permanent.
Unfortunately—at least it's unfortunate from our side—the government has not accepted that recommendation. They have brought forward legislation that will extend the NAIF for a further 10 years. That's better than five, but it's just 10 years.
I believe my colleague Senator Susan McDonald, the now shadow minister for Northern Australia—an able and very appropriate shadow minister for northern Australia, herself coming from Townsville and having grown up around the Gulf—has flagged that we'd like to accept that recommendation. So we will be moving an amendment to make the NAIF permanent. If we're going to go for 10 years, we may as well make it permanent.
Obviously, any future parliament can come back and look at the organisation any time it likes. But, given that the loans that NAIF makes are often 20 to 30 years—or it can make them up to 30 years; it can make them up to as long as the government bond maturity, but often the loans are more between 10 and 20 years, I should say—they're quite long. It makes sense for the organisation to be able to see through the provision of these loans.
As I said, it has been very successful. It has funded a range of projects right across the component parts of the three states, in Queensland, Northern Territory and Western Australia. I might steal some of my colleague Senator Smith's thunder.
He's going to go next, or sometime next, when he comes to the chamber. I'll start with his great state of Western Australia, particularly the north of that state, which contributes so much. In fact, before I get to the specifics, I should just outline how much the north does contribute to our nation.
It's worth repeating that over half our nation's exports originate from ports in northern Australia, principally our iron ore, coal, gas, beef, bauxite and lots of other projects, like aluminium. Senator Dean Smith: [inaudible] Senator CANAVAN: 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.