QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS
Senator CANAVAN (Queensland—Leader of the Nationals) (15:24): I asked some questions at Senate estimates a few weeks ago, and I was a little gobsmacked by the answers. I didn't ask those questions thinking there would be any major controversy; I was just reviewing the different loans, guarantees and other investments that a body called Export Finance Australia had made recently.
I was a bit shocked to find out that a loan that Export Finance Australia had made to the Power Finance Corporation of India involved no Australian whatsoever. I thought perhaps there was some Australian business that was a co-investor or supplier or perhaps even a contractor working on this project. But, in fact, this investment that had been proudly announced by Export Finance Australia, the government's financing arm, that you taxpayers all pay for, on 30 September last year didn't involve any Australians except the poor taxpayers who have to pay for it.
That's it. This wasn't a small amount of money. This was a US$171 million investment.
At current exchange rates, that's roughly A$250 million—a quarter of a billion Australian dollars—that has been provided to an Indian corporation that involves no Australians. Their corporation is installing solar panels in India to provide electricity to Indians. Now, I want to put on record that I love India—love it!
I love the place. We've got a great relationship with them. I think we have a fantastic future trade and investment relationship with them.
But I don't think a quarter of a billion Australian taxpayer dollars should be going to a corporation in India. And it gets worse. This corporation is actually government owned!
An Indian company that this government has thought fit to risk $250 million of your money with is government owned. It doesn't produce a single Australian job. It doesn't support a single Australian business.
It's all just going to another country, hand over fist. I don't think we build respect in our region when we act like this, when we act like mugs. They would just laugh at us.
They would absolutely laugh at us. The Indian government would never do anything as stupid as this, as stupid as putting $250 million of their own money into another country, be it Australia or be it anywhere else. But we're mugs, absolute mugs; we're taken as suckers for doing things like this.
It gets worse. At the same estimates I asked, 'Well, why is it that Export Finance Australia has not helped a Mackay business, a North Queensland based business, who wanted to provide services to maintain trucks to coal mines in India?' This was an Australian business. It would have been an Australian export of mining services—a big growth industry for our country.
It would have fitted the very purpose of Export Finance Australia—yes, admittedly, helping another country, but that's what we do with our exports, of course—but it was knocked back because, in the words of EFA, Export Finance Australia, it said, 'We might not be the right financier for them.' Why aren't they the right financier? It involves an Australian business.
Why not? Well, guess what? It involves coal.
That's why. The government won't invest in anything that supports Australian industry and jobs if it involves the four-letter word 'coal'. But it's happy to hand over $250 million of your money to build solar panels, not made here in this country, to another nation's government.
This is all because this government is obsessed with this absurdity of net zero emissions. It's putting that on a pillar above Australian jobs, above Australian industry, and it's now costing Australian taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars at least. Question agreed to.