CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS

Mr JOYCE (New England) (16:05): I rise today to talk about two issues. I was speaking to management in the coalmining industry in the Hunter Valley, at Muswellbrook, and they talked about how their future and the capacity to provide prosperity and wages for the people have been decimated by policies such as the safeguard mechanism. They said that if this is the process going forward, then people are going to lose their jobs.

No jobs have been provided as alternatives—the so-called promise of intermittent power, the so-called renewables jobs. It's a fantasy. It never happened.

The idea that power prices would go down—it never happened. The idea that somehow there'd be community benefit—it has never happened. I was also speaking to the workers, who work in the mines, at dinner.

They were quite clear that the Labor Party has deserted labourers. It no longer believes in labourers. It no longer believes in the opportunity that was provided by the mining industry where an apprentice could start on about $120,000 a year—something that even my daughter, as a doctor, couldn't start on; it's an incredible opportunity that is now being lost.

These workers are furious about it, because the views of other people—predominantly people who have had a different life experience—have been virtue-smuggled to take away their opportunity. We've also seen now that this has grown into other areas, where not only has the coalmining industry been decimated but also Tomago smelter has not been offered a rescue package, and the people of the Hunter Valley who were associated with that aluminium smelter and were part of the work of that aluminium smelter have been given no lifeline; they've just been thrown on the scrap heap.

There is nothing in the budget that said they were going to fix up Tomago smelter. And they can't go on, because our energy prices are ridiculous. It doesn't matter what the rhetoric is around here; I'll tell you who understands the nation's power policy, or the Labor Party's power policy, better than anyone else: it's the people who use a lot of energy.

Rio uses an awful lot of energy and had an assessment on our intermittent power crusade and said, quite simply, 'We're leaving.' And they're going with all our other heavy industry—our glass industry, our plastics industry; it's all going. During the break I had an opportunity to go to England. It is butchered.

The economy is butchered. It's the same thing: they went down the intermittent power path and they deindustrialised, and now the economy is finished. Their social security spend is equivalent to their tax take.

In Germany the same thing has happened. Yet we naively think we're going to be different. We're not.

We're not going to change the weather. We're not going to do anything to the climate. We are going to send people broke.

We're going to make this nation weaker. And we're going to cause massive hurt to the poorest people in Australia, because they're the people who struggle the most with that incredible thing called the price of power.