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Queensland economy needs a KickStart

 

In the past three months, whole industries have stalled, people have lost jobs and the State has been plunged further into debt. In those past months, I have outlined a KickStart Queensland strategy that maps out a path back to prosperity.

The Recovery Government (the government that leads Queensland through the economic recovery) must get out of the way and let Queensland shine like it used to. Environmental safeguards are important but the default position needs to change from asking “how do we stop this?” to asking “how do we make this happen?”

The government needs to stop paying external consultants to the government’s job and apply some accountability and transparency to the NGOs that suck up more taxpayer dollars than the parliamentary library is able to count. A Recovery Government will quit wasting millions of dollars on photo opportunities like a 2032 Olympics bid and redirect support to industry and local manufacturing  to boost the economy now and keep jobs in Queensland.

Both the Labor Party and the LNP need to withdraw the billion-plus dollars they are throwing at dodgy reef science to point the finger at farmers and actually back those farmers to produce better outcomes for the reef, for farming communities, and the State’s economy. And if the next government doesn’t repeal the vegetation laws (because we know this one won’t), the entire agriculture sector will be decimated as farmers simply walk away.

Queensland will flourish when their government focuses on their interests instead of funding and pandering to political correctness, China, the United Nations, UNESCO, and the other unelected globalist influences. Allowing foreign entities (especially the Chinese Communist Party) to buy land, water, and agribusiness without expanding and creating industries is not foreign investment. It is a foreign purchase and we would do well to ban all foreign purchases.

Until Queensland has a government committed to building dams and infrastructure to deliver affordable and reliable water and energy, industry and prosperity will continue to spiral. Our economy can’t move forward if our biggest industries are going backwards.

The Mount Morgan Mine was instrumental in Australia’s financial foundation. The current government has invested millions into an evaporation method of cleaning up an environmental problem left by the early mine. But this has not reduced the poison oozing from the mine – just concentrated it for release at the next weather event. If the government was truly committed to the environment it would stump up half of the $500m outlined by the CQU to assist Heritage Mining in rehabilitating this site and creating jobs.

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Recession raises urgency on new mines

Fast-tracking Central Queensland coal mines is the quickest and easiest way for Australia to fight its way out of the recession. The Federal Government conceded last week that Australia had entered its first recession in 29 years, on the back of a summer of bushfires and the pandemic shutdown.

There’s only one way to create large-scale employment in this recession, and that’s to open up big new coal mines at the double. We need development on steroids, and that means immediately approving those six stalled mine applications in the Galilee Basin.

It also means annihilating all those bogus bureaucratic barriers that have delayed approvals by as much as eight years.  Any left-wing activists who stand in the way of these thousands of jobs must be shown to be boulders in the road to economic progress.

Official Gross Domestic Product figures released last week show that Australia’s Economy shrank by 0.3 per cent in the March Quarter. GDP is the total value of all goods and services Australia produces. Queenslanders don’t need to hear the official figures to know that the country is in recession. We already have locally some of the highest employment in Australia. Bushfires, drought and COVID-19 were the main causes, other than mine layoffs over recent years. But some export mineral prices are right at the top of the cycle. Failure to act now to open up these mines would be economic betrayal.

There are two key parts to the economy: export and domestic. One Nation is already taking the State Government to the High Court, to open up borders with the rest of Australia. And that will take care of the domestic part of our economy – however late. Opening up mines will take care of exports. Pauline Hanson seems to be the only leader in Australia with a handle on what local developments mean to jobs.

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