David Littleproud
Maranoa · National Party · Australia
“In those communities we enjoyed relatively normal insurance premiums for 10 years—around $2,000 or $3,000 to insure a home in those communities.”
“I would say to the Queensland government to go out; do not rely on the department that has allowed this planning monstrosity to take place to continue to advise you. Get in the car. It's less than three hours from Brisbane. Go and sit in the Duff and Franz front yards, look at this and understand the impact on nonhosts.”
“How can we let the insurance industry determine how the modelling of our premiums is determined, at whim and without any transparency or public oversight?”
“I want to bring to the parliament's attention a matter I raised previously, the Wambo Wind Farm and the human toll that it's taking on the Duffs and the Franzes—the Franzes in particular. They are 80-year-old retirees who have farmed, and want to continue to farm, next to their son.”
“A survey by the local council there said that 37 per cent of residents no longer have insurance—that's insurance for anything; forget just for floods. They can't get insurance on their homes for anything. Overlay that with a young couple that wants to go and get their first mortgage.”
“I rise to update the House on the unfolding insurance crisis in western Queensland. Just to recap, back in 2011-12, St George, Charleville and Roma had huge floods that inundated our communities. There was no protection. There were no levee banks.”
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“A survey by the local council there said that 37 per cent of residents no longer have insurance—that's insurance for anything; forget just for floods. They can't get insurance on their homes for anything. Overlay that with a young couple that wants to go and get their first mortgage. They can't get one, because they can't afford the insurance premiums of $40,000 to $60,000. That would be more than double their loan repayments. If this happened in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, there would be outrage. In fact, Brisbane went through a flood similar to ours in 2011. There wasn't a levee bank anywhere near Brisbane. Their premiums still sit at around $3,000 or $4,000. In St George, Charleville, Roma and Cunnamulla, they sit at $40,000 to $60,000. It is time the ACCC took them on.”
“One of the major insurance companies actually confided in one of my mayors that they feared that the data that was coming back to them, to be used in setting their premiums, from the third-party modelling was sanitised. It is outrageous to think that the Insurance Council of Australia is handing sanitised data back to the insurers. This needs to be investigated by the ACCC, and it needs to be investigated thoroughly to understand if the processes and protocols have been put in place to ensure good governance and fairness to every Australian, particularly to those in western Queensland. I have pensioners that cannot insure their homes today. Their homes are now uninsurable, and that's in St George alone.”
“How can we let the insurance industry determine how the modelling of our premiums is determined, at whim and without any transparency or public oversight? I have written to the ACCC, asking them to expand their investigation into the CEO and the board of directors of the Insurance Council of Australia to understand the protocols and the processes behind the determination of information that is sent to a third party to model our insurance premiums in this country. It is abhorrent to think that we would let the Insurance Council, run by the CEOs and senior executives, determine our premiums without any transparency. This week I spoke to one of our councillors from western Queensland who was impacted, and it seems there has been a little bit of a breaking of the ranks in the Insurance Council of Australia.”
“This comes from the National Flood Information Database. The National Flood Information Database is owned and managed by the Insurance Council of Australia. The Insurance Council of Australia is owned and managed by the insurance companies of Australia. Its board of directors are the CEOs and senior executives of all the insurance companies in this country. This is the fox in charge of the henhouse. The fact that Australia is the only country in the world where the flood data is not made public or transparent to any Australian for them to know how their premium is being determined, effectively, by the Insurance Council of Australia is an abhorrent failure of good governance in this country.”
“In those communities we enjoyed relatively normal insurance premiums for 10 years—around $2,000 or $3,000 to insure a home in those communities. Eighteen months ago, for no apparent reason, despite the fact we've had three major flooding events that have tested those levee banks around those communities and proven them to work—there was no claim—we have seen increases of over 300, 400 and 500 per cent in insurance premiums in those communities. When you ask them the question, 'What has changed?' they kick the dirt, they look at the ground and they know they do not have the answer. They are gouging these people in western Queensland, so much so that I made a referral to the ACCC. Further investigation of this issue warrants the ACCC to take further investigation into how your insurance premiums are determined.”
“I rise to update the House on the unfolding insurance crisis in western Queensland. Just to recap, back in 2011-12, St George, Charleville and Roma had huge floods that inundated our communities. There was no protection. There were no levee banks. Effectively the insurance companies—rightfully, in their defence—lifted insurance premiums by 90, 100 or 120 per cent until such time as levee banks were built to protect those communities. Fast forward to 2015, and those levee banks were completed. In defence of the insurance company, Steve Johnston, the CEO of Suncorp at that point, said that as soon as concrete was poured on those levee banks he would reduce insurance premiums. He was a man of his word then. He reduced the insurance premiums.”
“You need to go and fix this for the Franzes. You need to actually make sure that we change the code, to set these towers back three kilometres from the boundaries of properties. This allows the nonhosts to negotiate and come closer—up to 1½ kilometres—if they so wish. That gives the power to the nonhost, not the renewable companies. These renewable companies need to put deposits down. They are not bound by decommissioning deposits. If you have a gas project or a coalmine, you must put a bond down to decommission it. This would take away the uncertainty and the pain that regional Australia is feeling—people like the Franzes and Duffs have worked hard all their lives and are being screwed over by state and federal governments.”
“I would say to the Queensland government to go out; do not rely on the department that has allowed this planning monstrosity to take place to continue to advise you. Get in the car. It's less than three hours from Brisbane. Go and sit in the Duff and Franz front yards, look at this and understand the impact on nonhosts. We are not saying, 'Stop renewable energy on these farms,' for those who want to do it. But, for those that do not want to, they should not have this imposed on them. There should also be proper testing of the acoustics. The Franzes are putting up with over 37 decibels, the modelling is showing, and it could be as high as 44 decibels. The code 23 this was approved under says the towers can only go to 35 decibels, yet they are still looking to investigate this. You do not need to model this.”
“I've also written to the federal government to ensure that there's consideration given to any federal funding supporting renewable projects that don't take into account nonhosts or ensure proper planning—and 1½ kilometres from a house is not enough. If you go to the Franz home, you only have to sit at the front verandah to see that these 80-year-old retirees are sitting there with these things swishing over their heads. In their retirement, they cannot live on a property they have worked hard to afford to be able to live near their son. After writing to the Queensland government—and I congratulate them on some changes—I am appalled that they are not prepared to heed what has happened to the Franzes.”
“I want to bring to the parliament's attention a matter I raised previously, the Wambo Wind Farm and the human toll that it's taking on the Duffs and the Franzes—the Franzes in particular. They are 80-year-old retirees who have farmed, and want to continue to farm, next to their son. They have multiple 260-metre towers less than 1½ kilometres away, and they hover over their homes. This is something that is an absolute eyesore, and it's a disgrace that the former Labor government in Queensland allowed the planning process to proceed. Since then, I've written to the Queensland government asking them to review the code. They have made small steps in reviewing and ensuring that there are better planning processes to protect non-host farms and give them the dignity and respect they deserve.”
“If you don't fix the fundamentals, give the economy what it needs and give people the hope and the honesty, our country will continue to go backwards.”
“We're going to scrap capital gains and these other taxes on trusts that take away aspiration and inspiration to go out and have a go. That's what our country was built on, and that's what this government ripped away six weeks ago. We're also going to tackle migration. We're going to make sure we have an immigration policy that works for this country. We've had one that's had too many and to not a high enough standard. We should choose who comes to this country, the skills they have and where we want them to live, because we're giving the greatest gift we can give to any person on this planet. We're going to fix the energy grid. We're not going to let net zero determine what our energy grid should be. It'll be the most affordable energy because energy is the economy.”
“It's been just over six weeks since this government handed down a budget which could only be described as being as popular as the pox. In a time of a cost-of-living crisis, when Australians were looking for hope and they were looking for honesty, all they got was more taxes. Australians deserve better from a government that's out of touch in understanding the pain that's being felt out there. They were looking for honesty from a government. Instead they got more tax. What a coalition government will do is make three main commitments to the Australian people. We will give you a tax cut every year by pegging inflation to every one of those tax brackets so that inflation doesn't eat away at your wage and you pay more tax. We're going to scrap the negative gearing.”
“Unless we have that, I fear Australians will hurt from that not financially but in their health. We won't have the financial resources to support that and help them when they need it. Thank you for the opportunity to speak on this bill. While I'll support the bill, I ask the government to please understand that the challenges that we are facing are far more significant than what this bill tries to address. Unless we have the courage to look that in the eye, face up to it and legislate for it, we'll be back here again, unfortunately, with even more perverse outcomes.”
“That would be the commonsense, real solution. This is window dressing at best, and I think we as legislators will fail unless we're prepared to be honest with ourselves and be honest with the Australian people that this is a problem that's got away from us. It's going to take the collective wisdom and courage of this building to understand that tinkering at the edges, making ourselves feel good, beating our chests for five minutes in saying we're coming down on organised crime, means we're going to be back here in three or four years debating the same thing. All I say to those opposite is: I'm prepared to admit that I was part of a government that got something wrong. I'm asking you not to repeat the mistakes of the past, to understand that this market has got away from us and that it will take collective courage.”
“It doesn't have the backing, the grunt, the intent or the intellectual rigour to shift the dial, as I think we all come to this place with the right intent to do. It ignores the reality of the real world. It is great that you are trying, but have more courage to understand that the market has changed and we need to change with it. We need to take more radical steps in aligning tobacco and vape excise, reducing that and understanding the elasticity of the market—that, if you reduce that and try to bring that illicit market back into the regulated market, it does have elasticity that will benefit and bring people back to a regulated product, giving us the opportunity to regulate that product, to earn the excise and to invest that excise into our health systems into the future and also in law enforcement.”
“And so, while this may sound good as a bill on the surface, I fear that in another three or four years we'll be back again. If we see that the regulated tobacco market reduces even further, well below 20 per cent to five or 10 per cent, you won't have a regulated tobacco market in this country, and that is a perverse outcome. As funny as that may sound, it will be a perverse outcome, because we won't have those regulated products that protect Australians. And you can look at that and work that through with vapes. This addiction that governments of all persuasions have had for many years on excise is now being lost because we have now skewed the market to make significant perverse impacts on health crime. I say to this government that, while we support this, it's a very superficial bill.”
“There needs to be radical movement towards addressing illicit tobacco and illicit vapes and towards making sure we put in a framework that ensures a regulated product and a regulated point of sale, which is what has served us well and is the model that we should return to. An ideological model might seem great within these four walls, but out there in the real world it's not happening at all. That's why you're seeing the perverse outcomes of organised crime taking over streets and small businesses and knocking them down. They see the opportunity—the opportunity that's been vacated by governments that have not had the courage to face up to the practical reality of this problem, where it is taking our nation and where it's taking our finances and our health system into the future.”
“The challenge that we will see is that big tobacco will pack up and go to another international market because Australia is lost. This is the challenge that I don't think we as legislators can see coming. If you take away that regulated product and you take away the regulated point of sale, all that happens is that you get perverse health outcomes. This is where the bill has missed the mark. The intent is commendable, but the practical reality of the lived experience that we've seen for the last five or six years should be screaming at us that we have to make radical change.”
“We've got to be courageous enough not to sit here and beat our chests and say, 'Yes, we've lifted the penalties.' We've actually got to look at how we take back this marketplace, because we have created a behaviour in the marketplace now that will make it very, very difficult for the regulated product to come back and for consumers to go back to the regulated product, and that is a challenge. While many of you may want to stand and attack big tobacco, just understand you are hitting a trigger point where big tobacco will leave. If their stranglehold on the market is reduced and they lose their percentage of market in Australia to organised crime, they will pack up and leave. If we are not careful and we do not tackle excise, we will not have a regulated product at all in Australia.”
“That has seen a reduction of around 70 to 80 per cent in youth usage of tobacco. Having a regulated model through a point of sale of registered retailers meant that, much like alcohol, you had to be above 18 to get it. There were checks at that point of sale. That had a serious and lasting impact, and I congratulate that health minister for those initiatives. But what we missed and did wrong was to deviate from that model. We thought that we could simply make doctors prescribe vapes. No-one's going to pay to go and see a doctor to get a vape when they can go down the main street and pick one up anyway. The common sense was not there. We missed that, and we're to blame for that. There is an opportunity to fix it, but you've got to understand that the market dynamics have changed.”
“But if you don't include them in the regulatory framework and align how that is achieved from the point of sale through to excise, then you have a marketplace that is out of whack and you have educated a marketplace to fall apart because you have priced one commodity, a regulated commodity, to be out of the reach of many Australians. In fact, only around 14 per cent of the people who use vapes today actually have a prescription, so prohibition hasn't worked. I was part of the Morrison government that went down this model of prohibition on vapes. We were wrong: prohibition does not work. But what does work, and what has worked, and we've seen it in the reduction in youth use of tobacco, is—I think, it was actually Nicola Roxon, who, as the health minister, brought this in—sensible reforms around points of sale and advertising.”
“The reality is that they do not have the resources, and they will not have the resources unless someone is prepared to pay. What we have missed in all this is that not only are we losing our revenue stream for the future health problems that we are going to experience but we are missing the opportunity to fund our law enforcement agents properly. That's why we should be looking at vapes and illicit tobacco in totality. Those products, as many medical professionals say, try to exchange the tobacco, get you off it and onto vapes, and then get you off those altogether.”
“If we had also regulated vapes the way that we do cigarettes, through licensed retailers, we would have collected an extra $3 billion to $4 billion worth of excise. Of that, we'd prescribe $500 million to law enforcement to be able to go and attack organised crime. While you can lift penalties and you can get a warm, fuzzy feeling in here saying, 'We're going to beat our chest and we're going to bring down this organised crime,' it costs money. Unless you're allocating funds to that, I can tell you that our good friends in the state jurisdictions are not as excited about spending their money on chasing down illicit tobacco. Their problems in tackling many of the social issues that our police forces around the state are facing up to, such as domestic violence, street crime and youth crime, are far greater.”
“The reality is that even if you had gone down the path of a regulated model, like cigarettes—a sensible, regulated model through the convenience stores and supermarkets, where only those under 18 could continue to get vapes as well as cigarettes—and you had a regulatory model around the product that was being sold—one of the challenges we are seeing not just with chop-chop but with the vapes is that there is no regulatory control about what the content is. That adds to the health issues that we're going to have to pay for as a Commonwealth into the future. The challenge is that we have opened up this front without the common sense and understanding of the marketplace and understanding of what has happened.”
“This government moved to have vapes sold only through pharmacies, which is pure madness because you can't charge excise once it becomes a prescribed product through the health side of the equation. It means that we miss out even on the excise of vapes that are prescribed through a pharmacist who did not even want this anyway. There are not too many pharmacists that believe in vapes or believe in nicotine full stop. It's one of the products they don't necessarily want to have to sell, but this government thrust it upon them without any consultation whatsoever. Yet there is still no excise even out of the vapes that are being sold through our pharmacists. The excise piece is one that we have missed.”
“They are using the black-market product because it's cheaper. We have priced this commodity out of the reach of many Australians. The perverse outcome of that is that we are seeing organised crime benefit from this and we are seeing the sheer reduction in excise revenue that goes into the Commonwealth and then, through funding of our health system through our states, to the ability to futureproof Australia's health challenges from the use of tobacco and vapes. While this is commendable in terms of taking on organised crime with increased penalties, you also need to be able to police it. Consider what we did at the last election, particularly around vapes.”
“I rise to support the intent of the Combatting Illicit Tobacco Bill 2026, but, unfortunately, this bill doesn't have the courage to face up to the facts. The fact is that our society has changed and is continuing to change, particularly with respect to its market habits. Governments of all persuasions for many years have failed to have the courage to address the real elephant in the room, which is excise. This is entrenching market behaviour that is tearing away at a regulatory model that has protected Australians and has ensured that we have the revenue to be able to pay for the health problems that eminently come from tobacco use and from vapes. The challenge that we now have is that only about 20 per cent of the market—in fact, it's probably gone under 20 per cent of the market—uses a regulated product.”
“Prohibition has never worked anywhere, and the fact that this government has said that they think that it will work has meant that we have lost billions of dollars of excise that will now not go into our health system, where we will still have the health problems to abide. This is the reality of a government that has lost touch with the reality of where we sit as a nation and where the pressures are as a nation. I say to the minister: there are a couple of quick fixes here, and you could do them very quickly. (Time expired)”
“We'd actually invested in further technology down the supply chain to ensure that we could process passengers but also protect our borders even better with AI intelligence and 3D scanning. That would go further to make sure that we protected Australians. We would streamline this. This is just common sense. But, for some reason, this minister has been asleep at the wheel and has let this fall away. This is an opportunity for the minister to explain why. To finish in the time allotted to me, I saw in the Australian today a story about illicit tobacco and a new report that tells us that now we are to the point where only about 20 per cent of the market is through a regulated model. The rest is through the black market because we have gone down this model of prohibition.”
“That feeds in to what happens in terms of what we actually charge for the processing of passengers coming through. This government added to the processing of passengers an extra $10 in this budget. Well, if you invested in technology, you wouldn't have to increase that and put a tax on tourism by actually saying there's another $10 on the passenger movement charge in this country. If you had invested in a simple digitisation of the declaration of those coming into this country for a measly $25 million, you would have sorted this out. What is the minister doing? Literally—where are the Minister for Home Affairs and the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry? We had it sorted. We were ready to actually implement this.”
“That was going to save hundreds of millions of dollars in what was required of the resources at our airports to process passengers through every one of our ports. The fact is that, four years on, this government has fallen asleep at the wheel and hasn't digitised the declaration card when the rest of the world has. When we face the Olympics in Brisbane in 2032, you'll have line-ups waiting to come through airports, whether they be in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne or wherever they want to come into this country to go and experience the Olympics. We will still be waiting because the Albanese government has been sitting there doing three-fifths of bugger all. The reality is that the technology's there, the opportunity is there and the streamlining of this process helps Border Force and AQIS to process passengers.”
“Wouldn't it make sense that, in 2026, after we set this in train back in 2021-22 at the cost of a bit over $20-odd million to digitise this, we have a government that has been here for four years and still hasn't prioritised this? Just so we understand—this goes beyond Border Force into biosecurity, because we were also putting in place and prioritising 3D X-ray scanners with AI intelligence. We were doing that in New Zealand. If you put your bag through New Zealand and came to Australia, that scan would marry with your electronic declaration so that our Border Force and an AQIS staff would know what was in your bag before you even came here and whether it married up with the declaration card.”
“I have one simple question, which I hope this government can answer. After four years of an Anthony Albanese government, why are we still filling out a paper based declaration card, when returning to, or coming to, Australia, to declare what is in your bags and where you have been? I can give a little bit of feedback and a little bit of experience on this because I was once the agriculture minister. Back in 2021-22, we sat on a pathway of digitising the declaration card so that we could simplify it like the rest of the world has done to make it easier for our airports to process passengers through those airports so they can enjoy their holiday here in Australia but also to protect our biosecurity and for Border Force to have the information about those coming in here.”
“Unfortunately, we have a government that has ripped the guts out of it in their budgets and has ripped the heart out of it with a purely senile advertising campaign.”
“They could create confidence across this country that there is fuel in regional Australia. If they recalibrated those ads immediately then we would get people out there. Our season isn't finished in regional and rural Australia. It takes leadership to understand you have made a mistake. It takes leadership to fix it. But when you've got a minister who won't even respond to a letter that was sent with genuine intent, with genuine concern and real solutions for a little group of councils in western Queensland—I mean, the department would spill what it would cost to put an app together before smoko on a Monday. Surely, they can put together something that would give confidence to the Australian community that maybe this fuel crisis is over and that tourism is important in this country.”
“And as we go into winter and into the ski season, you are going to see much of that sector also hurt because of the scare campaign that this government undertook. It's not going to take much to recalibrate some of that $20 million. I wrote to the minister back in April—it would be great to get a response from him—asking him to get the government to create a national app. They have FuelWatch. All they have to do is add a little green bar next to it where they can actually show people, when they drive across regional Australia, where there is fuel at a fuel station. That would help take away the anxiety. They can pivot their $20 million into scaring Australians into submission. They could actually go and shout to the world that they have actually solved the fuel crisis and there is fuel there.”
“And when you talk to these tourist operators, they will tell you that 70 per cent to 80 per cent of the cancellations are because tourists believe they will get stuck in regional Australia. Tourists believe there isn't fuel there. I have five councils in western Queensland that could create, in less than a week, an app that could tell people travelling across western Queensland whether there was fuel at fuel stations. We have a government that spent $20 million on telling us to take roof racks off and to pump our tyres up, but cannot create an app that gives Australians confidence to get out, travel across regional Australia and make sure there is economic diversity in these regional communities. The drive market is shot.”
“I'll give you a perfect example. In my electorate, between Easter and October, we see somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 visitors every year. People come out as part of the drive market and go to towns like Longreach, Winton, Roma and Charleville. But we have seen nobody this year. In fact, I've been to caravan parks in Charleville where there is nobody there. I've been to motels in Charleville where they are sacking people today. This is because the government has put out a $20 million campaign telling us to take our roof racks off and to pump our tyres up. This has created fuel anxiety across regional Australia. People in the cities are too scared to come out.”
“It is important that the government gives an explanation as to why they cut it, what impacts that will have on the particular industries and what parts of tourism it will actually impact. I'm sure there would have been Treasury modelling on that. It's important that the government shows transparency to Tourism Australia out of sheer respect. I'd also like to bring to the minister's attention—as the previous speaker, the member for Sturt, alluded to—the shortages around fuel. This mismanagement by the government in the initial stages of the fuel crisis in not understanding there were two markets—one in which regional markets are supplied by secondary tiered distributors, when we had towns running out—caused the government to spend $20 million on an advertising campaign that effectively trashed tourism in regional Australia.”
“In a time when tourism in Australia hasn't got past 2019 levels—we're sitting at about 90 per cent of 2019 levels, and if you cast your mind back, we had this little thing called COVID where planes stopped and the world stopped—I would have thought that one of the first actions of a government that took over after COVID would be to ensure that Tourism Australia was properly funded so that airlines could continue to bring people here, motels could be full and tourist operators could get their fair share after going through a pretty tough time. I think it's important that the government gives an explanation to Tourism Australia, who has passionately defended this industry and has grown this industry in the important way that it contributes to this economy.”
“I rise for my contribution around consideration in detail, particularly since the minister's here, and to reinforce what the member for Forrest asked, particularly around the callous cuts to Tourism Australia. Over $85 million has been ripped out of Tourism Australia since they first came to government and over the forwards.”
“That is not something that we should be seeing happening for these people that are being thrust upon with these renewable projects, and we should have independent testing of the noise to make sure that there is independence. You can put this right across where the cooks out in the Tara project now have trouble around their ability to be able to fly aircraft in and out not just for their agricultural production but also emergency management processes. The member for Warringah was here a moment ago and she railed against eight wind turbines on North Head because of the amenity of the good people of Sydney. Well, just start understanding what happens out here. I've also written to the federal government to say this should be part of the approval processes, not just state government, to make sure these families are protected.”
“I've written to the Queensland government to say that they need to now impose new planning rules over these applications to say that it should be set back three kilometres from someone's property boundary and can be negotiated into 1½ kilometres. That gives the non-host the ability to be able to negotiate whether they want these turbines towering over their homes, whether they want to have a 260-metre tower swishing over their homes at all. And that's a practical solution. There is also no decommissioning deposit that these companies have to put down until after year five, six or seven of the project being in place, and so decommissioning stands at the feet of the proponent themselves.”
“They've had this imposed on them because of the planning that the former Labor government has put on this in Queensland. Allowing these turbines to be that close to someone's home is a downright disgrace. What makes it even worse is that the approval application said that they do not need to have any of the sound tested for up to 12 months after all stages of the development are finished. So, the first stage, which is right over their homes and is going there now, doesn't need to be tested to see if it's above 35 decibels to be in breach of their planning application and approval of the applicant, and so these people will continue to live with this until stage 2 and 3 are completed. This is pure insanity.”
“I want to bring to the parliament's attention the human toll of this all renewables approach to this government's undertaking. Recently, I visited the Franzs and the Duffs just outside Jandowae. They've been impacted by a wind turbine farm called the Wambo Wind Farm. Mr Franz and Mrs Franz are in their 80s. They retired near their son, wanting to just produce beef and to be able to live comfortably and happily. Unfortunately, their neighbour decided to sign up to the Wombo Wind Farm. There's a 260 metre wind turbine less than 1½ kilometres from their home. They now live with wind turbines towering over their homes. They had no say in this. They had no inclination to want to have this anywhere near their properties. It is the same with the Duffs.”
“I congratulate that Crisafulli government and the minister herself have listened to the Southern Downs Regional Council, who opposed any changes to that water licence so that it would only be used for primary production or domestic uses, which is what the licence was originally issued for. They have had the courage to listen to both the Southern Downs Regional Council and to me. Unfortunately, I have written to the agriculture minister, who also has the power to say that she would not issue an export permit for that water. I did that on 2 March and am yet to get a response back. This would send a strong message that Australian resources are for Australians.”
“I rise to congratulate and thank the Crisafulli government, particularly water minister Ann Leahy, who has recently announced that she will review the water licence issued to a Chinese company to extract 96 megalitres of water a year to export back to China from a community just east of Warwick. The initial water licence was issued by the former Labor government for a housing development, but this company now wants to change the use of that water to bottle it and send it back to China. When the community and farmers of Southern Downs are going through and will continue to go through droughts, relying on aquifers to keep stock going, this is an abuse of what that water licence was originally issued for, and it should not be allowed.”
“This is the time to square the ledger, square it up with Telstra, and make that $270 million work for the Australian taxpayer.”
“Someone else will take up that universal service obligation and spend that $270 million in such a way that the Australian taxpayer, particularly people in regional Australia, might be able to turn on their phone or use it in their hour of need, when they need to ring triple zero. My heart bleeds for those families who lost loved ones, but just understand that that happens to us every day. Why would we stand in this parliament, with an opportunity to fix it today, and just walk past it and let it go? That's not what legislators should do. We should have the courage to take on the telcos, particularly companies like Telstra, who have done nothing for regional Australia. They've done nothing but take. Now the good people of peri-urban Australia are feeling the same thing.”