AUSTRALIA’S longest-standing Member of Parliament, Bob Katter, has called for “unification in the national interest” between the major parties divided in running the country and state of Queensland “to finally future-proof the world-class North West Minerals Province” via an East Coast energy grid connection.
The Federal Member for Kennedy has written to the Prime Minister to formally request his Labor Government work in unity with Queensland’s Liberal-National counterparts, on behalf of the Australian people, to build the CopperString transmission line as “not a project that can – or should – be left to drift” and “national priority”.
“By recognising our strategic assets must be protected for the nation, the Federal Government’s recent reserve resource policy announcement signals a shift in decades of thinking of Australia as ‘just digging up things to be shipped offshore’, while leaving our own national interests exposed,” said Mr Katter after repeatedly moving laws to mandate the reservation of domestic resource riches for Australian use first.
Mr Katter backed State Member for Traeger Robbie Katter’s call for the LNP Premier to also formally write to Canberra to prioritise joint funding; and commit construction all the way west to Mount Isa through a State-owned investment corporation “hell-bent on selling out Australians’ public-interest assets into private hands”.
“This contradiction is not a trivial administrative oversight – it goes to the heart of whether this nation is serious about developing its most valuable mineral province,” Mr Katter wrote to the PM. “Connecting Mount Isa to the National Electricity Market requires firm, coordinated commitment from both the Commonwealth and the State. Without that certainty, investment decisions will stall, projects will be shelved, and the North West will continue to struggle – despite sitting on one of the richest mineral provinces in the world.”
The politician of a half-century and state’s resources and energy minister in the late-1980s, warned further: “Unless you do that, your governments will go down as responsible for having sat on your hands while one of our nation’s biggest industrial centres in North West Queensland simply vanishes – threatening 17,000 jobs associated jobs into Townsville – without the fair-price power we desperately need to unlock $700 billion of critical minerals in hot demand on global markets.
“But if we’ve got to pay nearly $20 for gas-fired electricity while our international competitors pay $6 – now aggravated by an energy and fuel crisis threatening our diesel-dependent rural and regional industries – we’ve got Buckley’s hope of competing.”
After a recent delegation of North West Queensland mayors to Canberra was informed the State has failed to seek Federal funding for the “once-in-a-generation opportunity” in CopperString investment to secure untapped resource riches, alongside strategic defence and manufacturing assets, Mr Katter reiterated that “holding forums to ‘dance around the mulberry bush’ is taking us nowhere” amid the “escalating uncertainty” surrounding the critical delivery of the CopperString transmission project – “uncertainty that now threatens the economic future of Queensland’s greater North and North West”.