HOUSING
AVAILABILITY — REGIONS
299. Ms M.J. DAVIES to the Premier:
I have a supplementary
question. I go back to the question, which was: will the Premier's
failure to invest in housing and land in regional communities leave
industry with no option but to increase its fly-in fly-out workforce, and will
the Premier commit to ruling out new FIFO camps for operational workforces
within 60 kilometres of major regional towns?
Mr M. McGOWAN
replied:
Bizarre! The Nationals WA has not moved on in any way from
its election loss in 2017. I will just explain a couple of things. During
COVID, we actually shut down most FIFO from the east. I would have thought that
is the biggest issue—that people from New South Wales, Victoria or
Tasmania come over here and occupy roles that should be occupied by Western Australians.
Many of those people moved here. Major employers are now employing Western Australians.
Does the Leader of the Opposition know who opposed and criticised that? The
Liberals and Nationals did. They criticised us over that. We stopped FIFO from
the east and got attacked by the Liberals and Nationals. Around half of the
mining workforce —
Ms M.J. Davies: It's
remarkable—your rewriting of history.
Mr M. McGOWAN: I will go and
find it. Next you will say Clive Palmer was not your friend! That is the next
thing you will say.
Around half of the workforce in
mining is FIFO and the other half works in regional towns. There are a range of
reasons behind that. There are a number of people who want to live in regional
communities, and we support that. A number of people want to live in the city
and access their work via that technique, and they might have family who go to
school here and might have spouses with jobs in the city. For me, that is a personal
choice. If we can give the workforce a personal choice, that is a good thing.
The National Party seems to object to personal choice. It seems to say that
people should not have a right to have a personal choice in their lifestyle. I do
not agree with the Leader of the Opposition there. We have vibrant, exciting,
booming regional communities, yet she objects to that, and says that somehow people exercising personal choice is wrong.
She has not moved on since 2017. She might have seen what happened to
Brendon Grylls; he lost his seat. She might have seen what happened to Terry
Redman; he lost his seat. I would hate to think that is going to happen to her.